Long on-sale magazines – any title on-sale for more than 30 days – are under more attention as newsagents seek to reduce magazine related costs.
Take the titles from United Media, they have a long on-sale, a cover price that is not keeping with CPI and a scale out model that treats us as warehouses with 100% of supply sent at once. This imposes a space and labour costs that adds to the loss we make from the titles.
If I had my way I’d get this months what I expect to sell this month. United media will say that is not viable for them. To that I’d say the current model is not viable for us.
Rent increases 5% a year at least for most newsagents and this is a key factor in these discussions. In the years these titles have been the same price with a long on sale annually only one drop our costs have gone up and up while what we make has gone down in real terms – without even factoring in any sales decline.
This is one example of hundreds where the behaviour of magazine publishers pushes us to a point where we actively consider whether to quit the category – in the absence of real control over supply.
Newsagents: don’t forget to do your cull for early returns this weekend.
I return most of these now as I prefer to stock the higher priced Scoop range here in WA.
We beat the rush and the inevitable crash of Networks website and cull this week. Ironically our sales are a higher percentage of Gotch, yet our returns are 65% Network. No wonder their website crashes if this is country wide.
Gotch for us at the moment seem to have a good balance with minimal returns. This makes magazines more enjoyable so thank you Gotch.
We are Distribution only:
– we aim to move stock in and out of subagents quickly. Magazine’s have a recall (shelf life) of 4 weeks from when we receive them. The only exception is AWW Cookbooks – where give (depending on subagent) 3 months.
There nothing worse than “stale” stock on a magazine display in a subagent.
This policy seems to work for us.
John
Both the United Media Group and Scoop publishing seem to work on the same principle. Get advertisers to pay for your content, then the thicker the book the more profitable. These titles are all full returns and regularly weigh over 2kg-the last UMG “WA HOME” weighed in at 2.75kg-when you live in the bush and have to courier your returns back thats totally unacceptable on any title let alone one with a $6.95 retail (lucky me gets $1.74). The cost of returning plus the long on sale means even though their slow movers they hang around for ages because their too expensive to return, which I sure is why the publishers have set it up that way. Its an abuse of newsagents, though at $19.95 retail at least the Scoop titles are worth selling unlike the UMG ones.
As an example of how bad this is I sell about 2 copies of UMG’s “Western Australia Weddings” yet received 11 of the last issue, 2.485kg each, I early returned 2 cartons of 4 unopened but they stunk up the back office for 2-3 months till I could take them back myself because I’d be better off binning them than paying to courier them.
Just because a title is published at an interval greater than 1 month, why do we need to give it a full shelf life until the next issue?
Name 1 magazine out there that has a shelf life of more than 1 month that makes a positive return on investment.
It’s time there was a contribution to the rental space tied up by these titles.
Bill, each time I have analysed sales data for longer than 30 day on sale, it is rare such titles are profitable beyond 30 days. by profitable I mean by being able to pay for retail space and labour. If a title is losing money we should either not carry it or be compensated tracery it.
Mark, exactly my point. The newsagent is the one who pays for the poor performance.
It’s time we all pushed back on the duration a title is on sale. It’s the very long tail that’s wagging the dog.
In the past 12 months I have sold 1251 titles from a 750 pocket department and I don’t overlap titles.
The trick is get them in and move them on. No point putting out 2 of something that only sells 1 at best. Sell the 1 and move on.
My rule on arrival for titles selling under 5 copies is to put the maximum sold in the last 3 issues only. Early return the rest. No sales in 3 issues, it’s gone.