Author: Mark Fletcher

Newsagent suppliers often complain about the grumpiness of newsagents. Maybe if these suppliers had their own money at stake in a newsagency they would begin to understand how a good day can turn bad and a good mood can become grumpy.

Take this magazine, Holden in Australia, from Universal magazines. It is to be on sale for five months. Based on sales of similar categories I know I am likely to sell one or two copies. This means, if I do what Universal wants, that will have a pocket allocated to the title for five months.That will cost $17.50. Even if I sell all four copies I received, my GP will be $8.95. See my point?

Labeling magazines in the morning is like writing a cheque for the privilege of gifting real-estate and labour to companies like Universal who love long shelf life product – no wonder newsagents get grumpy. Until the publishers own and operate a newsagency I do not expect them to understand the damage they are doing.

This is why we need a magazine czar.

Youplay.com is being advertised heavily on radio 3AW Melbourne and, I suspect, elsewhere around Australia. It’s a partnership between Lovatts and Southern Cross Broadcasting.

The website is easy to use and designed to suit its target visitor. I reckon it will be a huge success. The partnership with Southern Cross is excellent given their reach and the demographic of their radio stations.

While access to YouPlay is free, the good stuff it will cost punters $4.99 a month.

Newsagents are actively promoting YouPlay on every Lovatts magazine in store. That’s fair I guess – Lovatts are welcome to promote whatever they want on their product. However, it contradicts their view that YouPlay will attract an entirely different customer to the purchaser of Lovatts crossword and Sudoku magazines from newsagencies.

If sales in my newsagency are anything to go off, a Princess Mary cover has to be worth at least a 10% sales kick – more it it has been a while since Mary has been on a cover.

My 10% claim is based on sales yesterday in one newsagency – we sold 10% more than usual without doing anything different.

We picked up this payslip for W. Davis yesterday off the floor of our newsagency and put it aside to forward. They we picked up another and another. How many payslips has this person lost?

Hang on, they are all for the same date, this is a fake.

After a bit of investigation we discovered it is an ad for the MyCareer employment site – inserted in this week’s NW magazine.

From the trash we have collected I’d say more than 50% of the MyCareer ads will be trashed. They fall out because of the other, bigger, insert in this week’s issue of NW. Had the MyCareer ad been inserted alone, not as many would fall out.

The mechanics aside, I am surprise of the choice of NW for a MyCareer promotion.

I am proud to carry Australian Wood Review, Fine Woodworking, Woodcraft Magazine and Woodsmith in my newsagency. They represent the point of difference between a run of the mill magazine retailer and a magazine specialist. Maybe not these specific titles, but special interest titles like them.

We have between eight and twelve woodwork related titles at any one time. It is a segment well browsed and while sales are not stellar, having the category is important to our credentials. The challenge is to balance the offer and ensure that we achieve a commercial return from the space allocated to the segment. This is very hard when we have three distributors of magazines and they do not have visibility of sales. It is good to see one distributor working on this.

Speaking of Dymocks, see my previous blog post, here is a photo of how they display magazines in one store.

Bagging English magazines is common in Hong Kong. The customers seem to accept it. I watched people pick up a magazine, read the cover and make their decision. In my last trip here three months ago I saw the bagging process in action.

Maybe the photo below shows the best way for displaying long tail magazines – fringe and special interest titles where you have 2 or 3 copies in stock, high rent and the need to carry range in less space. This is from inside such a specialist magazine retailer in Hong Kong:

Maybe newsagents could establish a wall like this, but better, and promote the special interest space. It reduced real-estate costs considerable. Sure keeping the display tidy would take more time but if you ar careful about the categories covered you;re more likely to be serving a caring shopper rather than a bloke browsing car magazines while his partner is shopping.

Any publisher wanting to sell more magazines ought to read this – if they really want to sell more magazines that is. Rather than throwing money at expensive subscriptions sent through the mail, publishers could do better providing newsagents with deals for an over the counter subscription pick up.

Take the Bulletin. It retails for $6.25. If I subscribe, it costs $129.90 a year and they mail it to my home. In my shop I sell between 6 and 12 copies a week. I think I could sell more by offering an over the counter subscription – customers would have to pay up front for a year. The difference from the current subscription offering is that the magazine would not be posted – the customer would pick it up.

A regular Bulletin customer in a newsagency might buy 70% or thereabouts of copies a year. An over the counter subscription offer could get that to 100%.

Newsagents have excellent technology to manage subscriptions at the counter and back office including the ability to SMS text message customers when the magazine comes in.

Many customers would prefer to pick the magazine up. I’d like their traffic.

Publishers show in the subscription order forms in their magazines every issue how much money they will throw to acquire subscription sales. Let newsagents be part of the acquisition process and I’d expect net sales growth to be achieved.

While I can sell subscriptions now, they are for mail delivery. What I am proposing here is different.

Is it just me or are other newsagents frustrated with these small hair magazines? They are not made to fit our traditional fixturing and, as the photo shows, they get lost. No wonder sales are not good.

While we could display them flat, the return does not warrant that premium space. I bet the editor and publisher would be frustrated if they saw how their product looked on the shelves.