Publisher’s Single Copy Sales Services Blog

…and who gets the last word?

Recently I was asked to mediate what appeared, on the surface, to be a disagreement between a publisher and her circulation manager on the matter of the newsstand cover.

The circulator, when reviewing a cover concept, pointed out some best practices in terms of placement of cover lines, clarity of cover lines, and specificity of cover lines. The publisher’s position was that best practices in general might not be best when applied to her high-end audience; in fact a cover based on best practices might be misleading, by giving the impression that the material covered in the magazine was more accessible than in fact it was.

As I looked at the specifics of both their positions, it seemed to me that there was less distance between them than originally appeared. Of course there is that initial gulf that must always be bridged in cover design: for the editorial department, the cover is almost always viewed as part of the editorial; for the circulator, the cover is first and last a marketing piece. It is the packaging of the publication, and its role is to draw in the reader, to make a sale.

One thing that tends to annoy editors is that best practices tend to be quite general and also—and we can be honest here—to appeal to theleast common denominator. For this reason they can appear to be the enemy of creativity. (They are not). Still, they are best practices for a reason: they work.

At the same time there is room for some give and take on a newsstand cover. After all, It’s only through taking risks and turning over the established order that new best practices are created.

The publisher understands the audience; he or she understands the content. The circulator understands the principles of marketing. Both are important elements—actually, both are indispensible. How to reconcile them when there is an apparent difference?

From the side of the editorial department, there needs to be a recognition that as long as the publication is on the newsstand it is being presented as a consumer product. There are established principles as to how to appeal to a newsstand browser: tried and true ones, ones that have been proven to work. These include certain sales principles: cover lines should emphasize benefits, not features (WHY does the buyer want to read about this concept/practice/widget?). Cover lines should be legible from a distance of 6-8 feet (after all, that’s where the browser stands when scanning the rack). Cover lines should match or refer to the image, which in general should reference the lead cover story. And covers should have an appeal that reach out, at least just a little, from the core group of committed enthusiasts already subscribing to the publication.

And from the side of the circulator, there must be a recognition that there are certain things a cover just can’t do. Chief among them is promising anything that isn’t delivered in the publication. Sure, newsstand readers are practical, hands on; they are looking for solutions. But if the publication doesn’t deliver a how-to editorial, then we just can’t make the cover into a how-to cover. We need to work with what is real as well as what has the broadest possible general appeal for the category.

From a circulation point of view, we don’t want to create an atmosphere where our publishers feel we are trying to force our best practices down their throats at the expense of their creativity or their relationship with their reader. Best practices are guidelines to help a publisher, or an editor, or an art director, to understand how to appeal to a newsstand browser on the level of clarity, benefits, and practical application. They are not intended to force them into a cookie cutter approach to their covers, or to ask the to present her product as something that it isn’t.

When I first got into newsstand sales, there wasn’t a lot in terms of systems and statistics, but there were certainly colorful stories being told. Case studies tended to be less about what worked and what didn’t, and more about whom you should call and whom you should…not.

Early on I met a gentleman from the subscriptions side of things. This diminutive fellow, who by then was already a giant in the field of direct marketing, had a tale to tell of his start in magazine sales—a short-lived career in the field of newsstand sales. This man had been pleased to get himself a job as a newsstand field rep for a major national publication. His first day in the field he paid a visit to a wholesale agency that had been producing high returns.

This gentleman—we’ll call him “Steve”—broached the topic of the high returns. “Your returns,” he told the wholesaler, “are out of line with our overall trends. With your demographics, we would expect to see a higher sell through. We’re going to want to start seeing full-cover returns.”

The wholesaler stared at him with (I like to imagine) cold, dead ideas. Then he spoke. “Demographics, shmemographics,” is what he said.

And what “Steve” said was: “Huh?”

The wholesaler did not speak again. Just reached into his top desk drawer, pulled out a large revolver, and placed it on his desk.

“Steve” was taken aback. “What’s that for?” he asked.

“This,” he was told, “is for little s**ts like you that complain about returns.”

“Steve” resigned the next morning. And that was the end of his career in newsstand.

The stories have changed since then, as has the experience of a wholesaler visit. (I still sometimes hear of a wholesaler “holding up”’ a publisher for an improved discount, but the reality is so much less colorful). Newsstand has become a more attractive career. I can truthfully say that no one in this business has ever pulled a gun on me. So I turned my energies to the more mundane task of quantifying, to the best of my ability, what works, and what does not.

Still, even without the guns, case studies are a compelling read, and never more so than in the case of magazine newsstand sales. So much of newsstand appears random and unpredictable. We have our rules and our best practices, but when we take them to the field what happens? We’re met with seasonality and cover art, distribution delays and “acts of God” (as they write into the distribution contracts). So many factors exercising their influence on every copy of every magazine at retail!

Then there are the times that an actual case just doesn’t fit into what we have learned, what we think we know. If full bleeds appeal more than framed covers, how to explain the passion with which the readers of La Vie Claire cling to the framed art on the cover? If cover lines help to sell your publication, how to explain the test performed by Log Home Living in which the bare, empty cover pulled better sales?

Case studies help us develop our industry’s best practices, and they also show where, how, and even, at times, why best practices might sometimes fall short, sometimes fail to deliver the results for which we aim.

We can learn from case studies. Those assembled here represent incidents from over two decades of magazine publishing; they represent the combined experience developed from working with magazines large and small, general interest and narrowly targeted. From these case studies you can learn about:

o A publisher that included, as a premium on newsstand copies, a teabag—and increased sale thereby
o The publication whose cover, from issue to issue, remained unchanged—for over 200 years
o How a multi-title publisher grew international sales in a declining market
o An independent publisher who launched his publication, with great success, in the newsstand channel—with no track record, no marketing work, and no chain approvals
o A publisher with no funding who reduced her launch risk considerably—by starting in Canada

And other fascinating examples of best practices, emerging best practices, and practices that are far from best—but worked anyway.

I’ll also give you some case histories of approaches that didn’t work—and tell you what went wrong.

If you’d like to share your own case study, send it to me at lruth@singlecopysales.com, and I’ll post it on my Newsstand Made Manageable blog, which you can visit at www.singlecopysales.com/blog.

I’ll look forward to hearing your experiences.

Some publishers have been finding that their national distributor reps have been more silent, less available of late than they were in the past.

Believe me, they’ve had good reason.

Think about all those outlets that had to be transitioned when Anderson News Company went out of business.
Thousands of outlets, carrying hundreds or even thousands of magazines suddenly were without a wholesale distributor.

The News Group and a few other wholesalers stepped in, and with really heroic efforts they, along with the national distributors, re-allocated copies of the affected publications to the retail outlets.

It couldn’t be done overnight. First, the retail outlets had to shift their contracts to the new distributor. The distributor had to set up billing to those outlets. The new allotments had to be put in place. It couldn’t be done based on the sales history through ANCO—that history wasn’t available, and anyway who had time to study it? A standard number of copies had to be put into each outlet, based on a best guess in a really short window of time.
Sounds like a potential disaster, doesn’t it? But it has been followed by another heroic effort on the part of the national distributors—distribution blitzes. The distributors went into each agency and added retailers for each and every publication. In some cases they are still at it.

To some extent that makes this a time of opportunity. It used to take some effort to get a limited saturation test set up in this town or that. Now publishers are finding that they are granted saturation tests on a wide scale. Publications that have been unable to add a retailer in years perhaps—that pesky “need” requirement of ANCO’s created some real limitations, remember?—suddenly are trying out their ability to draw customers in outlets that were previously unavailable to them.

Some special interest publications are already discovering that their distribution was targeted with very good reason. Draws are already being pared back, retailers that can’t sell a copy cut off once again.

But others are finding new points of sale in outlets previously closed to them.

Transitions are hard indeed. But they can also bring unexpected opportunities.

 

 Sell Sheet Tips [2:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here are some tips on how to make a good sell sheet.

Good luck all!

Eye tracking technology is a wonderful thing. Employed as part of web usability studies, the findings point to best practices remarkably similar to those we have long used on our newsstand covers.

Newsstand people have long told publishers that the most important features and benefits on the cover needed to be put on the top left. The reason given? That is the small section of the cover that can reliably be seen regardless of how the magazines are fanned or stacked.

Now eye tracking tells us that this is the area on a page–on a website, at any rate–that the eye goes first, the area that the rapidly moving eye is most likely to see information. The place to put your page identification, your chief benefit, your action point–whatever it is that the user should see first.

Who knew that the newsstand would lead the way in the world of the web? I’m going to christen the new world “Newsstand 2.0″ (I’m convinced no one got to THAT one before me, however many 2.0s there are in this cyber world of ours…remember this, posterity!). And I’ll continue to weigh in on it in coming posts.

I heard today that Host, one of the most important airport retailers for magazine publishers, is changing its magazine supplier from Anderson News Company to the News Group.

What does that mean to the rest of us? It seems like a further weakening of Anderson’s hold on its distribution territory, already compromised by the loss of a number of agencies and retailers. It changes the route density for the ANCO trucks–fewer retailers to deliver to in the Host servicing areas.

For publishers for whom Host is an important part of their distribution, it will change the profitability formula at the Anderson agencies. A different efficiency requirement or revenue contribution per copy might be called for.

There are some publishers for whom the major portion of distribution is airports and other high end accounts. Will these publishers be able to keep their distribution in ANCO’s agencies?

This development can be added to the list of things we need to be watching as the newsstand landscape continues to change.

In the world of magazine publishing, where the rate of change accelerates every year, the rules for launching a magazine or special issue just changed. Again.
 Is it the Wal-Mart bipad cleansing I’m talking about? No—that’s old news.
 The ANCO or News Group cuts? We’ve weathered them already.
 The pending Borders bankruptcy, cash infusion, or re-organization?
 There’s something more current, more relevant, and more immediately urgent than even that.
The Source Interlink Integration Program is something brand new, and it will affect your publishing plans this year.
Source Interlink’s Integration Program is the approach this growing distribution company is taking to blending their mass market (Levy) and specialty distribution (IPD) systems.

It will require you to think carefully through your bipad strategy. You might want to add a special issue or try a launch on a parent bipad in the mass market channel. That will enable you to test a new product on an existing distribution.
In the bookstores, as you no doubt already know, you will have to present a new bipad. The bookstores will not allow a special issue to share an on sale period on the same bipad with a parent title.
And now, you’ll have to add a third bipad to the mix: a Source-only, “unstacked” bipad for the parent title, no specials used on it anywhere.
You shouldn’t be impossible, or even unreasonably difficult. It just requires a plate change and a little more care in planning your bipad strategy and keeping your bipads straight. But it’s something to remember as you plan your product line for the coming year.

We’re starting up the single copy sales blog. Expect lots of new posts soon.