Publisher’s Single Copy Sales Services Blog

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.