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.

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

Good luck all!

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.