A Glimmer of Growth Amidst the Newsstand's Gloom

Despite continuing declines in North American newsstand sales the past few years, one category has experienced steady, impressive growth: bookazines.

Unit sales of the special issues in the U.S. and Canada grew at nearly an 11% annual rate from 2008 to 2012, with annual revenue up 80%, according to data presented recently by MagNet, an industry consortium.

During the same period, total unit sales of magazines decreased about 10% annually. The trend of rising bookazine sales and decreasing overall sales is continuing this year.

"If print is dead and newsstand is dead, why is it that consumers will plunk down and make an impulsive purchase to spend 10 or 12 bucks to buy a high-quality publication at the newsstand?"asked Gil Brechtel, MagNet's president, at the Magazine Innovation Center's recent Act 4 Experience conference. (Brechtel's presentation begins at about the 30-minute mark of this video.)

Bookazines, also known as book-a-zines, mooks, SIPs, one-shots, or special issues, are non-subscription publications sold via the newsstand system. They are usually published by subscription magazines, but some are published under such non-magazine brands as Philadelphia Cream Cheese, USA Today, and the American Bible Society. Brechtel's definition of "book-a-zine" includes only titles having a cover price of at least $9.99, which is probably the vast majority of special issues.

"During 2012 there were 900 bookazines released," Brechtel said. "Some did very well. Some didn't do so well." They generated $352 million in retail sales, a 20% increase over 2011. Typical subject matter included tributes to dead celebrities, in-depth looks at a single topic, and recipe books -- lots of recipe books. The top seller was a National Geographic title that brought in almost $3 million.

"Why are people buying $10 bookazines full of information they can get free on the web?" he asked. "A lot of these are coffeetable books."

The formula for bookazine success, according to Brechtel, is strong brands, high-quality cover and paper stock, and appealing content. Bookazines have the advantage of avoiding a major cause of declining retail sales -- low-ball subscription offers.

"Publishers are trying to chase ratebase so much they're basically giving magazines for free or for a very low price," Brechtel said. "If you buy Cosmopolitan 12 issues for $5 a year why in heck would you spend $3.95 for one issue?"

Bookazines accounted for more than 10% of total newsstand sales last year, and that share seems to be growing rapidly. At a couple of stores I visited recently, it was hard to find actual weekly or monthly magazines amidst all the special issues.

At Target recently: An issue of TIME surrounded by bookazines.

One advantage of the special issues is that they don't go "stale" quickly and can remain on sale for up to three months, versus a month or less for regular issues.

But that's not relevant to all locations: As some stores shrink the amount of space for magazines (though it's the most profitable category for supermarkets), there's increased pressure to turn inventory over quickly, even for successful, high-priced titles.

Related articles:

• Invasion of the Bookazines, Featuring the Return of the Living Dead 
• Mooks and Canucks: The Bookazine Invasion Crosses the Border
• Rupert, Weiner and Cardboard Animals: 5 Who Should Be Ahead of Me on RISI’s Top 50 Power List
• 8 Questions About Newsweek's Future

Seven Lessons for Publishers from the Boston Bomber Cover Controversy

As part of our mission to provide helpful advice to the magazine industry, Dead Tree Edition offers seven ways Rolling Stone could have avoided the recent Boston Bomber cover controversy:

• Remember your history: You can’t spend decades gracing your cover with the likes of pedophile rock stars, drug-addled actors, and Charles Manson – and then expect us to be happy when you desecrate that hallowed space with a criminal.

• Emphatic language: Some thought Rolling Stone was depicting Jahar Tsarnaev as a hero. Merely calling him a “monster” wasn’t enough; the cover should have had big red letters saying “This is a really bad man.” Besides, because Monster is a popular web site, perhaps some confused people thought Rolling Stone was endorsing him as a resource for job searches.

• Learn to use Photoshop: People complained that the photo of Tsarnaev looks like Jim Morrison or a young Bob Dylan. Outrageous! Every good American knows that terrorists wear turbans, have badly styled facial hair, and are obviously from somewhere else. They’re not supposed to look like a Sad-Eyed Laddie of the Suburbs. Couldn’t Rolling Stone have had the decency to edit the photo so that Tsarnaev didn’t look so much like one of us?

• Give him the Juice: Don’t forget the infamous TIME magazine trick of darkening O.J. Simpson in hopes of making him look more sinister.

• Know your sales channels. Among the first retailers to jump on the boycott bandwagon were major drugstore chains. They’re used to seeing Rolling Stone covers featuring their most profitable type of client – abusers of prescription medicines. You can’t expect them to stomach a cover model whose demons are apparently all non-pharmaceutical.

• Know your sales channels’ customers: Noting that The New York Times had previously used the same image on its front page, without controversy, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone summed up the controversy as “it's OK for the Times [to use the photo], not OK for Rolling Stone, because many people out there understandably do not know that Rolling Stone is also a hard-news publication.” No, it’s OK for the Times because its magazine is not on display in supermarkets and drugstores. People in such venues don’t want to be reminded of bad things in the real world. They want to see fluffy stuff about movie stars and royal babies that get their minds off their hemorrhoids, cold sores, oxycontin addiction, or whatever it was from the real world that brought them to the store in the first place.

• Ban my magazine, please: Getting banned from some stores will get you more publicity than money can buy, boost your web traffic and digital subscriptions, and turn your issue into a collector’s item.

Invitation to Extinction? Newsstand Professionals in an Up-roar

Those of us on the print side of the publishing industry tend to get a bit touchy about comparisons to dinosaurs, which usually come amidst discussions of e-this, digital that, and print-is-dead pronouncements.

Especially touchy are the people responsible for “newsstand” marketing, who are perhaps the most endangered species in the Printosaurus genus.

Ad pages and print subscriptions have stabilized, but newsstand sales keep declining at an annual rate of about 10%. (“Newsstand” is a misnomer because most retail sales of magazine occur at supermarkets and bookstores, with a tiny percentage at actual newsstands. And none occur online.)

So it was a bit surprising when the main trade group promoting U.S. retail sales of magazines chose to illustrate an invitation to its annual dinner with a photo of several large, extinct reptiles. That’s hit a raw nerve for some folks in the newsstand field.

"Is that supposed to show the museum or the dinner's attendees?" one invitee to the IPDA dinner asked.

The depicted dinosaurs are part of a display at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences, where the event is being held. But some people in the business fear they will soon be the ones on exhibit in the Hall of Extinct Species.

Cheer up, folks. Scientists now tell us that not all dinosaurs went extinct. Some survived the great die-off and evolved into what we now call birds.

Survival is possible, but watch out for falling meteors.

Other Dead Tree Edition articles about newsstand sales include:

•  Invasion of the Bookazines, Featuring the Return of the Living Dead  
• Weeklies' Weakness Pushes Down 3rd Quarter Newsstand Sales  
• Trouble in Magazine Land: We're Running Out of Celebrities!