Fairfax Digital has a report about Angus and Robertson requesting co-operative funding to ensure lower performing titles are viable for their retail network. Given the cost of real-estate and labour it is appropriate that books deliver minimum returns to Angus and Robertson.
The same is true for magazines. I know from my cash flow research that over 60% of all magazines are cash flow negative. Newsagents have requested co-operative funding but such requests have been refused. Once day a group will move and maybe then publishers will look at the newsagent channel as a partner should.
Isn’t the massive backlash against A&R a sign that it’s a bad business decision? It might seem right on a balance sheet but if it reduces the overall quality of content on the shelves it may cause a drop off of customers.
If you financially penalise small publishers, as A&R is trying to do, they will opt out or struggle to compete against bigger publishers and drop away and your overall content gets worse.
I’m sure most chain cinemas have over 60% of screens and sessions that are not profitable.
Vincent,
Removing the bottom 200 titles would have no impact on the customer experience in an average newsagency.
Mark
I’m not sure you can compare A&R’s proposed terms with that of newsagents and magazine distributors.
A&R seem to be trying to adopt the Woolies and Coles model of selling shelf space to suppliers. Given the local newsagent doesn’t have the market power of the big supermarkets, you’d quickly find the distributors or publishers dictating terms to you.
While I agree you’ve got a problem with the distributors, I doubt very much that the A&R solution would help you at all.
In fact I doubt it’s going to help Angus and Roberton much either.
Paul, As documented here over many posts my proposal is different to that of A&R and more suited to newsagents. Mark