The women’s fitness / health category of magazines is strong thanks to the re launch of Good health from ACP a year back and the launch this year of Women’s health from Pacific Magazines. The success this year of these two excellent titles is, in my view, the making of the category in 2007. Supported by between fifteen and twenty other titles, we now have a category which is well browsed and around which we can build excellent add-on business in food and lifestyle titles.
A risk newsagents sometimes make is not noticing trends, like with the women’s health and fitness category this year, and therefore don’t capitalise on the opportunity. Managing magazines is about much more than the labour of putting product out and taking it off and working through the archaic paperwork the magazine distributors require newsagents to use. The entrepreneurial work of chasing incremental sales is what interests me the most and where I find the best reward.
In our situation, by moving this category and playing with it every couple of days, we are driving excellent growth from key titles and achieving an excellent return on the space allocated.
Magazine publishers need to reward newsagents who work like this. We are far more valuable to them than the mass merchants who invest little in driving magazine sales.