While I am pleased that ACP reduced our supply for their latest Weeknights Fast & Fabulous cookbook, we still received around twice what we could reasonably expect to sell – even in today’s marketplace of strong interest in food titles.
For a company which demands on time settlement of accounts by newsagents and often pursues this with ignorant aggression, it is disappointing that the supply model remains unfair to newsagents.
This title has a three month on-sale so why not provide me with 33% of my expected sales and use the Sales Based Replenishment model to provide additional stock when sales show that this is necessary. That would be fair in terms of demands on retail space and newsagent cash.
Better still, why not give newsagents absolute control over supply? This makes sense given that we are responsible for paying for the stock. This is where the model is half pregnant and grossly unfair toward newsagents.
By supplying the stock up front as ACP has done for this title and its other long shelf life titles makes newsagents ACP’s banker in many respects. Sure we will ultimately be credited for unsold stock but in the meantime ACP has our cash and given their debt situation I am sure it comes in handy.
I would expect that somewhere within ACP the cash flowing from newsagents for this and similar long shelf life titles is reflected in their financial modelling.
Supplying more stock than we could reasonably expect to sell is effectively a request for us to provide a loan. This is more true for ACP than other publishers since they own the distribution company and, I expect, have faster access to the cash newsagents pay for these long shelf life titles.
I like the look of Weeknights Fast & Fabulous but I do worry that it will struggle in the more competitive food space of today. MasterChef is a monster of a title. Delicious is improving. Better Basics is hot! Donna Hay continues to cut through with stunning covers. The bar is higher today than a year ago. Food titles need to clear that higher bar if they are to at the very least achieve the sales they achieved previously.
Were finding it hard to push any sales of the title even after giving it an off location position. I asked a few of the staff what they though of the cover and they gave an overwhelming response that it looked ‘old’ like it was an AWW title recycled from 10 years ago.
This style of fast weeknight food title has been done before. AWW cant afford to be pitching something so … ‘blah’ … Especially when their circulation numbers aren’t exactly pinnacles of success. Now more than ever they need to remain relevant. Instead of focusing on this kind of brand extension AWW would be better of directing their attention to the growing success of their revamped cookbooks. No one else is really playing in that space in newsagencies and there is more opportunity there than they are currently exploiting.
Despite the Sales Based Replenishment (“SBR”) facility available to distributors due to XChangeIT, today we received 6 extra copies of the UAC Guide to compliment the 7 we received several week ago. They will know that we have sold only 1 copy only in 3 weeks.
Perhaps a better name is “Sales Underperforming Cash Kick” – SUCK for short.
we used to recieve300 copies from rds , but now 50 copies in each shipment, so i think acp is more reasonable but they should let delay billing like rds.
Bruce,not all titles are on SBR.Not all stores are on it either,data has to be perfect for the store to get SBR.
the data may have to be perfect, but it doesnt mean that Network will take any notice of it.,
sbr seems to work for me but only on monthly tittles
While not all titles are on SBR, it is easy for ACP to place their titles on SBR.
Super Foods is only $2.00 in coles ,printed on the front cover more bullshit
so is the UAC guide an acp title? I don’t believe it is so correct me if I am wrong.
A complaint or whinge is much more sound based on facts.
Mary, you are missing the point. The distributors KNOW how much they have supplied and with XChangeIT daily sales updates, they KNOW how many we have sold at any point in time. So whether the title is is an “SBR” title or not, the maths is simple. In my example, there can be no other point in more supply other than to SUCK some cash out of Newsagents!!!
Do what I do and send them straight back. I don’t know why they send out so many UCA as all state high school students get them handed out free of charge. So unless you have a lot of mature age students in your area you will sell very few.
in the golden age we can sell 500+ copies of tafe hand book and uac guide each, no wonder now hardly sell 50 copies, but they think we still sell the same amount.