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.