We are promoting Daphne’s Diary magazine – a publication in the form of a diary.  It appeals to an important demographic for us. Sourced through Gotch, this is a challenging magazine to place – challenging in a good way. We have it next to home and living titles and near Frankie. The Daphne’s Diary website provides a good insight into their target customer.

Here is another example of Bauer sending our magazine stock unnecessarily. We received more copies of monday to friday diet when we still had plenty of stock of the first issue of this title. This is not sales based replenishment – no, it’s an abuse of the newsagency magazine supply model. We early returned the extra stock.

Some stock of the reissued part 1 of Precious Rocks Gems & Minerals was damaged and had another retailers sticker – on barcode stock that was not removable. Very frustrating!  retailers should use removable stickers. Distributors should only send merchantable stock – instead of us having to return stock we can’t sell.

Source: Mumbrella

Sales of Family Circle magazine jumped 26.4% in the July – December 2013 compared to 2012. Women’s Fitness, Australian Property Investor, Australian Home Beautiful, real Living, Diabetic Living, Grand Designs Australia, Russh, Caravan World, Frankie, Belle, Australian handyman, Super Food Ideas and Feast all posted good growth – between 4% and 21%.

Cleo and Cosmopolitan experiences double digit declines of 17% and 14% respectively while Marie Claire experiencd a 1.7% decline. Girlfriend sales fell 23.3% while Dolly sales fell 22.3%. Food titles generally are struggling. Mumbrella has more on the monthly magazine circulation results.

As for weeklies, New Idea performed the best with a decline of 4% and Zoo performed the worst with a decline of 34.9%. See Mumbrella for more.

I’d love to see the sales breakdown by channel – that data would be valuable to newsagents to understand where we sit and to compare ourselves against the whole channel.

Newsagents can grow magazine sales by offering shoppers a unique value proposition and by working the category and individual titles.

While it angers me that Bauer decided they did not have enough stock to supply Take 5 to one of my newsagencies this week – there is no excuse for this commercially harmful action by the publisher – I want to note that this week’s issue looks good. I like the free necklace, how it is placed and the way it is promoted above the masthead. At least they got the production right.

Bauer is trying to drive sales of the new Elle magazine by bundling it with Cosmopolitan and offering the two for $5 off. While discounting can be seen as rewarding people for buying more than they expected, I think it gives the wrong message. The discount voucher approach I use works better as it is a whole of my business  push.

We are promoting the INXS one-shot title in three locations for impulse purchase by shoppers: with newspapers, with weeklies and here as shown in the photo at the entrance to the main magazine aisle.

Each location is getting shopper engagement – reflecting the broad appeal of the TV show on the Seven network.

Our supply of Take 5 was cut by Bauer from 30 to 0 due to insufficient stock. The Network Services website advised no stock available for us to order. Thankfully, a nearby supermarket had plenty.

Helping out a newsagent this week I suggested they take more care when placing labels on magazine covers. They were placing big labels over magazine mastheads, potentially making it harder for customers to find the titles they want. I also suggested they consider a slimmer more discrete label.

At a Coles supermarket yesterday I noticed two pockets of AWW Meals in Minutes at $19.95 each. This is a large-format title, the same size as the new superfoods title we have for $10 more. These price inconsistencies can’t be good for anyone, especially the retailer with the higher price.

In this era of reality TV (it’s not real, in fact it is more fake than non-reality TV) and social media enabled instant celebrity, it’s worth pausing to reflect on the passing overnight of Shirley Temple Black, a real celebrity with real talent and who did real things outside her celebrity life. Reading about Shirley Temple Black would be, I suspect, more interesting to many than reading about a convicted drug smuggler just released in Bali or a Kardashian who is famous for nothing of substance.

One shot magazine titles can be tremendously successful in driving traffic and leveraging basket-building. INXS Commemorative Edition is a title achieving both. We have people asking for it and purchasing on impulse.

The INXS telemovie was a hit Sunday night – 1.97 million viewers versus the 1.02 for the Schapelle Corby telemovie. These ratings indicate public interest that we should be able to leverage into unexpected magazine revenue.

To make the most of the one-shot we have it places with music titles, weeklies and on the counter. I figure we have a week, maybe two, to leverage the opportunity.