Within ten minutes of being unpacked and put on the shelf this morning, the cover of Woman’s Day started to curl.  Twenty minutes later, thirty minutes on the shelf, it was curled over as shown in the photo.  I thought it was the air  conditioning at my shopping centre as other titles curl from time to time.  Then I heard from several other newsagents experiencing the same problem.  The stock and the printing process for this cover appears to be different.  I say that as someone knowing nothing about the printing process.  I can see the result however, an obscuring of an excellent cover.

This could be a serious problem for Woman’s Day sales.

Promoting magazines to male shoppers.  The team at one of my stores cleverly created this display facing out into the mall to attract guys to the shop to look at our cricket, car and fashion magazines.

This is a clever move since it is mainly women’s magazines promoted in this way.  I like that it’s near cards – we often get couples shopping for cards.  This display keeps guys occupied.

I saw first hand the value of the display on the weekend with one guy who was walking past stopped and browsed two titles on the stand in the brief time I was at the store.

The display will be changed when 7 days is up.

We are promoting three British magazines with Coronation Street themed covers next to each other to drive more efficient sales.  Our British magazines sell well so we are the ideal market for a bit of promotion around the popular TV series – especially given that it hits 50 years in TV this year.  Promoting titles with related cover stories encourages enough shoppers to buy more than they intended to make finding the space worthwhile.

We are promoting the latest issue of Your Garden with a tactical co-location strategy – in with gardening titles as well as at the counter this week.  being a seasonal publication, it’s natural that customers will not be thinking of Your Garden when they visit.  This issue has been out for a couple of days and so far is showing promising sales.  We plan to run with the co-locatio strategy for the next two weeks space permitting.

While there are strict restrictions on the sale of handguns in Australia, there appears to be no such restriction on handgun magazines. This latest issue of Concealed Carry Handguns went on sale yesterday.

While I don’t know if this magazine is promoting guns which are illegal in Australia, I would certainly be uncomfortable with this title on my shelves.  It is from the US, a country with a very different approach to handguns compared to Australia, a country, too, with far more handgun related deaths than we see in Australia.  In the US they report 15.22 firearm deaths per 100,000.  In Australia we report 2.94.

While I am no prude, this magazine crosses a line for what I’d consider reasonable in an Australian newsagency.

The Parliamentary Library publishers a helpful guide on resources available on firearms in Australia.

We have seen a sales lift for Gardening Australia with the latest issue.  Hopefully this is due to the revamp of the title and sales continue at this higher volume.  We have the title in three pockets of prime position in our gardening section – there is no room for co-location in our temporary smaller location.  The new look cover works particularly well in traditional newsagency fixturing.

The royal engaagement announced overnight should give us some good sales of weeklies and maybe even AWW from now through Christmas.  Diana sold a forest load of magazines.  Selfishly, this engagement has come at a good time for magazine retailers.