Newsagents should check their shelves and see whether they have these titles: Green Garden & Home, Backyard & Garden Design Ideas, Backyard Landscapes, Good Garden Design and Outdoor Entertaining. They are all from Universal Magazines, part of their Backyard range and they all fit within a small category niche within the magazine department.
Five titles from one publisher makes it difficult for other publishers in this niche. It makes me wonder if this is a strategy from Universal, publish a bunch of titles in a niche as a kind of land grab. That is only speculation though as I am not privy to their strategy.
I’d encourage newsagents to check their shelves and then check sales data. If you have these five titles or even four, you have to ask yourself if you could achieve the same sales with one or two titles less.
Given that a magazine pocket in a shopping centre newsagency needs to return at between $8.00 and $15.00 a month in margin to cover its costs, it is appropriate that we ask ourselves if we have too many magazines in a niche.
Magazine distributors and magazine publishers have a commercial, ethical and moral obligation to newsagents to use our limited space efficiently. After all, we carry the cost of labour, real estate, returns freight and theft. In the case of titles with a greater than 30 day on-sale, like some of these, we also become the banker as it is our cash which is at risk which we have the stock.
The five magazines from Universal in the one niche is concerning. I have written about it this morning to ensure that newsagents are better informed.
But back to the question – Do newsagents have too many backyard and garden magazines? If I had all these five titles in my store the answer would be a resounding yes!
Our team at Forest Hill placed Annette Sym’s Weight Loss Journal next to Symply Too Good To Be True 6 which was released last Friday and guess what – the weight loss journal is selling too! Other stores are reporting good sales of Symply Too Good 1 through 5 along with number 6.
