Linda Ruth's Page

Though the craze for polybagging has been dying down a bit over the last year or two, premiums polybagged to a magazine can still be a powerful tool to increase sale. They can move the needle 20%, 25% or even 30
% pretty reliably.

What to bag? I’ve seen publishers bag items with little or no value—an advertising insert, a paper mask, and once a normal

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Educator Appreciation Week is coming up and Borders, for one, is going all out.

Actually, they are doing more than going all out—they actually invented the whole week in the first place. The

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2009 wasn’t what you’d call a great year for anyone who cares about magazine sales at retail. That would be any publisher of a
print consumer magazine, magazine wholesalers and distributors, and the
retailers who carry magazines.

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Rumors and also sobering facts have been flying about Borders for over a year, so it isn’t exactly a surprise that FT.com came out with an article saying that the retail chain isn’t paying its smaller (book) publishers. Still, it isn’t exactly a joy to read. Phrases like “bleeding cash”, “growing arrears”, and “legal action” are never fun to read, and in particular not when those phrases refer to a retail chain so important to magazine publishers.

Borders Group Inc. is the second largest retail… Continue

Publishers' approach has changed a lot since the early days when everyone was out there scrounging, pretty randomly, for anyone, just anyone to link to their sites.

Anyone just anyone doesn’t work anymore. There is a degree to which it never really did; but as the search engines get better and better, the random indiscriminate linking works worse and worse.

But linking is still integral to search. The concept that in fact made Google a success was that sites that were valuable to searchers are… Continue