All Blog Posts (119)

The message seems to be this: Everyone stay calm. The sky is not falling. And there will be no massive anti-trust style litigation.

I’m talking, of course, about the acquisition of the Comag Marketing Group by the Jim Pattison Group; and judging by the trade coverage of this event (not so much) everyone seems to be staying very calm indeed. Which is interesting, since JPG owns The News Group, the largest magazine wholesaler in North America. Pattison’s name is so closely associated…

I spoke to my friend Andrea York today about a new eulogy we have to write—a eulogy for a form of marketing that was brand new not so long ago.

It seems so recently that we all began to collect names on our sites. We started e-newsletters and sent them off, jam-packed with value, to our burgeoning lists. This was the beginning of permission-based marketing, where our audience would give us the OK to sell to them, as long as we provided enormous value along with our…

Every now and then, when our own newsstand landscape begins to look too homogenous and our cover formulas too tired we look to overseas to shake us up a little.

Or a lot—the polybag premium craze that swept our consumer publications a decade or two ago (but who’s counting) was sparked by one UK company.

Polybag premiums have, after many years, to some degree run their course here in the US, but any publisher with a serious commitment to a UK distribution is aware that it is…

What do you use when you are not using QR codes?

I’ve gotten a lot of mail asking me that question since a recent blog post wherein I mentioned that one of the downsides to using QR codes is that there are easier ways to reach the mobile customer. It isn’t internet marketing. It isn’t SEO. It isn’t QR. And it isn’t Siri (the topic of another recent blog post).

It’s text messaging.

That sounds crusty and ancient, doesn’t it, in this day of smartphones? But text messaging…

Here is one piece of magazine news that has gone a bit viral: the U.S. military has decided to stop its magazine program in its overseas commissaries. If you are interested in distribution and sales on the overseas military bases, you probably noticed it over the past couple of weeks popping up in various newsletters and updates.

The U.S. military overseas is actually one of the big sources of distribution for magazines with foreign sales. That makes sense of course—the audience is…

The two publications have a lot in common: a long, unbroken legacy (one has just celebrated its 100 year anniversary; the other has been continuously published for 220 years); the focus on the American values of hard work, native intelligence, cleverness, and heroism; and, for every issue, literally millions of readers.

And you probably remember each of them from your own childhood. I know I remember both from mine.

But Boys Life magazine and The Old Farmer’s…

All right, OK: so you are not a local business and no one is searching your site for a nearby place to eat Indian food.  But you do have a mobile site, and it is a priority of yours to have that site optimized for search—right?

Enter Siri, Apple’s clever personal assistant with its voice-activated commands.

Siri has put SEO experts into a tailspin as they scramble to understand its role in SEO.  Some are suggesting we rename SEO to mean ‘Siri Engine Optimization.’  Some are…

Warren Young, the publisher of Boys Life magazine, called me today to talk about the possibility—in fact, the lack thereof—of getting tablet version of this venerable publication.

Boys Life is 100 years old this year, and I wish them a very happy birthday.  They have 1,100,000 subscribers and close to four million readers.  That represents a value to advertisers that, in the analysis of the publisher’s team, would be diluted by the introduction of a tablet…

Full disclosure: I love QR codes. I have ones that point to my Google Places pages, ones that link to various forms of contact information, one that ties people to my mobile site (www.publishingdojo.mobi). So when the publisher of a pretty big magazine...

Full disclosure: I love QR codes. I have ones that point to my Google Places pages, ones that link to various forms of contact information, one that ties people to my…

There is no research, no statistics, no fact whatsoever to show that digital is displacing print.  This was a key message from the Distripress Congress in Barcelona last month; and it was a message that stimulated conversation from conference beginning to end.

We’ve all been to these business forums at this event or that, and sometimes, let’s face it, they can be real snoozers.  But everyone I spoke to had something to say about the “print is not dead!” message of the sessions;…

I have a tip-of-the-day today, courtesy of Colleen DeCourcy of Socialistic.  This is a tip she shared at Women in Digital Media’s Great Ideas Luncheon last month; and in DeCourcy’s view it is perhaps the single most important thing you can do to make your social media more effective:

Use offline marketing to support the marketing you do online.  And take that a step further: tie your online marketing efforts with your offline efforts. 

One of the most effective things you can…

“It’s all very well to say that the newsstand slump is the result of the recession,” said Denise Robbins of NewBay Media, “but to what degree will the sales ever come back?  And where will the publishers be when they do?”

This was in response to some recent blogs of mine suggesting that there might be more (or less) to the loss in print sales than the transition to digital.  If the recession plays a role in the downward trend, presumably some of that will be reversed as the economy…

At a recent luncheon I attended, publishers began talking about the value of video on their mobile and desktop sites.

Editors commented that their readers didn’t use video enough to make it worth giving it the focus it seems to get.  “The value is for advertisers,” one remarked.  “They see video as sexier than print; but our readers really aren’t using it that much. ”

Another agreed: “It’s more flash, less substance.”

These publishers are forgetting one of the most…

Almost a century ago, the poet Dylan Thomas asked his father not to “go gentle into that good night.” Today that might be advice that magazine publishers should be taking.

I can see that Sherin Pierce, publisher of America’s oldest publication, The Old Farmer’s Almanac has no intention of going gently, or in fact at all.  Pierce always taken a grassroots approach—agency by agency, store by store—to her newsstand sales.  In a recent blog I related how Curtis Circulation…

What to say about last week’s Exceptional Women in Publishing (EWIP)’s event?  You remember, of course (because I mentioned it in a recent blog post) that EWIP’s Women in Digital Media was going to hold its first Great Ideas in Social Media luncheon in partnership with Mansueto; and without getting all St. Crispins Day-ish (yes, we happy few, we band of sisters did have a lovely time; but no, please don’t count yourself accursed if you missed it), it really was worth being…

I went to Curtis’ Promotions Day this week with a mission—actually, several.  My mission for the retailer (I was representing Newsstands of America) was to book publisher promotions for the year 2012.  From my publisher clients, though, I had another mission.

It was this:  to find out what the heck Curtis Circulation Company, a major national distributor, had to say about the declining sales and revenues in our industry, what they thought was going on and what, if anything, they…

Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.  So said Edward Albee and so say I, now that I have seen and read the blog that I found in my inbox today, written by Al Reis about Stephen Levitt’s Freakonomics, and forwarded by Publishing Executive’s own Bob Sacks.

That’s already a long way to go for a useful nugget; and that was only the beginning.  The Freakonomics blog reminded me of a time when I was consulting for a…

In a cover concept meeting in which I recently participated, we got to talking about which phrase might be most powerful to increase sales on a newsstand cover:  “desert island” or “pristine beach.”  Each school of thought had its advocates; but without running a split on the newsstand or doing an online cover test, how to know?

One way would be to check out Google’s Keyword Tool and see what phrases people are most searching.

When I say, as I sometimes do, that the Internet is…

When I the various definitions of Web 2.0—the umbrella term that covers social media, blogs, forums, and other user-centric and interactive components—I am struck by the similarities of its qualities to those of women in management.  Reciprocity, sharing, open communication, and a flattening of hierarchies are often cited as qualities of both Web 2.0 and of women’s management style.    Perhaps that is why so many women have embraced social media both personally and…

“If there is going to be an email in an inbox on Monday morning—and there is—I want it to be mine,” Bob Kaslik said to me.  “If there is going to be a publication on sale in the crafts section of a store, I want it to be mine.”

Bob is VP of Circulation at Interweave Press, and we were talking about publication schedules for print and digital products.  In a year of dismal newsstand performance the bright spot for many consumer magazine publishers has been found in their…