Email and Print: How Much is Too Much?

“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 “bookazines”—the high-cover-price, high-quality publications that are produced on an annual or semi-annual basis, sold primarily or wholly upon the newsstand or by direct order, and carry little or no advertising.

Consumer price sensitivity is up—but publishers find that by creating a high-value product their audience might be willing to pay $9.99, $12.99, or even more for what is essentially still a magazine.  If existing or “best-of” content is used, as it often is, editorial costs are a bit lower.  And God knows we can all use that extra revenue to offset those return adjustments we are struggling to account for now.

In fact the temptation might be to load on the bookazines and go straight to budget heaven; but what makes these publications successful is a combination of variables that include a lot of practical value, a high page count, and a low frequency.  Pushing the product line to a monthly or greater-than-monthly frequency can lead to consumer backlash in the form of lost sales.  And budgeting, as some publishers have begun doing, for equivalent sales for every release is a recipe for disaster down the road.

A publisher who is growing a line of bookazines must take into account that not every one of them will provide exactly what the reader is looking for; in short, some will be flops.  Prepare for that.  If, as frequency increases, value drops, readers will perceive that, and they will go away.  If you release (as some publishers do) the same material in successive issues, your readers will see that as well.  Yes, even for publications whose audience can be expected to change each issue—last quarter’s brides have gotten  married and been replaced by new brides;  last year’s parent’s toddlers have grown;  last season’s first-time technology buyers have moved on—even though each release should be welcomed by a new set of eyes, repeat content is noticed and flagged.  Prepare for that.

And finally, even if your line of publications is fresh, new, and maintains its value release after release; even if each release has a unique, unduplicated audience; even in that perfect world, the more product that gets released the harder it is to find display space at the retailers.  Those pockets at the checkout fill up; the space on the mainline gets scarcer.  There is a law of diminishing returns that will inevitably set in as the number of your annual releases grows.

So budget for the lows as well as the highs—but don’t grow faint of heart.  After all, the alternative to competing with yourself is to have the next guy compete with you.  Someone else will come in and grab that place on the magazine rack, that space in the market.  The rules for print and email are remarkably consistent:  respect your audience, don’t take shortcuts, deliver value.  Then whether it is a free email in a crowded inbox or an expensive publication on a crowded rack, the reader is going to welcome it.