THE POST OFFICE IS KILLING OUR MAGAZINES
posted by James Reel
Magazines are in financial trouble, and part of the situation—but only part of it—is described in an Associated Press article that includes this information:
Newsstand sales of U.S. magazines fell 6.3 percent in the first half of 2008, an industry group said Monday, as rising gas and food costs led consumers to cut back on nonessential spending. … Publishers redouble efforts to sign up subscribers during economic slowdowns because they know newsstand sales will ebb, which they need to offset because advertising rates are based on minimum circulation targets. Newsstand sales are far more lucrative than subscriptions, though, meaning circulation revenue is dropping at most titles. … Overall magazine circulation, which includes subscription and newsstand sales, was flat at 349.9 million copies in the period, as paid subscriptions edged higher to 290.2 million copies, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported in its biannual tally. Single-copy magazine sales in the six months ended June 30 fell to 44.1 million copies from 47.1 million a year ago. The survey included 467 titles that reported results in both periods.
Single-copy sales are a problem, but there’s also an insidious threat to subscription copies: the U.S. Postal Service. Here’s part of an e-mail that Joel Flegler, editor and publisher of Fanfare, sent to his staff (including me) last weekend:
Originally I had intended to publish a 500+page Nov/Dec issue, but I discovered a few weeks ago that the USPS recently instituted a ruling that a magazine won't qualify for bulk rate mailing if it exceeds 3/4". If it's over the limit, it means that I would have to mail each copy as a parcel, which would be prohibitively expensive, at least $10,000 more per issue. After discussing the situation with Fanfare's printer, who investigated the various types of paper that we could use and still maintain quality, it's now clear that Fanfare can never exceed 416 pages unless the USPS changes its requirements. (There have been numerous articles published about how the USPS seems determined to drive small publishers out of business. The apparently annual increase for mailings is bad enough, but service is also deteriorating at an alarming rate, with subscriber copies often arriving three or four weeks late as well as many copies being lost in the mail.) Because of the significantly larger-than-average number of reviews for the Nov/Dec issue and the unexpected restriction on the size I can publish, I have to face the regrettable decision of postponing many reviews until the Jan/Feb issue. This will certainly have an impact on the quantity of new releases that I'll be assigning for the Oct. 1 deadline.
Bad service from the post office, and from the distributors that provide magazines to bookstores, is perhaps as great a danger to American magazines as any other, more widely discussed factor.
