Words Chipps
Now, how did those lyrics go again?
“Accept certain inalienable truths:
Prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old
And when you do, you’ll fantasise that when you were young
Prices were reasonable, politicians were noble
And children respected their elders.”
You may have noticed that the cover price has gone up (again!) on Singletrack Magazine. I’m sorry for the shock, but before you get all grumpy let me explain some of the reasons behind this.
Firstly, subscribers to the magazine won’t have noticed any price rise. For a start, they only pay us once a year, plus the subscription price won’t be rising in line with the cover price. If this looks like a barely veiled attempt to get everyone to subscribe, then you’re pretty much spot on. There are some very compelling reasons for the rise, though, but first we need to look a little behind the scenes in the world of retail magazine sales. The newsagent model has always been the traditional way of selling magazines in the UK. This isn’t the case in places like the US, where subscriptions have always been the bigger market. But in the UK, with greater town centre footfall, it has been how people saw, browsed and bought magazines, though that may be changing.
Getting your magazine into a newsagent, particularly the big ones, has never been that easy. With so many magazines bidding for shelf space, as an independent publisher, you usually have to persuade the newsagent chain that you’ll sell enough magazines for them to make some money, often supplemented by paying them for promotions. (You think those ‘New out this week’ boxes stuck to the front of the shelf come free? Even the order that magazines are stacked in is commercially driven.)
But, even if you get onto the shelves, the fun doesn’t end there. If you think you can sell, say, 10 magazines in the Ipswich branch, you probably need to send them 15 or 20, so there will be enough for everyone and any other random passers-by. The shops then take those copies – for no advance payment – and display them on their shelves. After four weeks or so, they look to see how many have been sold, and pass on around 50% of the cover price (minus distribution costs) to the publisher. The unsold magazines aren’t returned to the publisher, though, as it would be too expensive – they are just pulped.
So the publisher, having worked hard to produce a magazine and sending it out for free to as many newsagents as it can get into, waits a month or two to see what’s sold. After that time, plus another month or two for the newsagent’s accounts department to process payment, the publisher gets less than half the cover price – and to get to this point, they’ll have thrown away possibly 50% of the magazines they printed.
Subscribers meanwhile, buy a year’s subscription. They have paid in advance so you know exactly how many of them there are and you can print exactly the right number (plus a few spares). This is an astoundingly efficient way of doing it and for years we have made sure that those subscriber-only copies are better value than the newsstand ones; first by doing different covers that don’t have all the ‘Buy now!’ coverlines on, but in recent years, by giving the subscriber copies more pages and, therefore, more features. First 16, now 32 pages of extra features that aren’t in the newsstand copies.
Subscribers to the magazine automatically get many other membership benefits: there are discounts on our constantly expanding range of products, there’s access to every single back issue, ad-free website browsing, and more. In fact, it’s true to say that a membership to Singletrack gets you many benefits, which include having a thick, lovely magazine delivered to your door.
So, although the cover price may have increased, it only affects newsagent copies. And while that might put off a few readers who dip in and out occasionally, it means that those readers who back Singletrack by buying a membership for the year, are going to be rewarded for a magazine that is – literally – printed just for them.