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circulation solution
How Book magazine jumped to 1M subscribers
By Jamie L. Jones
The beleagured magazine industry rightfully moans about the ongoing ad slump, but the real challenge to publishers, one that gets far less buzz, is a deeper crisis in circulation.
Getting and keeping readers, whether through subscriptions or newsstand sales, is getting ever harder and more costly.
But some publications are coming up with ingenious solutions, and certainly among them is Book magazine.
Never heard of it?
That's not surprising. Just a year ago the consumer magazine about--what else?--books, had a circulation of just 150,000.
This month the redesigned three-year-old magazine expects its circulation to hit one million.
Book owes its skyrocketing growth to a partnership with bookselling super-chain Barnes & Noble.
"We were growing gradually and steadily after we launched, but last fall we kicked it into high gear," says Book publisher Mark Gleason.
"What’s beautiful about it is that it’s helping us reach our target audience."
When Book made the deal with Barnes & Noble a year ago, the odds were against the survival—much less the exponential growth—of a young magazine without the shelter of a major publishing house.
What happens now is that shoppers who buy the $25 "Reader’s Advantage Club" card receive a free subscription to Book magazine, in addition to a 10 percent in-store discount and other promotional offers.
Otherwise, a subscription costs $20, and the newsstand price is $4.95.
The people who buy lots of books buy the card, and the people with the card get the magazine. Book magazine could not ask for a more direct route to its audience.
Given its niche status, one would guess that Book magazine also has a built-in advertising base.
But Gleason says that the magazine cannot rely on book advertisers alone.
"Most of our advertising comes from outside the publishing world," says Gleason.
"Books don’t have big ad budgets, so we’re not a magazine that can count on a big endemic base."
So far, the top advertisers in Book are coffee producers, financial services, travel services, and other media.
"Where we’re only one or two advertisers deep in each category now, we would like to be six or seven deep next year," says Gleason.
Women comprise 65 percent of the readership, and the median age of the reader is 47. Of the magazine’s one million readers, 55 percent graduated college.
"Book readers are very, very educated—and that high education pulls with it other desirable demographic attributes—not only affluence, but also influence within a community," says Gleason.
He says that a strong ad sales effort did not go into effect until the second quarter, and he anticipates that when the magazine is part of the regular planning cycle, its advertising base will grow.
Gleason believes that the Barnes & Noble partnership makes the magazine more attractive to advertisers.
"The Barnes & Noble relationship has helped us in that all other (non-book) advertisers recognize the value of our audience. They know Barnes & Noble is a very respected retail brand with a desirable retail base."
Book editor in chief Jerome Kramer says that a story in the July/August issue raised some eyebrows about the Barnes & Noble partnership.
Barnes & Noble popped up in a story called "The Influential Ten: People Who Decide What America Reads."
The story lists Barnes & Noble fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley as one of the top ten, alongside others like Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, New Yorker editor David Remnick and, of course, Oprah.
But Kramer says that while he is vigilant in keeping the partnership from influencing the magazine’s content, it would have been unfaithful to his staff’s true opinion to keep the retail chain out of the story.
Book magazine will not only mark a circulation milestone with the September/October issue but will unveil a redesign.
The formerly glossy magazine now prints on slightly larger matte paper stock. A new sans-serif font runs throughout the magazine, and a new service section at the back of the magazine aims to help readers navigate the issue.
The coverage is the same: new book reviews stand next to author interviews and investigative pieces. Literary mainstays like Toni Morrison and John Updike have appeared on the cover, as well as best-selling authors like Anne Rice and John Grisham.
Sebastian Junger appears on the cover of the September/October issue.
The magazine will also increase its frequency to 10 times a year in 2002.
Gleason and Kramer founded Book three years ago with the idea that it was a glossy consumer magazine for every kind of enthusiast except the avid reader.
"As a literary magazine, we deliberately tried to model ourselves against everything else out there—we didn’t want gray, dry, pointy-headed, East Coast literati talking to themselves," says Kramer.
Models for Book were enthusiast magazines like Rolling Stone, Premiere and even Sports Illustrated.
"Sports Illustrated was a good model," says Gleason.
"It’s not a model in that we can’t be as timely—but there are a lot of different sports, and Sports Illustrated covers them all. We’re a very vertical magazine in that we’re about books, but in covering books, we cover every subject under the sun."
The magazine started with a small, mostly free circulation of 100,000
Book—and only Book—is published by West Egg Communications LLC. Gleason heads up the company, which was named after the fictional Long Island town in "The Great Gatsby."
September 5, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jamie L. Jones is a staff writer for Media Life.
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