Magazine retailing is about more than the best sellers

Last week, Retail Newsagent launched a campaign to bring fairness to the distribution of the top 100 magazines. Guy Campos said:

‘We aim to identify sales opportunities that will benefit independent newsagents and publishers and ask whether the industry can work together in a more effective way to grow sales’

This is a great idea, but my store’s experience would suggest that just getting a fair distribution on the top 100 may not be the only approach that is needed. A quarter of my top 12 don’t get into the national top 100, and we don’t stock four out of the national top 30. The two things that matter are whether we get enough copies to meet our customers needs, and how much our sales are worth. With weeklies selling mainly in the first three days, not having stock on day seven is not necessarily a problem. For us, having our best sellers available when our customers want to buy them is important. Our top 30 titles are worth over 60% more than our sales of the national top thirty, and that is what is key for me.

I will investigate when we sell out of these key titles and what we can do to stay in stock.