We stock about a gazillion different magazine titles as well as stationery across our 5 stores in Australia, New Zealand and online.

Archive for January, 2010

Why we’re not afraid of the iPad

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Apple iPad and iBooks

As you’ve no doubt heard from a slew of other, far more reputable news sources, Apple yesterday announced the release of the iPad; a portable, full colour tablet device which on the face of it, looks like it’s going to shake up not just the computing industry but TV, gaming and publishing as well.

As the New York Observer reported late last year, Time Inc., Conde Nast and Hearst have all signed a deal to sell digital mags in a kind of iTunes for magazines and books and which Apple revealed yesterday will be called, you guessed it, iBooks.

Are we worried? Actually, not a bit.

We’re obliged, of course, to carry the Time and Newsweeks of this world but they are by no means our bread and butter. A vast and overwhelming proportion of our sales are for small-run, collectible, niche titles like Sneaker Freaker, Lula, Purple Fashion, Self Service and Dumbo feather… that is, beautiful tactile printed objects.

Which is to say that most of the magazines we sell are not than the kind of throwaway newsprint titles that this device may end up replacing.

More than anyone, we’re aware of how wasteful the magazine industry is; every week we send back hundreds of unsold magazines to our distributors where they’ll be pulped. This kind of slash and burn approach is at best unsustainable and at worst, completely wasteful and absurd in the year 2010. (I mean, this is meant to be ‘the future’, right? If we’d had our way, the iPad would have surfaced closer to 2001 along with jetpacks, ray-guns and teleportation devices.)

We hope that the arrival of a portable reading device such as the iPad will stamp out a huge proportion of the unnecessary waste created by the publishing industry, but by no means we do we see it spelling the end of the magazine format as we know it. 

Just as sales of vinyl LPs continue to steadily rise in the face of downloads and (dwindling) CD sales, we see a promising future for niche printed media and we look forward to being a part of that for years to come.

Fittingly,  London based Newspaper Club goes into public beta today. These guys are set to launch on-demand newspaper printing for individuals and groups wanting to print as few as five newsprint papers or as many as five thousand for a comparable per unit price.

Posted in Magazine Industry, The end of print | 4 Comments »

Summertime means summer (mag) reading

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Oh, summer. The season of lying on the beach or by the pool, of being squished in the back of a car with your family as you head off on holiday or maybe (probably still squashed) on a plane while on the way somewhere exotic… but whatever you’re doing or wherever you’re going, there’s likely going to be plenty of time to relax with a few wonderful magazines.

You have heard from us a little less regularly over the last few weeks as we have been doing some combination of the above, likely with a copy of Monocle or Vanity Fair or the New Yorker or any of those longer form magazines that we so rarely get a chance to devour in their entirety during the hectic pace of the year.

From everyone at Mag Nation, thanks so much for your support over the last year, we hope you are having a great summer break, and if you are already back into the swing of things, we look forward to seeing you soon!

Posted in General randomness, Individual Mag Titles | No Comments »

Some reflections on our Christmas promotions

Monday, January 4th, 2010

In case you weren’t paying attention, we ran a number of promotions on our website this Christmas, that we wrote about pretty extensively here.

One of these involved refunding one in every 100 customers who purchase a magazine subscription from magnation.com. We did this for the last few weeks leading up to Christmas and it went absolutely swimmingly… scores of happy customers have responded with pure delight to the news that the cost of their subscriptions has been refunded to their credit cards.

The second—the person who buys the most subscriptions gets them all for free—also went well, albeit somewhat differently to what we’d expected. A bit of an experimental promotion, and one that we were never really sure how it was going to pan out.

We blogged about the difficulties of setting up the terms and conditions associated with this offer and trying to protect ourselves (somewhat!) while still making it a fun and interesting promotion. So as to keep us from the mercy of some rogue magazine fiend with a black Amex, we decided to limit it to 30 subscriptions in total.

When you consider that the average sub we sell (across the whole site, mainly imported air freight titles) is $100, then this still adds up to a pretty hefty sum. Then, in the case that two people BOTH took out the same maximum number of subscriptions, we specified that we’d give the prize to the person who got in first.

Did we see a rise in the average number of subs taken out? It’s hard to say. Christmas is an absolutely mental time in the magazine subscription market and when you’re a small, growing business like we are it’s hard to compare one month of the year with that same month in the year prior with any degree of certainty. What’s sure, however, is that most people bought one or maybe two subscriptions. Many of our customers bought three or four subs and a mere two people bought five.

That’s right—the winner of this promotion bought a mere five subs (albeit expensive ones, totalling around $NZD1500).

The feedback we had from many of our customers while we were running this offer is that they would have considered having a crack and taking out as many subs as they could possibly afford… were it not for the fear that some mag hoarding tyrant might swoop in at the last possible moment and take out hundreds of subs, leaving them mag rich and cash poor. Of course, this was never really a possibility due to the terms and conditions stipulated above… but this, nevertheless, this was their fear and it is rarely our place to dispel the irrational fears of our customers.

And so for us, did this promotion make good business sense?

The truthful answer is that we really have absolutely no idea. The point here is more that we tried something a bit different, had a bit of fun and in many ways that encapsulates just about everything that we’re trying to do here.

As for the winner? He had absolutely no idea the promotion was running at all.

Posted in Strategy, The Inside Story | 2 Comments »