Why Clarkesworld isn’t in bookstore newsstands

When I started Clarkesworld in 2006, it was already pretty well established that the shortest path to bankruptcy for a magazine was newsstand distribution. Since that time, it’s only become worse as the number of distributors has decreased and the costs have skyrocketed.

Print magazine distribution is even more broken than bookstore distribution. When a bookstore returns a book, the publisher gets charged a restocking fee, but the book is back in inventory and can be sent out to another bookstore that wants it. When a magazine is returned, it is destroyed and neither the bookseller nor distributor are penalized. Losses are entirely in the hands of the publisher.

When you hear a magazine talking about “sell through” they are talking about the percentage of copies that are actually sold. Of the genre print magazines I’ve been tracking, sell through has ranged between 25 and 50%, meaning more than half of the copies printed and shipped to the distributor end up destroyed. Attempts to better optimize sell through by printing fewer copies don’t necessarily result in better sell through. Complicating matters further, smaller print runs often lead to higher per-unit costs. (The inverse is true as well. Bigger print runs tend to result in cheaper prices. There is an economy of scale that favors larger print runs and publishers with multiple titles.)

There’s also the expectation from booksellers that a new magazine will engage in promotional efforts, not just on the national stage, but in their stores as well. This, combined with the necessary sample copies to market to bookstores, can require a more significant financial investment to establish a viable footprint.

Now let’s talk about bookstore magazine displays. Have you ever looked for one of the three SFF digests in a bookstore? You have to know what you are looking for because more often than not, you can only see the top inch or two of the cover. This renders cover art, one of the most effective in-person marketing tools, reasonably ineffective. Casual discovery is far less likely than it is with books. Interestingly, this problem could be addressed by shelving the magazines with the genre books, but that is against the standard behavior of nearly every bookstore on the planet. Magazines go here. Books go there. Visibility is extremely limited. The existing genre magazines in that ecosystem established their presence there before these limitations became as big as they are today.

Now, supposing you’ve bitten the bullet and decided to invest in a print run large enough for national distribution, you have one more problem: how long it takes to get paid. Most printers expect to be paid within 30 days of your invoice, assuming you’ve convinced them to allow that. (If you don’t have sufficient credit, you may have to pay some or all of it up-front.) It may be months before you are paid, so you will be in the hole for one or more issues before you receive payment or know how you should be scaling your print runs.

It can take months to establish a viable newsstand presence and months represent significant numbers of dollars small publishers don’t normally have. It’s a huge gamble and frequently one that fails to pay off.

So why establish a newsstand presence at all?

Let’s hop back to books for a moment. When the print edition of a book is in stores, it is seen. This often leads to a bump in the sales of ebooks. You could almost considering a market expense, one that could possibly pay for itself.

Being on a newsstand is a kind of marketing. It’s being seen and regularly reminding readers you exist. If someone picks up a few issues at the newsstand, they are more likely to become a subscriber, which is where the real money in genre magazines exists. Thing is, before the Amazon fiasco, the leading genre print magazines were selling more digital than print subscriptions. The previously mentioned limited visibility has made it less effective than it once was. In fact, print subscriptions and newsstand sales have been declining in volume for well over a decade. Not only that, print subscriptions have higher overhead than digital subscriptions. It’s entirely possible to earn more from a digital subscription than a print one, even when the print subscription is significantly more expensive. (Thank printing and shipping costs for much of that.)

To take things very close to today, there has been a lot of talk about tariffs on Canadian goods. Guess where printers get most of the paper they use for books and magazines? You guessed it, Canada. Even if they don’t happen, paper costs will continue to rise, just not as sharply.

We’re a small publisher. Gambling on print distribution was always risky. Today, it would be a deathwish.

We’ve had a print edition for many years now and while it can be a headache sometimes, it’s not an anchor that will drag us down. People who really want it that way can get it. We could probably sell a lot more of them, but newsstand distribution would be a substantial drain on revenue, time, and other resources. The same effort put into expanding our digital distribution and subscriptions would likely yield far greater results for our bottom line without having to risk the entire operation. With limited time and resources, I don’t see any path to print newsstand distribution in our future. Simply put, the idea of having Clarkesworld on a newsstand is more nostalgic than practical.