magazines

Creating Keepsakes Publishes First Bimonthly Issue

April 1, 2010 By Nancy Nally 9 Comments

Most subscribers now have in their hands the first bimonthly issue, March/April, published on Creating Keepsakes’ new 8 issue schedule for 2010.

For subscribers who purchased their subscriptions expecting to get 12 issues in a year, this issue counts as 2 of the remaining issues they expected on their subscription since Creating Keepsakes customer service is on record saying they won’t extend subscription expiration dates with the reduction in annual issues.

So, what did readers get?

First, let’s look at the most obvious feature – length. The March/April bimonthly issue is 122 pages long, exactly the same length as the February issue.

But an examination of the advertising content in the two issues shows what could be a critical difference. The February issue contained almost 22% advertising content. The March/April issue contained under 18% advertising content. This is great news for readers – they got about 5 more pages of editorial content in the March/April issue – but financially for the magazine, it means they had 5 fewer pages of ad income. Given that 22% isn’t a healthy ad percentage for a magazine, a drop to 18% is definitely a trend in the wrong direction. (For comparison, most of the recent scrapbook magazines that have shut down were closed when they were consistently reaching only 15% advertising in their issues.)

Moving past the numbers, looking at the content is more positive. The quality of the editorial content has been steadily improving. They’ve dealt well with losing several headline columnists and have greatly refreshed the look of certain sections. The March/April issue is the best the magazine has done in a long time. Hopefully we’ll get to see more of that.

Judging from the comments on the Creating Keepsakes Facebook page, the new production schedule is a hard sell with subscribers. Many of the comments about the change addressed to the company via Facebook are complaints from subscribers who feel they are being shorted issues on their subscriptions by the change. Many are threatening to not renew their subscriptions when they expire, although none appear to be outright canceling immediately. Creating Keepsake’s representative on Facebook have repeatedly referred questions about subscription extensions to the customer service department. They’ve also blamed the poor economy and slow ad sales for the reduced production schedule and the length of the bimonthly issue.

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Filed Under: News Tagged With: Creating Keepsakes, magazines

State of the Scrapbook Magazine, Part 2: Advertising

December 7, 2009 By Nancy Nally 1 Comment

Now that we’ve taken a look at magazine circulation of the news stand scrapbook publications, it is time to look at the second piece of the puzzle of their health: advertising. [Note that for reasons of comparison, the analysis in part one and part two of this series only includes the publications that have historically been widely available on news stands at places like grocery stores. The reason for this will be made clear in part three of the series when other scrapbook publications will be added in and discussed.]

Advertising content is an important part of the business model of the news stand magazines. A typical news stand magazine in any market needs to contain about 40% advertising to be profitable. Three or four years ago, scrapbook magazines were reaching this mark easily, and at longer issue lengths than they are now producing. Here’s how they’ve been stacking up recently:

	Scrapbooks Etc. (Nov/Dec 2008)	Creating Keepsakes (Dec 2008)	Paper Crafts (Mar/Apr 2009)
Length	144	130	98 pgs
Percent Advertising	36%	37%	18.57%

	Scrapbooks Etc (Nov/Dec 2009)	Creating Keepsakes (Dec 2009)	Paper Crafts (Dec 2009)
Length	128	122	90
Percentage Advertising Content	27.48%	21%	19.35%

So, what do all of these numbers mean?

All of the magazines are shorter today than they were in the earlier set of data. None of the three except Paper Crafts has been able to maintain their advertising content percentage over the past year, even by shortening their relative length.
Creating Keepsakes, in particular, has lost the most advertising in the past year. It is now in the very low 20′s where a year ago it was managing almost healthy stats in the high 30′s.
Scrapbooks Etc. has cut the most length (11%) in the past year. Paper Crafts and Creating Keepsakes have cut 8% and 6%, respectively.
Advertising percentages under 20% in a news stand publication indicate a title is likely in serious jeopardy. Simple Scrapbooks was at 15% when it was shut down. Memory Makers ranged between 15-19% in its last few issues. Digital Scrapbooking was at 11% by its next-to-last issue, and 5% in its last one.

While it is tempting to look at the above statistics and declare it to be a sign that the entire scrapbook industry is on life support, there is a bigger picture that needs to be considered here. That picture is the health of various business models in the publishing industry as a whole…and how that relates to scrapbook publishing.

To read about that, stay tuned for part three of the series.

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