It’s time to get past platitudes and talk honestly about print. We’re always hearing about “the death of print” and “digital transformation.” All the fun, exciting stuff seems to be happening online, and print titles are dying left and right.
At the same time, however, if you try to move your print subscribers to digital, most of them will leave you. That’s the sad fact. People love print. (Part of this might be because digital versions of magazines are usually horrible, but that’s a topic for another day.)
We also hear stories of titles that left print going back into print, and we hear of new print magazines that are succeeding.
But let’s face it, the economics of print are terrible. Printing and mailing costs are through the roof, they keep going up, and there’s constant downward pressure on prices. People expect to get a glossy, 80-page magazine mailed to their house once a month for $8 a year. It’s crazy. You can’t sustain a business with those kinds of numbers.
I know someone is thinking, “just get over it for God’s sake! Why agonize over this? The world has gone digital. Get with it and stop trying to sell buggy whips.”
If you feel that way, fine. Go create digital-only products.
But unlike buggy whips, people do actually like print. Even younger people. There is a preference for digital, but it’s not as if young people all prefer digital. That’s a common misconception.
The problem publishers face is that people don’t like to pay for print, but they still want it. So there is a market to be served here. The question is whether we can be clever enough to make it work.
So what can you do? Here are some options.
You can move your printing to China. For some reason, they’re able to print things cheaply and we’re not. Maybe they’re not subject to the same environmental and human resources restrictions as American companies, but however they’re doing it, they are cheaper. So if it doesn’t bother you that it’s probably not fair competition, and if you can wait 6-8 weeks for the product to arrive, that’s an option. Trade paperback books can go that route, for example.
You can raise prices to cover costs. Most magazines can’t do this. They’d lose 80 percent or more of their subscribers, and the numbers just don’t work. But you could re-imagine your product as a luxury item, or create a new luxury product, and sell that at a premium price. It’s worth considering. Some titles have done this successfully.
You can accept that print is a loss leader and create other business opportunities around it.
For example, if you have a magazine about fishing, your subscribers might be perfectly willing to give you information that would be very valuable to people who sell boats, or rods and reels, or fishing lures.
And there are other ways to use your money-losing print magazine to build a money-making business.
The economics of print are bad and they’re getting worse. But people still love print, and they’ll punish you if you try to take it away from them.
For good reason. Print is simply better than digital in many ways. Digital is also better than print in many ways. They each have their benefits.
Nevertheless, consumers aren’t going to pay for magazines and other periodical print products the way they used to — at those prices and in those volumes. Those days are over, and every print publisher is facing this problem.
Who’s going to come up with the right formula to make all this work?
Or … do we just give up and admit that everybody’s going to be playing on Tik Tok all day?
I love technology (except Tik Tok), but I don’t want to live in a digital-only world and I don’t want to be assimilated by the Borg. So I would very much like to help you find a way to make a successful print business even given the horrible economic realities of print.
