I have received couples of emails from people seeking my advice on advertising their product in Nigeria; I have decided to publish a few for you to read from. I hope you enjoy this.
Dear Victor,
I came cross one of your masterpiece on the newspaper circulations in Nigeria with superb statistics on sales figures and their attendant returns.
Sir, I am also a cub publisher exploring the industry with an entertainment, lifestyle and sports paper. I have done a couple of editions in the past which seems to attract a remarkable reading audience.
However, my concern is the distributors and news agents. After registering with their various units, many of them are elusive when it comes to returning their proceeds. This has become so frustrating that I have decided to stop publishing for sometime.
My question are:
1. Are there alternatives to circulating the newspapers aside without recourse to the news agents?
2. Are there measures one can take to reclaim ones proceed and forsetall a repeat in future.
These are my worries because I have come to realise that there are no respite for young publishers like us in the industry.
Thanks
Francis
Hello Francis,
Thank you for following my blog posts. People like you always give us the inspiration to write more.
Although, I'm not a professional publisher like you because I only write for my blog. I'm a brand consultant majored in advertising, training and media buying for corporate organizations. However, I will be advising you from previous experiences and experience from working with other publishers.
I can imagine the frustration in trying to get content, publish and circulating your magazine at the same time. This can be a very tough challenge especially for a growing publishing firm. Here is one or two advice I like to lend if you don’t mind.
1) Why not outsource your Magazine distribution to another marketing company: This will ease out the burden of trying to provide content, publishing and distributing at the same time. There are several marketing companies that can take up the challenge of marketing your magazine and get you back your returns at agreed terms.
2) Develop your own distribution outlets: You can get your own marketers to distribute your magazine. Castle magazine practiced this when they started and they are still doing this because it’s working for them. They use their own channel of distribution to circulate their magazine.
3) Try getting Subscribers: M2 magazine and a couple of other magazines only use this medium to spread their magazine circulation. They don’t use vendors at all. All you need to do is to advertise for subscribers and even give volume discount for bulk advance purchase. Then you can be sure how many people want your magazine in advance, this will even guide you into how many copies to print before going to the press.
4) Don’t base the success of your magazine on sales: The mistake that most magazine publishers make is to base the success of their magazine on sales alone. Successful magazines will not do this, even though the sales of the magazine form part of their profit. You must be able to get enough adverts to take care of your cost of production. That is why some magazine can afford to publish for free. So you should work hard in getting enough advertisement sponsorship for your magazine, so that the sales doesn’t have to determine if you can publish or not.
I will advise you to keep the last advice and the proceeds from circulation will only be an added incentive. I have not seen your magazine, but I believe your content will be great, please send me copies of your previous editions so that I will know what the magazine is all about as the quality of your content and productions goes a long way in determining how successful your magazine will be.
I wish you all the best in your magazine production.
Cheers
Victor
