As the shift continues at the nation’s newsstands from regularly published magazines to book-a-zines, one can see as we enter 2023 that the future of ink on paper is going to be with those single topic, high-priced publications. They are everywhere: at the checkouts and at the mainlines. They cover every conceivable topic from Inside the Mind of Your Dog to Inside the Mind of Your Cat and everything in between. The cover price of these publications ranges between a low of $9.99 to a high of $14.99. Some of these publications are second, third and even fourth printing. All returning to the newsstands by “popular demand.”
So can the aforementioned be the reason for the drop in the total of new magazines published with a regular frequency? Well, the simple and short answer is YES. A crowded marketplace combined with the three headwinds (paper shortage, printing cost, and postage rates) publishers had to deal with in 2022, kept the major remaining publishers from entering the new magazine field (in fact just the opposite happened for the major publishers, they folded some of the existing magazines that they have), and those publishers focused more on the book-a-zine market.
My sources tell me that the two major publishers Dotdash Meredith and a360 media now control 60% of the book-a-zine marketplace. Well, for those of us who recall the “golden age of magazines” in the 1980s and 1990s, you will remember that Meredith used to be a leader in publishing what was called back then SIPs or special interest publications. Those SIPs were used