Will bookazines replace magazines?

The continuing survival of many print magazines has as much to do with the wealth of the large companies who have long published them as with any kind of reversal in the 15-year decline in print readership and advertising. On both sides of the Atlantic, publishers continue to seek 21st century ways to leverage their best-known magazine brands and to (sort of) hope for a return to the golden days. That’s why merely counting up the number of ‘births, marriages and deaths’ of magazines does not tell the story of a sector that, for more than 50 years was one of the media industry’s most profitable. Big-selling weeklies and advertising-stuffed monthlies generated the kind of profits that can never be matched by the specialist magazines that are now among the most resilient. Magazines are a smaller sector but they’re still populated by big companies with long, happy memories.

We don’t need to debate whether magazines (and newspapers) were corrupted by the advertising boom which dislocated the direct relationship between readers and publisher profits. But we know what happened when advertisers and readers found quicker, hotter and more powerful media – online.

Many magazine business models were shattered by the web.

That explains the shrinkage of publisher profits. There are still major magazine winners in print as well as digital, of course. But the lengthening tail of under-profitable and/or lossmaking publications with fewer pages and lighter paper are a painful reminder of how successful they once were.

It is also inevitable that a diverse media sector once defined by its shared use of print and paper should now be seen as something other than a single sector. Inevitably, the publishers which once prospered from large-scale magazines and three revenue streams (advertising, subscriptions and newsstand), will increasingly focus on the specialist, narrow-cast magazines whose smaller markets have been less ravaged by the web – or get out completely. Even rich companies with a proud magazine history will eventually succumb to reality.

That’s why so many are turning to bookazines.

It’s all of 40 years since a scientific organisation defined its “bookazine” as a readable, non-academic magazine-style publication. That was (sort of) the start of a transatlantic publishing genre now responsible for more than 50mn copy sales and some $500mn of revenue. And, while there are still some scientific publishers involved, many of the 3,000+ bookazines on sale in the UK and North America are focused on the glories of Taylor Swift, the British Royal Family and Air Fryers.

Bookazines are single-topic, deepdive magazine-like books that are trusted because they are “contextually relevant”. The pandemic may have added to the stress of struggling magazines, but it boosted the success of bookazines, publications with higher cover prices and a shelf-life of up to three months. But, to publishers, they’re still mostly an ancillary.

In the UK, bookazines were (more or less) invented by the longtime publishing retailer WH Smith – essentially as “own brand” publications. But the longtime leader was Dennis Publishing which achieved worldwide sales of 500k for its ipad and iphone bookazines. They were branded as “MagBooks”, managed by Dharmesh Mistry whose London-based Catalysed Productions is now a custom bookazine producer for publishers in the US, UK and across Europe. Imagine Media (once also the largest UK publisher of bookazines) and Dennis were both acquired by Future, which last year generated an estimated £10mn (5% of its total print revenue) from 743 bookazines.

In the US, bookazines were formerly known as Special Interest Publications and were originally branded by existing magazines. They were dominated by tech guides, crafts and motoring but have now expanded to cover almost every subject that once captivated magazine readers and many others too.

Future published no fewer than three different bookazines to mark the UK’s coronation of King Charles. There were at least 10 others published in the UK and the official programme (as much a bookazine as anything else) last year sold almost 50k copies at £10.

According to Future CEO Jon Steinberg, bookazines are successful “because they cover passion points or cultural moments that people want to hold onto or reference from time to time. In some ways, you can compare a bookazine to a coffee table book, cookbook or reference book: they cover topics that interest people so much that they want them in printed keepsake format”.

In the US, the longtime leader is Meredith which – before its acquisition by Dotdash in 2021 – was selling some 20mn copies of its 300+ bookazine brands – accounting for $130mn of revenue, equivalent to 6% of the former company’s $2bn magazine group revenue.

A360 Media which sold 8.5mn copies of its 500+ bookazine portfolio in 2023 is no.2 in the market. The company – formerly known as American Media Inc – acquired Centennial Media LLC, a bookazine specialist and also the US interests of Bauer whose portfolio included 100 bookazines.

Debi Chirichella, president of Hearst Magazines says her company “leverages the authority and voice of its strong portfolio of brands including Cosmopolitan, Delish, Food Network Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Men’s Health and Oprah Daily to create bookazines that resonate with loyal and new readers alike. Our Town & Country bookazines about the Royal Family attract a large readership, and part of our success is due to market timing. We’re able to get on sale quickly as we have a significant portfolio of content at the ready. The latest in our royal collection, “Kate: Grace Under Pressure”, has just gone on sale. At one point, Delish and Good Housekeeping had a 25% share of the Keto bookazine market.”

Bookazine sales in the US and UK are now back above their pre-pandemic 2019 level.

The UK revenue in 2023 was a record: 3% ahead of 2019, and 8% ahead of 2022, with a 21% year-on-year increase in the number of issues. There are estimates of 10%+ revenue growth in 2024 and some predictions of a doubling market within 10 years. Encouragingly, the average price of a UK bookazine has increased from £8 in 2019 to £9.30 in 2023 (about twice the price of a monthly magazine).

The growth has been fuelled by music (Harry Styles in 2022 and Taylor Swift since). It is clear that a publishing category once dominated by specialty brands in tech, history or science is now increasingly driven by consumer-trend publications. It underlines the scope for flexible publishers to lean into the latest trends and ride each wave for however long it lasts.

Magazine academic Samir Husni says: “Bookazines are everywhere and they are changing the nature of magazines and the retail space magazines used to occupy. Whether at the checkout counters or the mainlines, bookazines are taking over and those magazines with a regular frequency are taking a back seat, if any seat at all.”

This last decade of bookazines refutes the view (shared by some publishers) that they are a passing fad. In the US, the boom in celebrity weeklies had created a substantial retail market for magazines (especially at supermarket checkouts) in a market previously defined by advertising-funded, low-cost subscriptions. Those same newsstands are now dominated by bookazines. Soaring sales mock the declining fortunes of magazines whose annual subscription prices – even when advertising is so much less plentiful – are frequently less than the cover price of a single bookazine.

In the UK’s newstand-dominated magazine market, the trend seems less pronounced. But supermarkets (which account for the majority of retail magazine sales) are increasingly attracted to bookazines. The country’s largest supermarket Tesco and WH Smith together currently account for a full one-third of all bookazine sales. It is assumed that the four other supermarket chains will fight harder to increase their share of the growth market – which might be expected to depress further the availability (and sales) of regular magazines.

Ultimately, the appeal to publishers of bookazines is easy to summarise: they are relatively cheap to produce, include a substantial volume of re-useable content, are premium-priced have a long shelf-life and give “fans” an internet-like deepdive into their favourite subject without the hassle and intrusion of the web. Some of the US bestsellers are said to have been produced (outsourced) for as little as $20k (pre-printing) in just six weeks.

Bookazines also offer strong volume and price growth in a magazine-related market characterised by inexorable decline.

UK research among Tesco bookazine buyers shows that a majority are not even buyers of magazines. But the two worlds may more obviously collide as monthly magazines continue the trend toward reduced frequency. Monthlies are starting to become quarterly or even half-yearly.

But publishers must remember that bookazine readers are enjoying the no-waste content of ‘luxury’ publications exclusively focused on their passion. The boom signals a post-digital desire for content whose presentation and style exudes authority, the very antidote to fake news and trivia. Enthusiast bookazine audiences are paying for specific reflective, reference content not general magazines padded with ‘news’ freely available online. That’s why we might expect this very 21st century media phenomenon to increasingly adopt some kind of frequency, many becoming more like the ‘partwork’ serial publications of earlier times. This emerging trend is already in evidence in the UK with Future’s Curious Minds series of history and science titles – now being published every four weeks.

Bookazine fans could become members, sharing their passion with each other. Such special interest clubs could become great outlets for podcasts, eCommerce, travel and events – and members might even start to connect digitally. Suddenly, we can see how bookazines could become the reader-funded community brands that battered magazine publishers have been dreaming about since the explosion of the web.

Might we, ironically, expect the digital-focused Dotdash Meredith (whose rich portfolio of bookazines are a hardly-mentioned print legacy embarrassment) to experiment with membership initiatives? Or will Hearst create the case study by building a print-digital-events membership community round a serial bookazine, perhaps in its cooking heartland?

Bookazines really can become the successor of magazines for many more people than they have yet reached. But magazine publishers wanting to turn them into a new, mainstream business must decide to do just that. They must remember the digital-era lessons of half-heartedly building a new rival while trying vainly to defend yesterday’s brands and business models against agile low-cost operators. If they ignore the disruption lessons of the recent past, the new world of specialist media will be owned by….specialists.

Welcome back to the glamour of print.