Lauren Holleyoake is publisher of three of Bauer UK’s most iconic magazines. She is also the lead for the company’s bookazine business, launching titles like Your Definitive Guide to the Masters from Today’s Golfer. That might seem like a mismatch, but as she explains it’s all about ideas that generate revenue.
Bauer Media UK, part of the family-owned Bauer Media Group, is the country’s biggest selling magazine publisher. Its portfolio includes TV Choice, Take A Break and Heat in the weekly market as well as the biweekly Grazia and entertainment monthlies Empire and Mojo.
Lauren Holleyoake is the publisher for Grazia, Empire and Mojo and the lead for the company’s growing bookazine business. On this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast I expressed surprise that as well as her role as publisher of some of the UK’s leading glossies she is also responsible for bookazines about golf, rail transport and classic cars.
To make sense of it, Holleyoake says you need to step back and think about what the publisher role entails. In other industries, she says she would likely be called general manager or MD, running P&L, driving sales and making sure costs are managed efficiently. Another important responsibility is coming up with revenue generating ideas: “Bookazines are a revenue generating idea.”
The bookazine market is a highlight in a magazine market that has elsewhere seen consistent declines, Bookazines are worth $500mn annually, according to a 2024 Flashes & Flames examination of the sector. Seeing the opportunity, Holleyoake says: “Other publishers are making good money in this market. I suppose I got the gig, because my view was, ‘why are we not in the market?’ ”
Premium print
February’s Your Definitive Guide to the Masters is a 132-page bookazine from leading UK golf magazine Today’s Golfer. Priced at £9.99 the title was billed as an ‘essential collectible’ for fans of the Masters Tournament, held in April and won this year by Rory McIlroy.
While a golf bookazine might seem very far away from the world of fashion, music and movies, there are clear parallels in the premium-print strategy that Bauer is developing with titles like its Master’s guide.
Holleyoake’s publishing brands operate ‘way beyond their print heritage’, but print is still a big revenue driver and collectible print plays its part. She spotlights the Mojo Collectors series, a sub-brand of music monthly Mojo which she describes as a ‘beautiful, big, premium product’.
The series features a high cover price – £15+ – with issues providing a deep dive into the careers of legendary artists. Holleyoake explains that they are designed to super-serve narrow verticals within the broader Mojo audience.
“We know that we’re not going to sell as many as Mojo does, but that’s fine, because it’s doing a different job. We have the same thing with Grazia… we’re probably in the fourth year of Grazia Casa, the Grazia take on interiors. So I guess bookazines massively overlap with my area.”
From process to profit
Holleyoake admits she is not an expert in a lot of the subjects Bauer would publish bookazines in, “but I do know the business. I’ve worked here for a long time. I know who we need to engage with, and I like to think I’m good at making things happen, so I guess they’re the reasons it’s ended up at my door.”
Bookazines are not new to Bauer. Holleyoake says they have been published ‘in pockets’ by individual brands for many years, but without a central strategy. “When you do one within your own portfolio, it might make a marginal profit. Once you do it as a central thing, the costs are more efficient… you have a better process and you turn more of them out. Suddenly the P&L on all those titles across the year, the numbers look pretty attractive.”
Part of making the numbers work on bookazines is being bold on pricing. Holleyoake notes that lower-priced weeklies like TV Choice are big earners for Bauer in the UK. “A big, big chunk of our money comes from lower cover prices,” she says. However, the bookazine market can support premium prices. “We’re being much, much more bullish with price than perhaps we were in the past. It’s about being brave enough to push that more.”
With improved processes and dedicated resources Holleyoake says she is optimistic that Bauer can do more in the bookazine space. “We’ve got central people working on it now. That certainly makes the whole thing better. Where we would have done five across different titles, quite disparately, we can do 20 in a very organised fashion.”
Bauer is 12-18 months into its streamlined bookazine strategy and Holleyoake sees an appetite for getting ‘stuff out there’ to see how it performs. “The teams are pitching some really interesting, lovely ideas. We’re deciding what to publish based on market data from our distributor Frontline. But there is an element of following people’s instincts, intuitions, passions, ideas.”
Go deeper with Flashes & Flames: Will bookazines replace magazines?
“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.”
Brilliant bookazines
What’s the secret to producing a brilliant bookazine?
“It’s about super-serving a segment of your audience with something really deep, done really beautifully with premium production values.”
Part of that is being able to engage a deeply knowledgeable niche audience: “We talk about bookazines super-serving fandoms or dedicated hobbyists. The insight and the depth of knowledge, the way you talk about [the topic] is going to be important.”
However, it’s also about look and feel, presenting a product that people really want to own. She says there is a broad consensus that we all spend too much time on our screens and that spending time with physical media is a good thing. “The better that medium feels when you make time for it the more likely people will come back to it.”
For Holleyoake that means bookazines need to be ‘really beautiful’ from the design and the visuals to the paper stock. Maybe that’s one other reason why she is Bauer’s bookazine lead: “My titles are in that space, and I’ve always valued that. I think that’s where we’ll cut through, and I think that’s what makes us different.”
Listen to the full episode above, or search ‘The Publisher Podcast’ from MediaVoices wherever you find podcasts.
Will bookazines replace magazines?
