‘Mr. Magazine’ on Why So Many Launches Crash

Samir Husni, perhaps better known as “Mr. Magazine,” has been chronicling the ups and downs of magazine launches for 21 years. The chair of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, Husni is a nationally regarded expert on successful magazine launches who has presented seminars on publishing trends to such companies as Hearst, Hachette Filipacchi, ESPN the Magazine and Meredith. Forbes ASAP magazine dubbed Husni “the country’s leading expert on magazines.” In its unrelenting quest to arm publishers with the information and knowledge to make their magazines profitable, Publishing Executive sought Mr. Magazine’s comments on the keys to a successful magazine launch. Publishing Executive: How many new launches actually make it?Samir Husni: The death rate lately has been 63 percent of new magazines end up folding within the first year.But the thing is, if we stop trying to introduce [new magazines], no matter how many people say there’s a gluttony of new magazines and that the market is overcrowded, where would the market be without the Maxims, the Real Simples, etc.? If you look at the list of the hottest-selling magazines in the marketplace, more than half of them are new magazines from the last 10 years.Change is the only constant in this business.PE: What are some of the major pitfalls you routinely see as contributing to such a high death rate?SH: One thing [publishers] should keep in mind when they are developing or launching a magazine is that their fate is not in their hands. Their fate depends on somebody else, whether it’s an advertiser or a reader, that will agree with them that their idea is the best idea that’s ever happened since sliced bread.It’s amazing how many times we sit down and come up with this marvelous idea that nobody has ever thought about and think that we are the next genius … when in fact we discover later that a lot of people have tried it before and failed. There’s a reason why there is nothing else like this on the marketplace, and 99.9 percent of the time that reason is because somebody else has tried it and failed.Number two is the lack of knowledge of the business model. Unless you have a lot of cash on hand, the cash flow is not going to come dashing your way like with a restaurant when you open and people come to eat and give you their money. In the case of a magazine, if you are a b-to-b, you have to wait until you get money from your advertisers, and that can be three to six months. If you are a consumer magazine, you even have more trouble because you have to wait to get money from both your advertisers and retailers—and that will take another six months. The old premise that “Whatever I sell with the first issue will give me enough money to do the second issue” is one of the most misleading concepts of launching a magazine.PE: What types of mistakes do larger companies—who have the resources to fund their launches—still commit anyway?SH: I think the biggest mistake big companies make is … they forget about their audience. They forget basic common sense. A lot of big companies end up in what I call the “paralysis of analysis” status where they crank the numbers and redo the figures, and redo the numbers and forget about the simple, basic thing: At the end, this magazine has to touch a nerve with their audience.The thing I [look for] whether it’s a big company or a small company is … are we going to find a willing audience who is not only capable of paying the price of the magazine, but also for the price of the advertised goods? You would be surprised how often [publishers] say, “I didn’t think about that. I mean, I thought about the cost of printing and the cost of marketing, the cost of this and the cost of that, the five-year-plan, etc.” [A publisher’s] gut feeling is so important. If Ann Moore had to listen to all the criticisms and all the naysayers about Real Simple, we would not have one of the most successful women’s magazine launches in the last five years. If Felix Dennis had listened to all of the experts and consultants in New York, he would not have launched Maxim, and Maxim would not have reached 2.5 million [in circulation]. Sometimes a gut feeling and common sense are a good business decision.PE: How do you think Shock magazine—which is making so many waves these days—is going to fare?SH: To me, Shock is like “Jackass: The Movie.” I mean, you’ll go one time to watch it. You’ll laugh, you’ll giggle, you’ll throw up. Would you go a second time? I showed the magazine to my son, and he’s 18 and supposedly within the target audience, and his reaction was exactly like when he went to watch “Jackass.” The American public is not like the European public. The magazine is doing very well in France—I’ve seen it. In France, there’s a touch of sex in it, a touch of nudity in it and these [shock] pictures. Here, we are a country at war, a country facing terrorism … you cannot make light, no matter how minute those subjects are, you cannot say, “Look, we have this serious piece about the KKK or about the Iraq war,” and then you flip the page and you see a picture of … It does not work in America. You want to shock me? Just shock me, but don’t try to mix real [news] and this. The National Enquirer and Weekly World News can be glossies compared to this.—MS

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‘Mr. Magazine’ on Why So Many Launches Crash

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