It’s probably superfluous to even mention this, given recent success stories like Porter and Monocle and marketers’ continue love of print. But let’s reiterate, folks: Print is not dead.
So says Imagine Publishing exec Damian Butt in an interview with What’s New In Publishing. As one of the UK’s fastest growing companies in both 2013 and 2014, Imagine Publishing is a specialist publisher with 90% of its revenue from print sales.
According to Butt, the market has changed, and those who change with it are doing well.
“Many people forget just how strong print publishing continues to be. The decline in print publishing has seen many of our rivals struggle or retrench, whereas for IP the decline has been largely mitigated by our growth in the bookazine format and the success of our new launches & acquisitions,” says Butt. “Last year’s premium copy sales accounted for the majority of our revenue.”
Those Bookazines are big business for the publisher in a world that is hungry for trustworthy and reliable knowledge content.
“Tapping into the consumer trend for knowledge has also been advantageous to IP’s global expansion. In a market where the consumer’s thirst for knowledge continues to trend, our educational titles are proving increasingly popular with affluent parents,” Butt notes.
“The parents who are eager to educate both themselves and their children with trusted titles that provide expertly written, well researched, accurate information presented in a way that’s accessible, fun and safe for their children.
“We’ve noticed a growing parental concern that the Internet is becoming increasingly unsafe for children and unreliable as a research tool. Our knowledge titles deliver information in a way that’s entertaining, trustworthy and safe. This trend has meant our knowledge titles sell in 54 countries across the world,” he continues.
From fashion to lifestyle to education, print continues to provide what the customers want. We’ll continue to bring you good news about print, and hopefully the whole “print is dead” thing will just stop.
March 17, 2015, 9:30 am
David, I have contributed to one of Imagine Publishing’s titles, Total 911 and signed their standard contributor agreement for my work. What I failed to notice was a clause that said after paying me for my initial submission, that they could reuse my work on any platform, including bookazines, without any further compensation.
Imagine Publishing republished my work in one of their bookazines on the Porsche 911 and when I contacted the editor about compensation, he referred me back to the clause in the contract I signed. I asked him for two copies of the $19.95 bookazine, one for my files, the other for the owner of the car I profiled, and thus far my request has gone unfulfilled for almost a year.
Mr.Butt says in the article you cite, “Many people forget just how strong print publishing continues to be. The decline in print publishing has seen many of our rivals struggle or retrench, whereas for IP the decline has been largely mitigated by our growth in the bookazine format and the success of our new launches & acquisitions,” says Butt. “Last year’s premium copy sales accounted for the majority of our revenue.”
Of course these titles are profitable, especially when you don’t pay a fair rate for the content, or in this case, nothing at all.
If content creators don’t stand up for our rights and be treated fairly and paid for our work — when was the last time you met a freelance writer, photographer or artist who was doing more than making ends meet? — then we deserve to be treated as second-class citizens. The hypocrisy of publishers like Mr. Butt and Imagine Publishing needs to be called out. Does he think that the buyers of his bookazines and premium publications would buy them if they knew that contributors received nothing for their work?