Time's
Travails
Calendar
Publishing Clocks Another Year. But Is There Life After
'The Far Side'?
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (AUGUST 2001)
The
Far Side Off-the-Wall Calendar, Gary Larson’s
page-a-day phenomenon that has been the number one selling
boxed calendar for more than a decade, is history. “He
decided that 17 years was enough,” says Michael Nonbello,
VP for Andrews McMeel Publishing. “Larson wanted
to go out on top.” To mark the passing of this 3-million-copy-per-year
publishing manna, which concludes with the 2002 boxed
calendar (the company’s still negotiating for other
formats), Andrews McMeel has drummed up a final Far
Side edition with six different box designs, each sporting
a signature character from the cartoon. Call it the
gilding on the calendar coffin. “By far the biggest
calendar that was ever done — probably that ever will
be done — is retiring this year,” says Mike Brown,
owner of Canadian book and calendar publisher BrownTrout.
“Next year everyone has to figure out how to plug the
holes.”
Indeed, as the season’s new offerings hit the racks
this month, calendar publishers — who comprise an estimated
$300 million industry in the US — could use a few of
Larson’s sure-fire laughs. Sales last year at Calendar
Club, the Barnes & Noble affiliate whose
520 kiosks and mall outlets in the US account for almost
25% of all calendar sales, were “somewhat flat,” and
B&N’s first-quarter results this year chalked up
a $2 million Calendar Club loss. Factor in a dearth
of licensed hits, a stagnant number of shopping malls
in the US, and a highly fractured market teeming with
new competitors — all in addition to the mercenary cycle
of the six-month sales window — and you’ve got a business
in no mood for jokes. “Calendar publishing,” as one
gift-market veteran says, “is a very dangerous business.”
Even as they push ahead with new calendar lines and
products, many publishers are bound to agree. “It’s
a very difficult business at the moment,” says Charles
Miers, publisher at Universe, the Rizzoli-owned
company whose calendars are distributed by Andrews McMeel.
“There’s a lot of competition fragmenting the market.
There isn’t quite the demand for traditional subject
matter that there used to be.” Miers, whose calendar
line has nonetheless grown by about 25% in recent years
to 60 titles, points out that the industry’s tried-and-true
subjects aren’t looking so failsafe anymore. “The days
of Ansel Adams and swimsuits and even Monet are wearing
a little thin,” he says. “I’m not sure that the young
new customer has the same allegiances that the traditional
customer had.”
As license-hopping continues (the powerhouse Anne
Geddes line, for example, has moved to Andrews McMeel
this year), and new formats are launched and abandoned
instantaneously (the ill-fated “calendar cube”), lasting
allegiances of any kind seem few and far between. “Loyalty,”
says Lisa Gulick, national accounts manager for
California-based wholesaler Sunbelt Publications,
“doesn’t seem to be a big part of the calendar business.”
Norwich
Terriers, Anyone?
You
might think the industry is like the kid in Larson’s
cartoon rendering of “Midvale School for the Gifted,”
who mightily pushes against the door that says “pull.”
But some of the biggest retail players are banking on
calendars, including B&N, which last year spent
$11 million to take a controlling interest in Calendar
Club, and was rewarded with sales of $66.3 million and
an operating profit of $1.4 million for the unit. “We
have a distinctly seasonal product that we’re selling
at the biggest season of the year,” says John Lash,
Calendar Club’s Marketing and Design Director, who adds
that Larson or not, some calendars simply will not die.
“The standby is animals, dogs particularly,” he says.
Also tireless sellers are James Dean, Elvis, Marilyn
Monroe, and the Beatles, known in the trade as “dead
celebrities” who sell well year after year. In fact,
Lash says about half of his top ten has remained the
same as it was five years ago. Over the long term, such
constancy has been good for business. The Austin-based
company began with 63 stores in 1993, and now counts
520 locations in the US, plus 250 stores ranging across
Australia, Hong Kong, and the UK. Each one carries 2,500
calendar titles, with an average price of around $11.
Demographic research has shown that 60% of the company’s
customers head to the mall with Calendar Club as their
primary destination, and in 1999 the top store did almost
$500,000 in sales.
Those aren’t bad numbers, considering that such opportunistic
retailers (including the Arizona-based calendar chain
The Date Place) are run by independent contractors,
and generally colonize vacant mall space from September
through January. The down side is that growth is slowing.
With the country’s 1,000 major malls saturated, B&N
and Borders (which operates its own Day by
Day calendar stores) have been reduced to fighting
trench warfare and have battled themselves to a stalemate.
At press time the only advertised openings for Calendar
Club were in Eden Prairie, Minnesota and Des Peres,
Missouri, slim pickings indeed.
Moreover, those registers won’t be ringing without the
requisite pop-culture sizzle. “Nothing’s hot this year,”
Brown of BrownTrout says. “We went to the Licensing
Show a month ago, and they were trying to sell the rights
to Chiquita Banana.” Brown, whose Ontario, Canada–based
company expects to pump out 11 million units of more
than 700 titles this year, falls back on dogs: specifically,
their calendars for each of 102 dog breeds and varieties
(Black Pugs, White German Shepherds, Norwich Terriers,
and Salukis are new this year). It certainly takes the
edge off such vagaries as the Star Wars debacle (“the
biggest bomb in the calendar business since I’ve been
in it,” says Brown), and the “very disappointing” Harry
Potter showing. BrownTrout’s hottest title at the
moment is actually The New Girls of Maxim. As
further insulation, however, Brown has been working
on extending the sales life of calendars, shipping to
the major chains in April. He also opened his own printing
plant, Chess Press, in 1998. Run out of BrownTrout’s
warehouse in Vacaville, California, the press takes
care of about half of BrownTrout’s calendar printing
(the remainder is handled in the Far East). “It’s a
godsend to have our own printing in our backyard this
time of year,” he says, adding that the press has enabled
just-in-time printing, “which is one of our great competitive
advantages.”
Sitting
on the Sidelines
Those
advantages are ever more precious in a field crowded
with the likes of At-A-Glance, and calendar publisher
Date Works, a unit of American Greetings.
Not to mention Workman, which invented (or at
least trademarked) the boxed, “Page-A-Day” concept in
the first place. Workman advertises its 86 calendar
titles on the 2002 list as “our leanest but most guaranteed-to-be-successful
list in years.” Yet as Brown points out, the field is
largely bereft, for better or worse, of book publishers.
“The major publishers have watched the whole business
grow exponentially, and they’ve been sitting on the
sidelines,” he says. “The book publishers really missed
it.” Mostly, they seem to have signed deals with Andrews
McMeel, as did Simon & Schuster two years
ago, when it launched a joint venture designating Andrews
McMeel as the house’s calendar publisher. A similar
deal was struck with Hyperion in 1998, and a
licensing arrangement with Penguin Putnam allows
Andrews McMeel to base calendars on book titles. Other
publishers, such as HarperCollins, make use of
their handy corporate siblings. Tom Dupree, marketing
director of HarperEntertainment, says his unit
publishes a handful of tie-in calendars for properties
owned by sister company Twentieth Century Fox,
including Simpsons and The X-Files, plus
some Tolkien products. But all the calendars are produced
by outside packagers, and though “we may continue to
do more years of our current titles,” Dupree says, “I
don’t expect us to have more titles than we now have
on the list.”
Not all publishers are so wary. Mike Hejny, VP
of Sales and Marketing for Motorbooks International,
says the Minnesota-based company will publish about
20 calendars this fall and distribute 15 others, all
of them in core areas of transportation and military
subjects. “Our books have had a stellar reputation over
the years among the enthusiasts,” Hejny says. “That
has allowed us to move into the calendar business and
be successful.” He says retailers such as Calendar Club
turn to Motorbooks to fill in the gaps when they’re
desperately seeking, say, those luscious spreads of
American Farm Tractors. Most calendars are sold
nonreturnable, and Hejny remains upbeat on expanding
the line. “It’s a terrific business to be in,” he says,
“and we’ll probably be exploring additional calendar
opportunities going forward.”
You may chuckle at farm tractors (or Belgian sheep dogs,
for that matter) but such calendars placed in the haunts
of enthusiasts are the golden key to sell-through, says
Sunbelt’s Gulick. Though attacking specialty markets
is more work, greater benefits accrue from the transaction.
“If you put a ski calendar into B&N, they might
order 6,” she says. “But a sporting goods store might
order 12 or 24.” Those looking for other nuggets of
calendar wisdom will want to know that wall calendars
outsell any other format three to one. And a safe bet
is always Ricky Martin, who was a surprise hit
last year when another title was cancelled at the last
minute and Gulick put the young crooner back in rotation.
Don’t touch the massively competitive market for dogs,
however, and stay away from the endless cavalcades of
horses and wolves. The hot tip of the day for publishers
seeking a wide-open niche? Just one word, Gulick says:
“Skateboarding.”
©2001
Publishing Trends
