When F+W Publications mines an enthusiast vein, it goes deep. No retailable nugget of esoterica, it seems, is too recondite for the Cincinnati-headquartered magazine, book, and book club empire, which publishes such über-niche offerings as Aggressive Whitetail Hunting and Raw Edge Appliqué. It operates Camp Memory Makers, the weekend scrapbooking retreat, and The Fantasy Football Trade Conference (er, don’t ask). Then there’s the monthly Postcard Collector magazine. “We have a lot of crafts titles the average New Yorker does not believe exist,” F+W Chairman William F. Reilly told Folio last month, underscoring the point that while more and more publishers are hungrily eyeing the lucrative enthusiast market, “big publishers are not comfortable with it.”
Indeed, it may take a certain aplomb to publish everything from Beaded Adornment to Big-Bore Handguns, but F+W is doing just that, aiming to convert pockets of rabid enthusiasts into ferociously loyal readers by using its manifold publications, book clubs, websites, and trade shows to “surround the customer with information,” as corporate spokesperson Stacie Berger puts it. Having now aggregated how-to and hobbyist properties with estimated total revenues of $275 million, the company has crossed the fateful threshold from financial buyer to strategic player, with President and CEO Stephen J. Kent said to be driving toward a goal of $500 million in sales by 2008. To get there, late last year the company hired former Primedia development exec Andrew Levy, who joins Reilly in F+W’s New York office in the new position of SVP, Corporate Development. The struggling Primedia, where Reilly served as Founder and CEO before his ouster from the company in 1999, is of course a happy hunting ground for the niche-focused titles F+W has squarely in its sights.
No stranger himself to the trade book world, Reilly was President of Macmillan in the 1980s, and following his Primedia tenure launched Aurelian Communications in 2001 to scout for publishing and media targets. In partnership with Providence Equity Partners, Aurelian acquired F+W in 2002 for a reported $130 million. “Bill’s name, alone, gives them a lot of cachet,” says one industry veteran, and Reilly’s clout has at least added momentum to what the company calls “a strategically focused acquisition program,” which along with organic growth has helped F+W quadruple both revenue and profitability since 1999. All told, the company publishes 600 new book titles per year, with an active backlist of about 3,000.
The paradigm began to shift five years ago, “when we started this effort to look at the company differently — as a platform company,” according to Budge Wallis, President of F+W’s book division. First came the purchase of UK-based David & Charles Group, appealing to F+W because of its enthusiast bent and its nine book clubs. David & Charles distributes the parent company’s lines in the UK and Europe (F+W reciprocates for North America), while the two companies co-publish 15-20 titles per year. The next big buy was Denver-based scrapbooking publisher Memory Makers in 2001 (see article, p. 1), but things really got cooking the following year, when in a $120 million deal F+W snared Iola, Wisconsin–based Krause Publications, a bastion of hobbyist and collectible tomes such as An Illustrated Guide to Gas Pumps and Legendary Deer Camps. Krause had itself been scooping up small enthusiast shops such as gun and knife specialist DBI Books and Books Americana, while also operating the hobbyist portal Collect.com. The unit’s subject areas don’t entirely match F+W’s book clubs, but Wallis isn’t ruling out mining the new categories for clubs down the line.
Finally, last July the company bought Boston-based Adams Media for a reported $35 million, adding 140 titles per year to F+W’s portfolio, and 700 backlist titles, including the two-million-copy selling Everything series. Wallis describes Adams as a “value publishing” operation working more in the general interest arena, but adds, “We are looking for ways in which we can repurpose some of the editorial material that we have in our other companies to meet the Adams model.” Unlike other growth-oriented publishing outfits, F+W manages its new units on what Reilly has called “a highly decentralized basis,” with properties revolving around authoritative, gung-ho editors who typically are not relocated to the mother ship, which bolsters employee retention and keeps editorial expertise in the fold.
Cross-Selling the Clubs
Among the sprawling list of conferences, seminars, trade shows, and other F+W offerings, book clubs have become a centerpiece of the company’s “affinity marketing” strategy — that is, selling the same customers more products. Wallis says the majority of cross-selling occurs when magazine members join one of F+W’s six US book clubs, which include the 60,000-member North Light Book Club (fine art and crafts) and the fast-growing WoodWorker’s Book Club, with 40,000 members. Meanwhile, the company’s Writer’s Digest club has 30,000 members, although the writing products have faced tough competition, and a revamped Writer’s Digest debuts this month. Writer’s Market Online is the big growth engine at the moment, according to Wallis, offering a database of writing markets for $29.99 per year. The clubs, of course, also represent a prime opportunity for the company to connect with its most die-hard consumer base via focus groups, surveys, and “cross-category matching.” “We can see what they like and identify any change in trends faster than just tracking sales through traditional retail channels,” says Becki Meyer, Executive VP, Sales & Marketing for F+W. Affinity marketing can breed hits on the magazine side as well: the group created a one-shot magazine with author Donna Dewberry called Donna Dewberry’s One-Day Decorating; now the magazine is published bi-monthly and has a 100,000-copy distribution.
Meanwhile, the bottom line is getting a boost from F+W’s distribution clients, which include International Artist, HBI, Design Books International, and by far the largest client, Rockport Publishers, which is having its “best year ever” from a strong graphic design category and, yes, the booming market for origami books. “Crafts are up dramatically since September 11th,” says Dalyn Miller, Director of Marketing and PR for Rockport, RotoVision, and Fair Winds Press, who also points to mind-body-spirit hits on the Fair Winds list, including Dana Carpender’s 500 Low-Carb Recipes (it’s ranked #28 at Amazon). Chalk it up to those rabid enthusiasts, the Atkinites. As Rockport owner Quarto noted in a report, Fair Winds “had almost $2 million of profitable sales in its first full year, and this has encouraged us to increase the resources for this imprint.”
