Publishing Trends

Calendar Publishing Clocks Another Year. But Is There Life After ‘The Far Side’?

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.”