Is Genre Stiffing Its Subscribers?

In the magazine biz, there are two customers of utmost importance: Your subscribers, and your newsstand buyers. Subscribers who pay an annual fee for home delivery help a publisher’s “rate base,” or the guaranteed number of readers they can provide advertisers, as well as deliver a predictable revenue stream. But newsstand buyers, who pay more per issue, tell the publisher how buzzworthy any particular issue is, but don’t guarantee their loyalty every month. So why is Genre stiffing subscribers while feeding the newsstand? Update: The magazine responds.

A Genre subscriber tells Queerty he didn’t receive December’s issue — the one with Broadway hottie Nick Adams — but did see it on newsstands. So he called Genre‘s subscription line, and was told they didn’t even send it out to subscribers. “The woman I talked to said there was some problem with the printer and they were trying to find out from the Genre folks if the magazine would ever ship to subscribers or if we’d be credited.”

And it seems this subscriber is as cynical as we: “But given all the issues with publications these days, I’m wondering if the problem was Genre didn’t pay the printer to print the subscriber issues. Or is the magazine about to fold?”

We’ve got a message out to Genre‘s editor Neal Boulton. We’ll let you know what we hear. But if you subscribe to Genre, tell us: Are your issues missing from the mailbox?

Update: Boulton writes in:

I actually did hear from a few of my www.Bastardlife.com readers that their Genre subscription copies did not arrive. I am in contact with our new printer to figure out why this might have happened–apparently there were a few blocks of zip codes that did not receive their latest issue.

We are working with our subscription team to hand-stamp and mail out a copy of the last issue to any subscriber that calls in with a subscription issue. It might be as simple as re-printing the issues and sending out to the entire mailing list, a costly alternative that is being explored. I would ask any Jossip or Queerty followers who are also Genre subscribers who might have been impacted by this situation to contact me personally at [email protected] and I will forward their request to our fulfillment house.

In addition, we will be extending all subscriber’s subscriptions two months for any inconvenience experienced as a result of not having their issue delivered in a timely manner. We are also taking steps to avoid this kind of thing from happening in the future, and thank our readers for their patience.

To be honest we were caught napping on this one–and fortunately our dedicated readers who look to us each month for a full slate of information on fitness, fashion and fun have let themselves be heard. They have a right to be annoyed and fortunately, we have taken a proactive stance. Judging from our high sell through and success on the newsstand, Genre is very much in demand–so I plan to keep supplying that demand.