Jamie is absolutely swamped. It’s always the busiest time of the year for subscription processing but this year we’ve had the perfect storm with the state of Royal Mail. There is currently no one working or caring harder in the office right now than Jamie is and he is coping amazingly well. No one is sitting back and rubbing their hands thinking how lovely it is to have any subscribers £3.12 when they don’t yet have the mag. Everything we can do we are doing. Royal Mail are amazingly slow at providing anyone in the publishing industry, from the little guys like us right up to the huge corporate magazine publishing houses of London, with any kind of explanation or expectation. All subscribers mags were posted in the first week of December and currently the vast majority have been delivered. We believe the remaining delayed copies are small in number and that they will arrive by the end of this week. We are receiving messages by email, as well as on this site and even twitter that mags are still arriving with subscribers.
Typically, we have a contingency of an extra 50 copies of the mag set aside for replacements that have been lost in the post. We’ve never needed more than 30. We have almost 4500 print subscribers so we think that’s not a bad rate of loss for each issue. We expect we will need more than that on this occasion and so we are currently arranging for spare copies to be pulled back out of the newstrade distribution channels like WHSmiths and Tesco in order that we will have enough to be able to make sure that every subscriber gets a copy. Taking copies back out of highstreet distribution will cost us considerably but that’s not any subscribers concern as we will make sure that everyone gets a copy if their copy is lost. And that’s the main issue at the moment. When do we declare copies as lost? Copies are still being delivered all around the country today. RM are no help right now and have given no one any information as to the expectation that the backlog will be cleared.
As for RM compensating us for failing to deliver your mags within the 5 days that they set for a Presstream delivery, well that all depends on the final assessment of their performance by an audit at the end of the year. If it is shown that over the period of the year ending 31st December 2010 that they didn’t average a 97% delivery rate within 5 days then they will have to pay ALL Presstream account holders 5% of their total spend with RM for every percentage point under their target. RM don’t compensate on an individual publisher basis and so we will have to wait, like every other publisher, for the final audit of RM’s performance over the entire year. That, we can expect to wait months for and since we are talking about mags only posted in a very narrow window at the start of December of maybe a few days, how all this affects an average that is calculated over a whole year I don’t know. Sadly I’m not that optimistic that it will make much of a difference to the stats at all.
But after all that, let me sum up where we are at right now and what we are planning to do. We are still waiting for deliveries of issue 62 to stop. Deliveries are still happening every day but we think we are very close to the point where we will be able to draw a line in the sand and start posting out replacements. In preparation we are calling back newstrade copies. If you have emailed or called to report your copy has not arrived then you will be contacted by Jamie shortly to first confirm whether or not your copy has arrived and then to send you a replacement if it hasn’t.
Finally, Lazlo.. We all appreciate your frustration.. in fact we share it with you. But to call us thieves is hugely insulting and I don;t appreciate that at all. We, more than any other magazine (ALL magazines in the UK have been hit with this issue) have kept a very public update running as to the issues we are dealing with. There is uptodate information on this website, on the automatic email responses to the subs@singletrackworld.com address and also on the direct subs phone line. Jamie has been fielding calls and emails constantly since well before Christmas and he has done his absolute best to make sure that everyone gets this information. If you wish to cancel your subscription then Jamie will sort that out for you in the same professional and courteous way he has dealt with every aspect of this crisis that was fundamentally not of our own making.
Has anyone with a missing sub from any other cycling magazine had a personal or public response from both the Editor and the Publisher after midnight?
