Gardening magazines - how many copies do they sell?

Following my recent post about British garden magazines and their websites, I thought I’d take a look at the sales of the magazines themselves. Sales of most British garden magazines are in more or less steady decline.  Competition from the plethora of TV programs, expanded gardening coverage in national newspapers and free online information and advice – well, people feel they just don’t need gardening magazines as much as they used to.

So weekly Garden News is down over 10% year on year and monthly Garden Answers is down almost 20% - but now has an excellent new editor, Geoff Stebbings. Garden News, and its weekly competitor Amateur Gardening, are now down to about one third of the sales they showed in their heyday but there are successes.

BBC Gardeners World is up a little, about 1%, but its connection with the weekly TV how is an enormous help – as is its determination, from its launch, to sign up subscriptions. The excellent Gardens Illustrated is up 18%, helped by some more concentrated management effort. The Garden, the membership magazine from the Royal Horticultural Society still leads the way selling more than 351,000 copies a month.

But change is in the air. Garden Answers has an excellent new editor. Though you would never know from its owner’s corporate website where no editor is listed (and they’re a year out of date with the Garden News editor too).

New Garden Answers editor Geoff Stebbings is surprisingly unusual amongst editors of gardening magazines - he’s a trained botanist and horticulturalist! He has a long career of writing about plants and gardens, as a book author, magazine contributor and as a magazine staffer. The other model is for the editor to be a journalist (the Garden News editor was previously a distinguished editor of Angling Times) and for horticulturalists to be part of the editor’s team. This can work very well. But it’s good to see a top plantsman and top writer in the top job. I wish him well – it could be a bumpy ride.

Here are the audited circulation figures for the British gardening magazines for January to June 2007. Some of the smaller magazines do not have their circulations audited.

You can subscribe to British gardening magazines here and here.

Weeklies
Amateur Gardening - 48,362
Garden News - 44,047

Monthlies
BBC Gardeners World -303,448
English Garden (UK edition) - 36,902
Garden Answers - 36,549
Gardens Illustrated - 27,090
Gardens Monthly - 26,017
The Garden - 351,487

Bi-monthly
English Garden (US edition) - 30,783

Comments

[max]

No American garden magazine is worth reading, with the exception of Pacific Horticulture for the west coast; the British magazines are too expensive here. I take no pleasure in saying this, but I fear that the internet's "long tail" is a better medium for the needs of serious gardeners.

[Graham Rice]

It's true... UK garden magazines are expensive here in the US - partly because of the exchange rate. However, Gardens Illustrated and English Garden now have special US issues (not just copies of the UK issues flown over at great expense) and these are more affordable. It's also worth noting that US subscriptions to US garden magazines are significantly cheaper than UK subscriptions to UK magazines - especially when you look for discounts. This is partly because in Britain most magazines are delivered with the daily newspaper by a local store; generally, subscriptions are less popular.

I agree, Pacific Horticulture is excellent for enthusiastic westerners.

[Philip Voice]

Graham - You may be interested to note that I have been contacted by three editors in the last two months who are unwilling/unable to enter into the debate about their publications and dwindling sales.

I suspect that there are more casualties to come in the sector and somewhere along the line a Phoenix will rise from the ashes.

I can even see a possibility of several titles merging into one bound magazine but remaining independent in content and style.

Maybe that is a long way off but with instant answers available from millions and millions of sources worldwide and instantly up datable and extremely fluid the internet will surely win OMO.

[jodi]

Very interesting post, Graham. I wonder what the statistics would be for the two Canadian 'garden' publications: Gardening Life and Canadian Gardening. The latter won an award for best designed in Canada recently, but I find them both not nearly as good as they were a few years ago.
They tend to be heavy on pretty pictures and profiles of gardeners in The Centre of the Universe (Ontario) and their articles are shorter and less meaty (planty?) than they used to be. Whether they are playing into the idea that gardeners aren't reading like we used to and are capable of absorbing only soundbites and newsclips, I don't know--but I'm relying more and more on quality content in blogs and websites rather than magazines. Whether this is a trackable trend, I don't know, but people want more gardening information, not less, especially as new species/cultivars/varieties etc keep cropping up...I am constantly being emailed by readers wanting to know, "will you write about....?"

We rarely see the British magazines locally, unless I go to Halifax (I'm in Nova Scotia, Canada) but I have plenty of books--including several of yours, (Ultimate book of small gardens and All in One Garden, which I love for being practical and 'not-talking-down' to readers/gardeners. I've recommended both in garden book omnibus reviews (books section of provincial paper can't run a lot of individual garden books but editor is very good to me and lets me do roundups regularly.
Sorry, a bit of a rambling comment. Time for coffee!