
Children's magazines report their best sales between late spring and autumn half term. This is, logically, to do with children having more time on their hands, time at airports and on holiday, time with adults to read and to complete the activities they find in magazines. Egmont's titles appeal to boys and girls aged 3-12 and include Mattel, Disney and Hit titles, as well as their own, called Toxic and Go Girl.
A number of Egmont's magazines recently increased their frequency from monthly to three-weekly and now fortnightly. Other publishers have followed suit. It makes commercial sense, providing retailers with something new, more often. Is the era of weekly comics in sight? It would be an ironic twist; Egmont in the UK once owned famous weekly comics like Roy of the Rovers and 2000AD. Colin describes his challenge in licensed magazines as, 'taking properties
Another key development is in the nature of the content. Magazines have always been a combination of activity and story telling. But the balance is shifting in favour of activity. 'I'm interested in developing the way you tell stories with pictures,' Colin says. 'Every child goes through the steps from pictures only to words and pictures and then only words, and we have to think about how this is developing.' A growing part of Egmont's business is magazine titles based on film properties, something that echoes the wider retail warmth towards film properties. Incredibles is its first dedicated film magazine. 'Retailers like it and we have to view it as a long-standing title, with the appropriate efforts going into launching and maintaining it, at the same time acknowledging it might naturally have a limited life span,' says Colin.
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