Monday, June 5, 2023
“We really believe that in the end you need to give your customers a choice of how they want to find you. And many of them want print. Our customers want the print product and we offer them four different versions of that.”
“As it gets harder and harder, we have to understand that we’re in this together. And that each of us has a responsibility of making sure we deliver the products to our readers. When we make it accessible to our readers, when we make it plain to them why magazines are important, I think the readers respond really well.”
The Old Farmer’s Almanac has been around for 232 years. It has been present in most of our lives forever. We have come to depend on it and to look for it every year. And it’s still as relevant and significant as it was when it first began.
Sherin Pierce is publisher of the magazine and has been for over 25 years. According to the magazine’s website Sherin leads a team responsible for the long-term strategic planning of the Almanac brand, including new product development, oversight of editorial, and management of the book’s finances and ancillary businesses. She also oversees the Almanac’s robust promotional and marketing activities, including the Almanac’s expansive social media channels.
In Mr. Magazine’s mind, she puts the magazine out there and meets people where they are, be that on digital or in print, or any other way they want to find it. Something she believes in strongly.
So please enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Sherin Pierce, vice president and publisher, The Old Farmer’s Almanac.
But first the sound bites:
On how The Old Farmer’s Almanac has survived almost two and a half centuries: I like to say how it’s thrived all these years is simply because I think when the Almanac started, it started with a very clear and simple premise: to always be useful with a pleasant degree of humor.
On how important it is for a magazine publisher to stay true to the magazine’s concept and not change with the wind: I think being authentic, being real, and understanding what your mission is and what people expect from you year after year, is absolutely the North Star for us. There are times, especially when people are faced with a pandemic such as COVID or faced with recession or inflation, they turn to things that are simpler and things that will help them in their daily lives.
On the competitors of The Old Farmer’s Almanac: In every publication we do with the name The Old Farmer’s Almanac, we pay so much attention and care to what we are putting out there for our readers. They get the experience of the Almanac in various forms, through calendars, through our gardening books, they get that whole experience, which is what our competitors haven’t been able to do.
On the circulation of The Old Farmer’s Almanac: We distribute 2.5 million copies. We have four different editions: a mass market edition, newsstand edition and two bookstore editions, with a hardcover as well. And why we’ve done this is because we want to make sure that all the different editions serve our multiple channels of distribution.
On having a minute number of editors over the last 232 years: We’ve had 13 editors and our 13th editor is retiring after close to 23 years. We’ve just hired the 14th editor in our Almanac’s history. It really builds the consistency of the product and the voice. People have time to hone what the message should be. We don’t have a revolving door. But to that point, there’s been 13 editors, but 23 publishers. The publishers always get fired. (Laughs)
On whether her job as publisher has been a walk in a rose garden: Oh no, not at all. It’s a walk in the field; it’s a walk in the woods; it’s a walk in deer-filled gardens and vegetable gardens, in shrubs and fruit trees. I think we would have been remiss if years ago we had said we’re going to just stick to print and not bother with the other mediums. But the group publisher in 1996 said we had to go on the Internet.
On some of the major challenges they’ve had: One of the biggest challenges we’ve had has been in retail. In one part of our retail presence we have our bookstore edition, which has been doing tremendously well, both in stores and on Amazon. We have our own direct distribution to Tractor Supply and to Ace and to the nontraditional bookstore accounts. Again the Almanac, being the type of product that can transfer different types of retail has done very well there.
On whether The Old Farmer’s Almanac is mostly older readers: No, it’s been surprising what readers have come to us for. I think the younger generation, many folks grew up without getting advice on most basic things in life. Look up at the sky, look at the planets. what are the signs of nature? How do you start a little garden? How do you do a container garden?
On 250,000 of the Veggie Garden Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook going into print: Yes, and for a gardening book that’s a lot. We printed six times. It’s a gardening book, but it came out at the time when COVID stuck in people at home, and they wanted something.
On anything she’d like to add: I think the Almanac is always a surprise. And when people read it, they always say they grew up with it, they always saw it in their grandparents house, or on the farm of a relative or something. And I always urge people to pick it up again for the first time. Remember. McCall’s ad campaign, read it again for the first time, it’s the same thing.
On what keeps her up at night: I think what keeps me up is that I would hope our distribution channels realize that it’s really a partnership. And that all of us have a responsibility of making sure that our publications reach our audience.
And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Sherin Pierce, vice president and publisher, The Old Farmer’s Almanac.
Samir Husni: Recently you were featured on Jeopardy and they asked about the little
yellow magazine that has a punch hole in the corner. Your magazine, The Old Farmer’s Almanac is almost two and a half centuries old. Tell me what’s going on; how does it survive all of these years?
Sherin Pierce: Well, I like to say how it’s thrived all these years is simply because I think when the Almanac started, it started with a very clear and simple premise: to always be useful with a pleasant degree of humor.
So it started with that premise, to always be useful with a pleasant degree of humor. And I think the one thing that we’ve always tried to deliver ever since the first publication, the first issue in 1792 is to give people the information they need for their daily lives, which was very simple when it first started. The nation was an agrarian nation, and so it talked about the seasons, the calendar, the heavens, any other information that was pertinent, the holidays, the coach roots, everything that was important to people at that time.
And that’s what the Almanac has continued to do through the centuries, 232 years of continuous publication. It has always looked to see what do people need within the purview of what the almanac provides. We’re very clear about what we provide to our readers. We don’t stray in different directions, we talk about astronomy, the weather, gardening and other things such as food, home remedies, things that are useful to people’s lives.
We talk about the sunrise and the sunset; how to read the planets, things that yes, are available in many other mediums or in many other ways, but we put them together; we curate them; we fact check; we make sure that we fulfill what our readers expect from us year after year and also give them a little more. The expectations and the surprises are what keep the Almanac front and center and beloved because it fulfills its mission, hopefully, every single year.
Samir Husni: With all the changes that are taking place in society, somehow the Old Farmer’s Almanac has stayed true to its focus. It did not cover COVID: it did not cover the pandemic at all; it didn’t cover any civil war either. So tell me how important is it for a magazine publisher to stay true to the concept and not change with the wind?
Sherin Pierce: I think being authentic, being real, and understanding what your mission is and what people expect from you year after year, is absolutely the North Star for us. There are times, especially when people are faced with a pandemic such as COVID or faced with recession or inflation, they turn to things that are simpler and things that will help them in their daily lives.
Gardening was huge during COVID. And for us, people came to the magazine wanting to know how to garden. They wanted the most basic advice about how to grow vegetables; how to understand what they should do to fulfill this urge and need to garden and to understand that.
I think authenticity, building your credibility, and building people’s trust is very important, because that’s how they come back to you year after year in print, and in any way they can access the Almanac. They come back to you because you are curating the best advice and giving that to people. Trust and credibility you have to earn, it’s not something you demand, you earn it.
Samir Husni: Through the years you’ve had so many competitors, but you’ve managed to grow and grow. How big is this small publication?
Sherin Pierce: Well, first of all, the Old Farmer’s Almanac is our trademark name, as opposed to Farmer’s Almanac, which is a generic term for any farmer’s almanac. And there have been plenty of people who, when you’re the number one in the field, you have a lot of imitators.
And they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but only if the imitators are good.
I think people have been distracted and picked up and imitated. Again, it goes back to the quality of the information. The care and the quality of what we are gathering together for our readers is really important. And once you see what ours is, as opposed to what the other farmer’s almanacs have been trying to offer, I think people realize that you can’t rest on your laurels and say, well, I’m the oldest, therefore, I’m the best. The competition is fierce and you have to prove it year after year. You go back every single year and prove it.
And not just the Almanac itself. In every publication we do with the name The Old Farmer’s Almanac, we pay so much attention and care to what we are putting out there for our readers. They get the experience of the Almanac in various forms, through calendars, through our gardening books, they get that whole experience, which is what our competitors haven’t been able to do.
So as long as we’re able to keep the Mother publication, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, really vibrant and robust, useful and forward-looking, we’re good. We want backward-looking only with respect to the tradition. We want to be in the present and in the future, forward-looking because that’s how we want to take our readers with us to give them the best advice along this journey. Forward.
Samir Husni: And in a day and age where we are seeing circulations shrinking. what’s the circulation of The Old Farmer’s Almanac?
Sherin Pierce: We distribute 2.5 million copies. We have four different editions: a mass market edition, newsstand edition and two bookstore editions, with a hardcover as well. And why we’ve done this is because we want to make sure that all the different editions serve our multiple channels of distribution.
We also want to make sure that it’s not just retail distribution that we have all our focus on. We have subscription programs as well with the hardcover edition and reprints of the 100 and 200th anniversary edition. As a publication that has an archive that you can pull on and draw on, you can offer these special type of programs within The Old Farmer’s Almanac. We also have the Almanacs in a gardening club and an almanac club. So we’ve tried to find different ways of producing the Almanac. In total, with all the different editions, we’re 2.5 million copies.
Samir Husni: I think one of the reasons for your success and longevity is that consistency in the mission and in the concept. You don’t have a revolving door for editors. You don’t change editors every month. For the last 232 years, you have had twelve editors?
Sherin Pierce: We’ve had 13 editors and our 13th editor is retiring after close to 23 years. We’ve just hired the 14th editor in our Almanac’s history. It really builds the consistency of the product and the voice. People have time to hone what the message should be. We don’t have a revolving door. But to that point, there’s been 13 editors, but 23 publishers. The publishers always get fired. (Laughs)
Samir Husni: Is your job as publisher of The Old Farmer’s Almanac a walk in a rose garden?
Sherin Pierce: Oh no, not at all. It’s a walk in the field; it’s a walk in the woods; it’s a walk in deer-filled gardens and vegetable gardens, in shrubs and fruit trees. I think we would have been remiss if years ago we had said we’re going to just stick to print and not bother with the other mediums. But the group publisher in 1996 said we had to go on the Internet. We had to have our own website: almanac.com. We started that in 1996 and it really taught us a lot. We didn’t take the whole Almanac and put it on the website. Almanac.com gave us an opportunity, 24/7, to talk about all the various elements in the Almanac that you can’t cover in print and update because it’s an annual publication.
We could update that personally. We could give you your weather forecast based on your zip code. And we could do a lot of other things that you can’t do in print. So we found ways to pull people into The Old Farmer’s Almanac. The website sent people to print and print also promoted the website. They worked together, hand in glove, in tandem. Really enhancing one another.
Also on the website and through our email newsletters, we could talk to our customers and readers every single day. So that became important again because they had ways to reach out to us and to talk to us through feedback.
Social media just accelerated that or accentuated that more through Facebook. We have close to 1.7 million social media followers, Instagram and Pinterest too of course. What we do is make sure that people have access to us online in social media. But we also bring them back to our print products.
So everything we do, whether it’s our Veggie Gardener’s Handbook, which is a bestseller and Amazon’s number one vegetable gardening handbook, everything we do we’re able to cross promote and cross pollinate the information so that in our world all boats rise when you talk about everything. It’s not just we’re going to abandon print because print is dead as they said 15 years ago. Everything’s going to be on EPUB. When we have the Almanac as a Kindle publication or an iPad or Nook, we have that for people who want to access us that way.
But we really believe that in the end you need to give your customers a choice of how they want to find you. And many of them want print. Our customers want the print product and we offer them four different versions of that.
So we’ve had to listen and adapt and continually change some error to be a relevant part of the marketplace. And that’s what we’ve had to do as a small company with our limited resources, we’ve had to really be flexible and nimble and keep adapting.
Samir Husni: Being flexible is one issue you’re dealing with, but what are some of the major challenges you’re facing today?
Sherin Pierce: One of the biggest challenges we’ve had has been in retail. In one part of our retail presence we have our bookstore edition, which has been doing tremendously well, both in stores and on Amazon. We have our own direct distribution to Tractor Supply and to Ace and to the nontraditional bookstore accounts. Again the Almanac, being the type of product that can transfer different types of retail has done very well there.
And I’m really thankful for that because the newsstand as you know, of which we’ve always been a huge supporter and part of, has really presented a lot of challenges and a lot of increased expenses in terms of distribution costs, which every publisher is facing, every publisher. And we’ve all had to in the face of the supply issues. distribution cost, distribution to the store’s cost, and then the wholesaler distribution cost. Being constantly asked about increasing a discount. All these things, we’ve had to face all of that and figure out how do we fit in this newsstand marketplace where these huge wholesaler groups that are controlling our destiny.
For us, it’s been a huge curve over the last year that’s been the challenge that everybody’s facing. We’ve had to really review all our print orders and floor display programs. We don’t sell a single display for the Almanac without another product being in it. There’s always going to be an Almanac for kids or a calendar to help us offset and increase our sales so we can face some of these increased expenses. We’ve had to make those changes as well and push back and say no, this is as much as we’re going to be able to do. and this is the type of configuration we’re going to sell And that’s been our challenge.
And despite the merchandising problems that everybody experienced last year, the Almanac sales on the newsstand have been down 4 percent. But without those merchandising problems
we would have equaled or exceeded our 2022 numbers. So I’m really hopeful about 2024. Merchandising should hold. These are things beyond our purview, but last year that was a double whammy, the logistics fees and the merchandising problems. But we are able to still make our way through. We don’t want a repeat of that, at least the merchandising problems. And that’s the challenge.
So my advice always is make sure you have diverse channels of distribution so you’re not dependent on anyone for your success in distribution. That’s really important. And that’s really helped us.
Samir Husni: People keep on saying that only old people now care for print or look for print. Yet you have The Old Farmer’s Almanac for kids. Are all your readers mostly older?
Sherin Pierce: No, it’s been surprising what readers have come to us for. I think the younger generation, many folks grew up without getting advice on most basic things in life. Look up at the sky, look at the planets. what are the signs of nature? How do you start a little garden? How do you do a container garden?
All these most basic things have not been passed down recently. It’s like saying, well my grandfather taught me this. Everyone’s been so busy. And life has been so challenging and evolving, constantly on the move.
People haven’t had time to really master the basics and some of the basics that we can teach really well, they come to us for through online, through social media. People have come back to print. Proof is in the pudding. The veggie gardener’s handbook, which is a book, is now in its 6th printing. Over three years we’ve printed 250,000 copies and when you read the comments of people who are buying it, so many are like I was looking for basic information to teach and guide me as to how to do something. And this explains everything so clearly. I can follow it and it gives me confidence to do what I need to do.
And that’s what has been amazing. It’s young families, people starting out. They care about the environment. They care about sustainability. They want to know what kind of food they’re feeding their families. You have something within your control. You can do that. We can help you do that.
Reading, now that you get feedback very quickly through your social media, on almanac.com. I read the comments on Amazon all the time to see what people are saying when they’re reviewing the books. There’s so many ways people get back to. You know that the demographic that’s reading The Old Farmer’s Almanac is far younger than one would imagine it to be. And we are guiding another generation and saying, there are ways to do things. You don’t always have to have the biggest and the best. Sometimes you start small, you have success and you grow.
Your first little success grows into something bigger. But it’s a confidence in the advice and the truth. What people are looking for.
Samir Husni: And you said 250,000, right? 250,000 of the Veggie Garden Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook has been in print?
Sherin Pierce: Yes, and for a gardening book that’s a lot. We printed six times. It’s a gardening book, but it came out at the time when COVID stuck in people at home, and they wanted something.
So we’ve already licensed the Veggie Gardener’s Handbook to a publisher in New Zealand. And that’s our first foreign license. And now I got an inquiry to license it to a publisher in Italy as well. It’s just a common theme: how to grow vegetables? What are the pests? What are the things about the soil? You start with soil. That’s the most important thing. We have places where you can make notes and you can journal in the book. So it becomes a very interactive book in print. People have a level of comfort. How do you do companion planting; it’s all there.
Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical last question, is there anything else you would like to add?
Sherin Pierce: I think the Almanac is always a surprise. And when people read it, they always say they grew up with it, they always saw it in their grandparents house, or on the farm of a relative or something. And I always urge people to pick it up again for the first time. Remember. McCall’s ad campaign, read it again for the first time, it’s the same thing.
People think they know it, but when they actually settle down with it and can read it in small chunks, they don’t have to read it in this one big binge, they’ll find that it is always so useful. It’s going to guide you in your life. It’s going to tell you; it’s going to give you that reassurance that every year, every day, the sun is going to rise, and the sun is going to set. And you’re going to know that every single day.
The seasons, you’re going to have four seasons. And no matter what happens, there’s a certain continuity to life. And that’s what the Almanac gives you. It gives you that optimism and that hope that you can get through anything. And I hope in each of our publications, our voice, and how we present the product, good value is what you’ll see running through each of the publications.
Samir Husni: My typical last question, what keeps you up at night?
Sherin Pierce: I think what keeps me up is that I would hope our distribution channels realize that it’s really a partnership. And that all of us have a responsibility of making sure that our publications reach our audience.
As it gets harder and harder, we have to understand that we’re in this together. And that each of us has a responsibility of making sure we deliver the products to our readers. When we make it accessible to our readers, when we make it plain to them why magazines are important, I think the readers respond really well.
But in these times when there’s a lot of trouble, when everyone’s faced with all the challenges, we need for everyone to understand that we have to work together. And it’s not a combative thing. It’s like understanding all the pressures that all of us have. But we have to work together to ensure that magazines stay a relevant and significant part of people’s lives.
That’s what worries me, but that’s why on the Almanac we found different ways of making sure that people find that little Yellow Book. (Laughs) That they can find it and can look at it and refer to it throughout the year.
Samir Husni: Thank you.