Although she started out at entertainment publications like Entertainment Weekly, Melina Bellows is now Executive Vice President of the National Geographic Society and Chief Creative Officer for Books, Kids and Family. In that role, she leads the editorial and design teams for adult and children’s books, and for Kids and Little Kids magazines.
In a recent conversation with Technology for Publishing, Bellows discussed the successful turnaround at Kids, the challenges publishers are facing, and the opportunities she sees for Nat Geo.
How would you describe your current role, and what do you see as your biggest challenges?
I feel like I’m doing a balancing act on the high wire. And the high wire is the publishing industry, which is constantly changing.
One of my jobs is to oversee and grow everything we do about kids, and in that we’ve been quite successful. We found out last week that the kids division is the largest [operating income] generator for the society. Considering that it started as a kids’ magazine that was losing money and was about to be shut down, I think this shows what good products can do. No matter how the landscape is shifting, from print to digital broadcast to broadband, if you put out a good product, people will pay for it and your business will thrive.
My other challenge is adult books, which is nothing like kids’ books. In the adult market, with bricks-and-mortar bookstores going under, there’s a lot less of that browsing discoverability going on, where you go to get something for someone else but then you find that book you can’t resist for yourself. The types of books that we make at National Geographic are not always books that you know that you want. Sometimes they are; if it’s the Field Guide to the Birds of North America, you would go to Amazon and plug that in and up we come. And our national park guides are number one. But there are more books that we do that you wouldn’t know to look for. So the question is, how can we stand out in the crowd?
The other thing that makes this role challenging is figuring out who the National Geographic book buyer is. It’s not one person. Unlike the magazine, where they know the age or the income of the person, we publish many books that wouldn’t necessarily all appeal to the same person. For instance, this year we published In the Footsteps of Jesus, which is a beautiful illustrated atlas about the biblical world, but we also published Angry Birds Furious Forces: The Physics at Play in the World’s Most Popular Game. So there you have two very different buyers. Yet I think the success of the books division is taking the brand and making it elastic without abandoning the core of who we are, and who we are is the authority on travel, nature, science, history. So when we do a book on Angry Birds, it’s not like “How to you draw Angry Birds?”; it’s “Here’s the real physics behind Angry Birds.”
So it’s really holding on to the essence but shaking the dust off our essence and making it really, really relevant—so relevant that people will want to pay for it.
Where do you see the biggest growth potential right now?
Where we’re growing with kids is TV. We are the leader in nonfiction for kids publishing, but if we don’t digitize and digitize soon, we’re lost in the sauce. So we’re doing all sorts of innovative things. It’s very boot-strappy—it’s not like somebody’s giving us $100 million to launch a channel. We are doing a subscription-model channel with YouTube at the end of this month that’s National Geographic Kids-branded. We have a block on the Nat Geo Mundo network, in Spanish, so we have our toe in the water there. We have a virtual world called Animal Jam that’s very successful. And the next thing we want to do is really go big into video. Hopefully video can eventually be aggregated into one big channel that kids could go online and watch. In the short term, we could make it into apps and put it online and do all sorts of things with it. So that’s one of my challenges—figuring out how to continue that growth.
To what do you credit the success of Kids?
We took a lot of risks. We changed the name from World to Kids, we radically changed the design and content, and we started taking advertising, which was a huge taboo. We still needed additional revenue streams, so we started putting the magazine on the newsstand. And everything just worked. I think the name change was huge. Now, when you say National Geographic Kids, it puts a very concrete picture in your mind of who the magazine is for. Our circulation went from 700,000 to 1.4 million at one point. We’re still the largest circulating kids’ magazine. We have 17 international editions, we’ve had seven Guinness World Records, we have Little Kids magazine. It’s just this little engine that could. I don’t think it’s ever not won a Parents’ Choice Award.
In 2010, we were the only kids’ magazine to receive Min’s “Most Engaged Media Brands” award. They did their research and recognized that we were more than just a magazine to kids, we were part of their lives; we were a lifestyle brand. And that is always important to us. We don’t want kids to just sit on the couch and be couch potatoes, we want them to get inspired from the magazine to go outside and do something.
What’s your perspective on the current state of the publishing industry?
Print is not dead. There are people who think magazines are going to go by the wayside. I think printed magazines are going to become bigger, better, glossier, more luxurious, more beautiful, because they’re going to have to justify themselves. I think they’re going to be something that you’re proud to put on your coffee table. I do think there’ll be fewer of them, but the ones that are gorgeous to look at and flip through are going to be around forever.
Posted by: Margot Knorr Mancini
