Roles & Expectations Summer 1984

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Those of us who write editor's pages and publisher's pages read other magazines to see what our counterparts do. James Glassman, publisher of The New Republic, recently gave his readers an insight into what he called "the seamiest part of publishing: direct mail." I decided I'd do the same for the readers of LEADERSHIP.

We start with a short course in magazine economics:

Say you begin with 1,000 subscribers. If your magazine is unusually well liked, perhaps 60 percent of those subscribers will renew at the end of the first year. (The others got their feelings hurt by something you published, or were just leaving on vacation when the renewal notice arrived and never saw it again, or were broke, or got married to somebody who also had a subscription, or died during the year, or . . .) That leaves you with 600 subscribers. In subsequent years, 75 percent of those readers will renew. If you work out the mathematics of this, in Year Three you've got 450 subscribers and in Year Six you've got 200. It doesn't take a Harvard M.B.A. to see you're going broke.

So the key to magazine economics is to replace the dropout subscribers. That's where direct mail and other promotions enter. The cheapest promotion is a bind-in card in the magazine itself. Bind-in cards are those heavy paper stock cards that several of you write me each issue to complain about. (I don't like them either-but they work.)

Large-circulation, general-subject magazines can attract enough new subscribers through mass media such as radio, television, and newspapers to make it pay. Not so special-interest magazines like LEADERSHIP. There are only a limited number of you out there (perhaps 300,000) who want what we provide. So we have to use specially targeted ways to reach ...

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