FROM THE EDITOR

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 you. Our most effective way is to rent mailing lists from other magazines and organizations who know where you are and then send letters asking you to subscribe. Currently we are getting our best responses from lists of Group magazine, Clergy Journal, Wittenburg Door, Eternity, Discipleship Journal, Bible Newsletter, and Word, Inc. (Some of you current subscribers are already on their lists, inevitably-but it often costs more to weed out your names than to mail you superfluous mailings.)

Our next major mailing will come next February, when we will send out 500,000 pieces. That will cost $90,000, about $26,000 of which will go just for postage. We hope to get 6,000 to 8,000 new subscribers from that mailing. We do a mailing like this every January or February, which for unknown reasons are the best months.

The sales pitch is the hard part. Elizabeth Stark of Psychology Today recently asked 500 randomly selected readers, “If you were granted one supernatural power, what would it be?” Their number one response was Reading other people’s minds. Editors and publishers feel the same way when putting together promotional packets.

Naturally, we ought to keep our sales pitches in harmony with the editorial tone of our magazine. But within that boundary, there is a great deal of latitude. LEADERSHIP is a professional journal for local-church leaders that takes a relatively laid-back approach. So in promotion, we need to brag without sounding like we’re bragging. For example, we’d like to tell you that LEADERSHIP was named Periodical of the Year this spring, for the second time in four years, by the Evangelical Press Association. But would you think that too much braggadocio? We’ll probably decide to tell you anyway, rationalizing it as “interesting news.”

We’d also like to tell you how hard we’re working to serve you even more effectively. We plan on starting the Leadership Library this fall. The first book is authored by Associate Editor Marshall Shelley and is titled Well-Intentioned Dragons: Ministering to Problem People in the Church. The books will appear quarterly thereafter, in between the regular issues of LEADERSHIP, and will be sold on a continuing subscription basis. They’ll also be copublished by Word Books. But maybe all this should be said in a separate direct-mail campaign. …

We also want to tell you about our 1985 desk calendar that features LEADERSHIP cartoons. Designed especially for local-church leaders (double space for Sundays), it includes a three-year planner, a sermon log for each week of the year, and many other helpful features. Each weekly spread includes a cartoon from LEADERSHIP, over sixty cartoons in all.

But we don’t want to get pushy. We’ve tried some things that haven’t worked. We put together a direct-mail promotion that featured all the Christianity Today, Inc. magazines (Christianity Today, Campus Life, Partnership, and LEADERSHIP), but it bombed. Apparently our efforts to save money and the deluge on the mailboxes of North America didn’t strike you right. Too many choices? Too much sell? We wish we could read your minds.

We want to keep serving you better through LEADERSHIP and related projects. Direct mail and promotion are essential parts of that, but we never want the material realities of publishing to make us lose sight of our ministry goal. We’re committed to uplifting local-church leaders as they selflessly contribute their considerable gifts to the kingdom. Often a letter arrives at our offices that reinforces that purpose in our minds:

“I might trade salaries with some professionals I know, but I wouldn’t trade jobs with them. Not because being a minister is easy or exciting or glamorous. It isn’t. But because I happen to feel that what I do is important and challenging and worthwhile.”

We agree that what you’re doing is all those things. Anything we can do to help you, we stand ready to do. We’re here to serve you better-even if it means using direct mail.

Terry C. Muck is editor of LEADERSHIP.