Learning by doing the Natural Life way

I'm not sure how interesting it is to the readers of Natural Life magazine, but I found it fascinating to read the interview that Rolf Priesnitz, the publisher, put up on the Natural Life website. His wife Wendy is the editor, and presumably asked the questions.

The interview's candour and its down-to-earth common sense would be terrifically useful to anyone who publishes or wants to publish a magazine since, over 30 years, the former plumber and steamfitter (nice to have a trade to fall back on) has learned a thing or two. Here are a couple of excerpts:

First, about how he paid for the launch:

I financed the first issue – the list rental and postage for mailing out 50,000 magazines, not the printing, which we were billed for later – by a $5,000 advance on my VISA card. Subscriptions and book orders financed the rest. Book orders outnumbered subscriptions at first, because in our inexperience we didn’t make it very easy for people to subscribe or even to find the subscription information! We ran it as a home-based business, which meant we didn’t have to make an investment in office space or a long-term lease. It literally took over our townhouse in Jarvis, Ontario.

I tend to do things by doing them rather than having the financing and other things in place. I just bulled my way through. But there was lots of support from acquaintances and friends. I remember four-year-old Heidi helping sort magazines that were stacked in the bathtub. After all, 50,000 magazines are a lot for one small townhouse without a garage! And there were some great publishing industry people helping along the way too, like circulation software expert Rolf Brauch and what is now Magazines Canada but was then known as the Canadian Periodical Publishers Association (CPPA), which started up around the same time.

Second, what he has learned and what he would have done differently, if he'd known better:

The financial aspect is always the hardest. The huge early acceptance of the magazine, with tens of thousands of subscribers and good newsstand sales in both Canada and the U.S. within the first two years, was a surprise. The speed of growth was so phenomenal that I didn’t have the model to understand what was going to happen, with how to deal with that many subscribers. We quickly went from Cheshire cards to nine-track tape on a big IBM computer just to keep track of people. Starting the magazine was actually quite easy; sustaining it was what turned out to be more difficult.

Q: Is there anything you would have done differently, perhaps with hindsight?

I wouldn’t have let it grow to 96 pages in the first couple of years. That was a mistake. We should have published more often instead, but there was so much need and so much material to cover in so many areas. We also undervalued the cover price at $1…and didn’t really look for advertising. I wanted to address the needs of the readers; servicing them was more important and we did that partly by offering products – from books to juice strainers and hand plows – directly through the Natural Life General Store. It also would have been better if I’d worked for another magazine publishing company for six months before starting Natural Life, just to understand how the industry works. However, I probably wouldn’t have started the magazine if I had!

And why he published an interview with himself.

I’m not a big reader at all. In fact, if I didn’t proofread Natural Life, I probably wouldn’t read it! English is not my first language and I still have trouble with number and letter sequences. In German, number words are spoken in a different order – for instance, you’d say nine and 50, instead of 59. So as anyone who’s got me on the phone to take their credit card number for a subscription will know, I often mix things up.

I do like to read about what makes people tick…how they think, what they did and why. That is, I think, best accomplished through the interview format. So I hope that this will be the first of an ongoing series of interviews in Natural Life, interviews that bring out the personality of ordinary people doing ordinary things, showing the way to the future. I want to continue to reinforce the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are making the changes we see around us. I like knowing there are people out there who think critically. Only a small percentage of people do, but those are the people who make a difference. I’m interested in reading and thinking about concepts, not whether Pluto is classified today as a planet.