Northern Woodlands magazine has come a long way in the 13 years since we launched its predecessor, Vermont Woodlands. Our first issue was published in June 1994. It was a slim 28 pages, printed in black with some splashes of red as an accent color. I can remember wondering what to charge for a subscription to a small, tightly focused specialty magazine. Our market research involved spending an afternoon at a bookstore scanning magazine prices. The range, then as now, was imponderably wide. You could get a subscription to Newsweek for what amounted to pennies an issue, or pay $8 a copy for a literary journal or more still for an art magazine. Using the papa bear, mama bear, baby bear, just-right methodology, we settled on a subscription price of $18.00 a year, and $5.00 for a single copy. Maybe that pricing scared some people off, but by the time the second issue was at the printer, there were 400 people who had seen the first one and wanted to see more.
In the 13 years since that nearly invisible beginning, we’ve expanded our territory to cover all of New England and New York. We’ve nearly tripled the magazine’s length, with more stories, more columns, and color photography throughout. Starting with this issue, we’re binding it with a spine that has the title and edition printed on it, making it easier for you to find a particular issue in your collection. Most importantly, by learning more and more about the people, scientific research, public policy, and market trends that influence what’s going on in the region’s forests, we have developed a magazine that I’m happy to admit is far superior to the one we launched.
Along the way, there have been steady increases in the three largest costs associated with publishing: paper, postage, and printing. Once again this summer, we’re faced with yet another increase in postage. All along, we have been absorbing those costs, but we can’t do that any longer, and so for the first time ever, we are raising our prices.
Starting June 1, a single copy on the newsstand will be $5.95. Subscription prices will be as follows: one year $21.50; two years $39; three years $55. We’ve held steady for 13 years, and I hope you will continue to see the magazine as worth every penny. Further, I hope you will understand our need to do our best to make the magazine pay its way.
Unlike some nonprofits that depend on philanthropy for their entire budget, we are fortunate to have a product whose sales bring in about two-thirds of our annual income. Given the importance of the magazine to our organizational strength, we need to run it with good, sound business principles in mind.
Business survival is not just an idle thought. In the past year, we have made arrangements to fulfill the subscription obligations of two publications that had to close their doors. Both of them, Northern Sky News and Natural New England, were covering natural history and the environment in the Northeast, and we see their readers as naturals for Northern Woodlands. The experience of these two publishers is sobering, and it makes it abundantly clear that we made the right choice in 2003, when we became a nonprofit. Doing so gave us a means to accept the tax-deductible charitable contributions that fill the balance of our annual budget and to put them to use in supporting all of our efforts.
Not all rising numbers are cause for alarm, and let me end by reporting a cause for celebration. We have now reached a paid circulation of 12,000, a number we didn’t even dream about in our early days. Because we started as Vermont Woodlands and got a good jump in the Green Mountains, it’s no surprise that we’re strongest in Vermont, with 25 percent of our readership. But growth in neighboring states has been strong, with Massachusetts close behind and New York, Maine, and New Hampshire closing quickly. Our core territory is New England and New York, and a combined 91 percent of our subscribers live in these seven states. But that means that nine percent live outside the region. In fact, some live outside the country – we have subscribers in 11 foreign countries on four continents.
At the moment, we have subscribers in 48 out of the 50 states, which I see as a challenge. Doesn’t anybody know someone in Louisiana or Mississippi who needs a gift subscription?