Adrenalin is a beautiful thing. At Northern Woodlands, we are quite accustomed to the rhythms of a quarterly cycle. Four publications a year works just fine. Develop the stories, sell the ads, work with photographers, artists and writers, do a final check of it at the printer – it all happens in a more or less predictable way. But when we add another magazine-size publication into the mix, the adrenalin kicks in.
The extra publication we just completed work on is The Place You Call Home: A Guide to Caring for Your Land in Vermont. It’s a magazine-format owner’s manual for people who own land in Vermont. It’s the third in a series, and we hope that we’ll keep producing one a year, until eventually we’ve covered every corner of New England and New York.
I wish I’d had this owner’s manual when we bought our land. We were clueless. It’s so easy to make poor choices when you don’t have good information. The mistakes we made weren’t fatal, but the experience sent me on a path of learning about the land, which ended up with starting this magazine nearly 15 years ago. I hope this guide helps people make good choices in regards to what happens on, and to, their land.
As we’ve been working on the marketing publicity for this, we sent press releases to all the daily and weekly newspapers in Vermont. I got a call from a reporter at the Rutland Herald on Wednesday afternoon saying he’d like to run a piece on the publication but he needed art to run with it.
“Can you get something to me?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “When do you need it?”
“Oh. In an hour,” he replied.
Right. He works at a daily paper. They put out 365 issues a year. I have no idea how they do it. On second thought, I can guess: adrenalin.