Beth Early has done it all in 27 years in the newsletter industry.

"I'm too busy to think about 'the future of the newsletter industry,'" commented Beth Early of Business Publishers Inc., Silver Spring, Maryland, when asked to prognosticate.

She began in newsletters after high school and two years of college as receptionist at Capital Publications, and she now serves as associate publisher at BPI, business-to-business publishers with nearly 40 niche market titles. (Have you seen the movie, "Remember the Titans"? That was Early's high school and era, she said, although the coach didn't much resemble Denzel Washington.)

Asked what's new at BPI, Early said, "We're always actively seeking acquisitions. In house we're both doing some consolidations and trying to step up our test mailings for new products. We have an incentive plan for staff to reward ideas that become test marketed or published newsletters."

On the marketing side, direct mail is "still there," Early said, "but we've moved much more heavily of late to forced free trials. In some markets we are in, they appear to be the only thing that will work. We used to do only small FFTs, 300-400 names, but currently we'll go as high as 4,000."

From the outside, we commented, BPI looks a lot like Capital Publications did during its heyday, some 20 years ago. How much has the business changed? "Well," Early said, "for one thing there was no competition from the internet, so you could have a 'heyday."'

What has changed are the employees. "We have some great people at BPI, including many who've been with the company 10 or 20 years and more, but in the past few years we've had a lot of turnover. Perhaps it's nostalgia on my part, but I haven't seen the dedication I used to. Who knows, maybe tougher economic times will change things."

BPI was founded in 1963 by Leonard Eiserer (see p. 8 and NL/NL 3/15/01), who still comes to the office at least three days a week at age 84.

One thing that is different at BPI: "We aren't nearly as tightly structured by subject area and product line as other multi-title publishers appear to be. We have an editor who writes both on hazardous materials transport and literacy, a marketer who handles Nuclear Waste News and Education Technology News. When you have good editors or marketers, they can cross lines. They usually say working in the very different areas is more interesting than spending every hour of the week in one subject area."

Early continued, "In a company which isn't really that large (55 employees), you need people with varied skills. When we lost our accountant, the office manager and I handled those responsibilities for four or five months until we could find the right replacement. When we lose an editor unexpectedly, the editorial director or editorial coodinator steps in to write the publication until we fill the position.

"I am usually involved with every department in the company every day. At BPI we need people willing to get their hands dirty."

The internet

How much as the internet changed the way things are done? "BPI has a web site," Early said, "but we use it mostly for our catalog of products. We tested some e-mail marketing blasts and they haven't been particularly successful for us. I don't think print is going away for awhile.

"Here's an example. In 1999 we launched a product that I thought was our perfect entree into electronic publishing and fulfillment, Higher Education Technology News. And would you believe it, 90 percent of the subscribers to that title picked the print edition, and nothing we've offered since has convinced many of them to move to e-mail delivery.

"I can understand why. You're out of your office for a day and a half and you come back to find 238 unread e-mails. And, somewhere in there is eight pages of a newsletter you receive via e-mail. Who has time to read it on screen? I print it out and put it in my briefcase to read at home and I think, 'Why didn't I pick the print version?'"

Fulfillment systems

Early has spent much of her career in circulation management, in increasingly senior positions. Her experience includes beginning with the old "put the orders in a shoebox" system to surviving the original "meeting the big, bad wolf in the forest" industry horror story of making the conversion to computers and outsourcing to a service bureau, and then to, years later in another company, bringing it all back in-house again with one system or another.

"Honestly," she said, "I don't think anyone is ever really happy with their fulfillment system. I'll probably be looking at vendors for a new system for BPI sometime fairly soon."

The staff person's view

In her career Beth Early has worked for some of the best known publishers in the newsletter business: Ken Callaway at Capital Publications, Tom Shack at Buraff, and now Len Eiserer at BPI. What's it like, we asked, when you disagree with what they want to do?

"Really," she answered, "that doesn't happen nearly so often as people might think. I do my homework, I try to present both the positives and the negatives of any course of action and generally we come to an agreement. Sure, once or twice you hit a stone wall--'This is the way we do it and we aren't going to change'--and then you get yourself with the program and sell it to the staff."

Watch this space. Looking over her career in newsletters, Early noted, "I was with my first company for ten years and out of work for a week. I spent another ten years at my second company and then was unemployed for another week.

"Now I'm in my seventh year at BPI and who knows what might happen three years from now?"