Circuitous career path led Dan Schwartz to senior publisher at Lippincott Williams & Wilkins' health division.

Many of these Publisher Profiles, regular readers (an attractive presumption on my part) will have noticed, begin with a newsletter publisher explaining his boyhood dream of pitching in the National League and how he only more or less accidentally became a newsletter journalist.

We've interviewed defrocked lawyers, an ex-male model and an actual professional basketball player. But Daniel E. Schwartz, senior publisher at Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins in Baltimore, is part of that minority (excluding the second and, in one case, third generation publishers who knew the business they were going into) who planned a career in journalism when he entered the master's program at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.

"I can't say I specifically thought about newsletters then," Dan said, "but when I graduated it was the middle of a recession and a newsletter job was what was available. I went to work for a trade association writing a pension newsletter.

"My first 'real job' in newsletters came when I joined the Thompson Publishing Group. I was editor of a looseleaf and newsletter title aimed at employee benefits law. The law was designed to insure the rank and file got the same benefits as the honchos, and our prosaic title was Section 89," Schwartz said.

Newsletter helps repeal law

"This law was drafted by attorneys and was probably one of the most convoluted pieces of legislation in memory, a real regulatory boondoggle and, consequently, the service took off like a shot. In 1989 we had the most successful first six months in company history."

Schwartz continued: "The business community regrouped and mounted a repeal effort. One night before the hearings I got a call from the Senate Finance press secretary asking if he could have a copy. I thought, 'Why not? Might be good publicity.' I had one messengered up to the Hill.

"Imagine my surprise then, sitting at the press table for the hearings, when I saw a then-fairly junior member of the committee, Senator Trent Lott, waving my notebook over his head and shouting, 'This is what passage of this law has wrought.'"

Success kills the messanger

"Business succeeded. The law was repealed. The title tanked," Schwartz said.

"Since I had wanted to write about healthcare, I moved back to a trade association. This one represented managed care in the years just before 'managed care' became the answer to every question in healthcare. I wrote their biweekly for several years."

Begins management track

"In 1993 I got my first opportunity in management, as managing editor at Aspen in Maryland for their health administration titles. I enjoyed my time there, still keep in touch with friends I made there but, unfortunately, the health division is no more," Schwartz said.

"I moved to Connecticut to work for Bob Brady at Business & Legal Reports until, in 1999, my wife had a job opportunity in Cleveland and I followed as a trailing spouse. There didn't appear to be many opportunities there and, after a year as Mr. Mom, I convinced her I needed to get back into the game and I came to Baltimore as senior publisher in Lippincott's clinical newsletter division."

So, for Dan Schwartz it's been two trade associations and four newsletter publishers. Plus a ladder of increasingly responsible positions. Is this a more typical career pattern today than beginning with a launch from the proverbial kitchen table?

16 titles

"We have 16 titles presently," Schwartz said. "The oldest, International Drug Therapy, has been published for 40 years. The others are a mix of launches and acquisitions, all edited by physicians on contract as editors. Our titles are all specialty-specific and strongly clinically oriented, rather than administration and practice management."

Some of those "specialty-specific" newsletters are: Back Letter, Bone & Joint Letter, Sports Medicine Digest, Topics in Pain Management, and Contemporary Spine Surgery.

"Our newsletter division is a tiny part of Lippincott, which has a frontlist of 100 books and a backlist of thousands of titles," Schwartz said. "We publish 300 clinical journals including all of those from the American Heart Association.

"My division may be small, but we're a nice profit center for the company."

Good renewals

"One thing I'm proud of is our achievements in renewals. Over the period I've been here we've been able to move the division from the bottom of the company in results to the top," Schwartz said.

"It's been a multi-pronged effort, including:

* "Revamping and rewriting the entire series for every title,

* "Adding a Renewal at Birth option,

* "Adding an Automatic Renewal option,

* "Better coordinating the 'about to expire' final issue with the notice. We put an oversize post-it note on the issue which also offers the option of going to the website for an online renewal.

* "We do what we call a 'blanket renewal' campaign to all subscribers to every title. In 1999 our premium was a Y2K special report. Each year, as a rule, the premium has gotten bigger and more expensive, but this year we had our best results ever, about an 18 percent response overall.

"We brought in a half million dollars on a 'campaign' which cost $10,000 to mail."

Schwartz concluded, "None of this is rocket science, but the combination of 'all the above' has been quite successful."

LWW, 351 West Camden St., Baltimore, MD 21201, 800-787-8981, www.lwwnewsletters.com