Dan Capell succeeds with no online version, ancillaries, conferences or special reports, and with traditional DM and a frequency few understand.

Dan Capell, editor and publisher of Capell's Circulation Report, believes he may be one of the last of the "old-fashioned" newsletter publishers.

His newsletter, targeted at magazine circulation directors (CDs), has passed its 20th anniversary since its founding in 1982. Capell, then a veteran of many years in the magazine business (including founding publisher of Inside Sports), was temporarily unemployed and doing consulting.

"I was looking for a steady income stream to augment my consulting work."

CCR is published only in a print edition. "I have no website and I've asked my subscribers repeatedly if they'd like an e-mail edition and they aren't interested," Capell said. "Magazine CDs are traditionalists, I guess."

Marketing is done with conventional direct mail. "I went into the mail again right after Labor Day. I've tried sample issues and trials, and the straight DM offer works best for me. It's a soft bill-me offer. Ninety percent of my orders are unpaid. I've offered credit cards but they don't work for me."

Capell said that when he launched the newsletter, he found it was very difficult to write marketing copy about himself. "After about four tries, I gave up and went to a professional. The control package has now been through many hands but none of the writers was me."

Again, possibly unique among publishers: While Capell has been the editor for the entire run of the newsletter, it has been sold twice over the years and he has bought it back twice.

"I launched the newsletter at $95, and today, after 20 years, it's at $395," Capell said. He began with what he described as a unique frequency--20 times annually. "Biweekly during the year but monthly in the summer so I have time to play softball," he said. Capell just retired after 30 years on the diamond but he says the frequency won't change.

"None of my subscribers knows what the frequency is anyway. Some think it's weekly, others tell me they 'look forward to getting it every month.'" And this from the former circulation director of Newsweek.

CCR has almost no ancillary products. Capell doesn't do seminars or promote conferences. There are no special reports, "although publishing the newsletter does lead to a lot of consulting work," he said.

Reprints and annual survey

One thing Capell does do is sell reprints. CCR produces an annual "Best Performers" survey of the field. "Any magazine that gets a good listing may want to order reprints to put in the advertising kit or whatever. I charge from $3 down to $1 a copy for large orders, and some have ordered 5,000 or 10,000 copies."

He also sponsors an annual online survey (CircTrack) of the business, which covers every imaginable question: "How many efforts in the renewal series, what are pay-up rates, sliced and diced by every possible category, size, frequency, and so on," he said.

"It's free to subscribers, but I have corporate sponsorships from vendor companies. It's in its eighth year now. I wrote the original eight-page survey, but I've turned it over now to a professional research company. We get a 25-30 percent response on the surveys, which I understand is pretty good."

Capell gets quite a bit of print publicity. It's difficult to find a newspaper or magazine article about the business ("Decline of the Seven Sisters," "Rise of the 'Laddie' Books," etc.) in which Capell isn't quoted.

"I don't work to get it," he said, "but I've been at this so long that my name and number is in the Rolodex of every media reporter in the country. The publicity brings in a consulting assignment from time to time, but I don't know that it sells any subscriptions to the newsletter." (See following article.)

Asked how the magazine business is these days, Capell said bluntly, "Lousy--worst I've seen it in more than 30 years. But the 'State of the Industry' doesn't seem to affect the newsletter much. In bad times, people want to know, 'How bad is bad?' Is my performance worse than the rest of the industry?'"

Finds success with limited universe

Capell continued: "What has affected me is consolidation--publishers buying publishers, leaving a smaller market. My market is 2,500 magazine executives with the CD title. Whenever I've gone beyond that, I've gotten in trouble. Experts would say that isn't a large enough universe to support a newsletter, but I keep the circulation between 400 and 500 with a consistent overall 75 percent renewal rate, depending on how active I've been in marketing.

"My honest goal is to maintain the annual revenue at $150,000+, whatever combination of circulation and price it takes to stay there."

As an expert on the economics of circulation, he has settled on an impressive economy of scale: a 20 percent penetration into his universe and revenues of about $150,000 for what is basically a one-man operation. (He farms out his QuickFill fulfullment to another newsletter publisher.)

Design for living

Having retired from softball, Capell now spends six months of the year on the Jersey shore. "I made a deal with my wife to sell the big house (the kids are long gone) if I could have six months at the shore and she could have the other six months wherever she wanted. She had friends there and now we also have a condo in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, D.C.--a great urban neighborhood."

Dan Capell, 202-332-6272