Everything I should have remembered before launching the great consumer newsletter.

"Success has many fathers," the bromide goes, "but failure is an orphan." Christie Brinkley's Beyond Beauty was all my idea and it didn't fly. I admit paternity.

Speaking of fathers, mine used to say that every man in his time has one million-dollar idea (back when that was real money), and I thought this was mine.

What can be learned from this experience--beyond that "I had this great newsletter idea but the test mailing didn't pan out"? In the clear glow of hindsight, the things I should have remembered are embarrassingly clear (no matter how beautiful Christie Brinkley is). They are:

* Successful newsletters are seldom "fun." The late Mike Morrison, once director of R&D at McGraw-Hill, always said that most successful newsletters "are written on subjects that are grungy, awful and dull. If you come across an idea that sounds interesting, exciting and fun to write and read, run."

But I loved the idea, my bosses did, and so did Christie. At our initial meeting with Christie and her agent, we knew we had a live one. Write her a fan letter and you get an autographed photo and copy of her fan club newsletter. She knows to the penny what each response costs her. "This a businesswoman we can work with," I thought.

* Do the "right" market research. "Never trust any market research that doesn't require the prospect to commit money," John Stewart of BNA once told me.

We did a number of informal surveys and focus groups. Christie has enormous name recognition, almost all of it very positive (although there is a diehard Billy Joel fan here and there). Tremendous interest was expressed in the newsletter.

Key point we missed. Christie gets very high credibility ratings in areas like fashion, fitnness and beauty, but noticeably less in areas like nutrition and women's health--which was unfortunate because these were the areas we thought would differentiate our newsletter from the magazines.

* Don't create copy by committee. Perhaps too many cooks spoiled the broth. We picked two top freelance copywriters to do packages, but several in-house people also had ideas. Christie herself wrote a good deal of one of the versions (pretty good copy, too). At my final count 11 people had put pen to paper and contributed something that appeared in the final version. That can't have been good.

* Don't ignore precedent. This type of newsletter is usually marketed with a magalog. And, with the most photogenic editor you can imagine, why didn't we use one? We just didn't. However, with a launch mailing what you are really testing is concept, and I can't believe a 20-page, 4-color magalog would have brought results dramatically different from the package we used, which was a 6-page, 4- color, illustrated letter sent in a #14 envelope.

* Playing in a different ballpark. We were dealing with celebrities. Newsletter publishers are comfortable dealing with staff editors and marketers and hiring the odd out-side copywriter. Celebrities are different. Allie Ash told me this about the launch of Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street. They have agents, lawyers, publicists and other business activities.

Heck, when Christie suggested her hairdresser Frederick Fekkai as a contributing editor, we soon found out he's a star in his own right, complete with agent and publicist. From what I've heard from other marketers working with celebrities, working with Team Christie was no more difficult than average--but it's definitely a different world.

* Editorial focus. How was our newsletter going to have editorial credibility in fitness and beauty care when Christie had contracts as spokesperson for fitness products and a skin care company? (Those new deals were signed while the newsletter was in preparation, but we hadn't cut a deal that said she couldn't do anything else.)

When you hire a staff editor you can make reasonable restrictions on what other activities he or she may engage in, but this doesn't work with celebrities.

* Stars in my eyes. Everyone thought this was a great idea. I even got to spend a day with Christie at her place in the Hamptons planning marketing and editorial strategies (she brought me coffee--what more can a middle-aged man desire?). Perhaps this was all a little too heady for someone whose biggest success at United Communications was writing an official memo package for Medicare Compliance Alert that returned a $10 net profit ratio.

* Picking lists for the actual test. We dropped 50,000 names from five lists--female subs to two health letters, one catalog list, and two magazine lists that fit our idea of the target audience. (Tom Phillips once told me that it was very difficult to build a newsletter from magazine lists).

Conventional wisdom holds that few people under 35, or even 40, subscribe to newsletters, but we picked one list to prove that idea wrong. Just before we dropped, one of the magazine lists, Redbook, had a cover article on Christie (in which she got in a nice plug for the newsletter that brought in white mail orders).

If these weren't the "right" lists, it's hard to think which would have been better. (Of course, the health newsletter subs responded best, but these were the smallest lists.) We tested prices of $39 and $29. Response should have been great or, at worst, very good. It wasn't either. I wasn't a total disaster but it was not nearly what it needed to be.

* Beward of overexposure. "Providing information difficult to get from any other source" is the key to newsletter success, one of the Association's early presidents, Ray Henry, liked to say.

Beyond Beauty wasn't it. While we were preparing the test, Christie was on the cover of Ladies Home Journal (twice), InStyle, Redbook (twice), Vanity Fair, and a couple of the supermarket tabloids. Yes, "free publicity" is nice, but prospects could learn an awful lot about Christie without subscribing to her newsletter.

* Perhaps Christie Brinkley's Beyond Beauty just wasn't a newsletter idea. At about the same time we dropped, I picked up a copy of Allure magazine, one of Christie's favorites, and realized, "This one issue has articles about every damn thing we promise in the promo."

In the end, I decided I didn't do anything wrong. I had "a great idea," gave it my best shot, and it didn't fly.

We didn't throw good money after bad by changing the price, adding more premiums, mailing to different lists, etc. We took our lumps like men.