Food newsletter editor builds publishing empire on continual promotion to the media.

One way of putting it is that JoAnna Lund traded 130 pounds for 10,000 newsletter subscribers. But that's not half the story.

A self-described "stress eater," Lund began eating even more when her son, daughter and son-in-law were all called into active duty during the 1991 Gulf War. When she tipped the scales at 300 pounds, she decided to face her problem head on. She developed a method of "exhanges" to enable her to eat all the food she loved, while exchanging the fats and sugars with healthier choices, thus reducing caloric intact.

After she lost 130 pounds, she compiled 135 recipes into an Oct. '91 cookbook, Healthy Exchanges. Then the newsletter bug bit her. She attended Howard Penn Hudson's How to Start a Newsletter seminar and in 1992 founded Healthy Exchanges Food Newsletter, with an initial subscriber base of 205.

Without the capital for a direct mail campaign, she took to the air waves--first locally in her native Iowa, then regionally, then nationally. Press releases telling her success story won her radio and television appearances in which she shared her recipes and touted her newsletter. Subscription orders poured in.

Within a year she had 10,000 subscribers to the $26.50/year monthly.

In her contract with G.P. Putnam's Sons to publish her cookbook she made the publisher agree to include a newsletter order form in the book. Since then she has published 13 books with Putnam and Perigee.

In her first appearance on QVC home shopping network, she sold 23,000 copies of her cookbook in 26 minutes. Since then she has been featured in 300 newspapers and magazines, has been interviewed by 500 television and radio stations, and has made about 1500 motivational and cooking speeches to a variety of organizations.

A six-year flurry of activity yielded many profit centers spun off from the book and newsletter:

* A 100,000-sq. foot tourist attraction, "The House that Recipes Built," which is a gift shop, a printing shop, and Jo's Kitchen.

* Her own brand of spices.

* Two audio tapes: "It's Not a Diet, It's a Way of Life" and "HELP: Healthy Exchanges Lifetime Plan."

* A line of "cookbooklets" which sell for $6.50 each.

Then last year, a family crisis made the self-proclaimed Middle America Martha Stewart realize that she was working too hard. So, she and her husband, Clfford Lund, sold the whole complex, cut back on speaking engagements, and began concentrating "the heart of our enterprise--my cookbooks and my beloved newsletter," she told NL/NL.

On regular appearances on QVC and in weekly radio interviews from her home, she now preaches moderation and balance. "The professional life cannot destroy the personal life."

Circulation to the newsletter, which Clifford prints, is holding steady at about 9,000--still without any promotion budget.

JoAnna Lund, who describes herself as "a woman who never wrote before the age of 47, who never spoke in public before the age of 48, and who didn't know what the word marketing meant," has this advice for beginning newsletter publishers:

"Be true to your audience. Be true to yourself Start small and grow with it. If you truly believe in your dreams, set your goals, dream your dreams, pray your prayers, and work your work, your dreams will come true."

Early in her newsletter career, JoAnna Lund appeared on a popular talk show in Des Moines. She talked about how she had at that time lost just over 100 pounds by changing her eating habits, and she gave out her cookbook and newsletter ordering information a couple of times.

A few days after the interview, she received a letter. The writer said that her farmer husband was listening to the show on the radio in his tractor while doing Spring field work. He was impressed by what Lund said but didn't have paper or a pencil to write down her address. So he wrote it in the dust on the fender of his tractor.

When he came in for lunch, he copied the information from the dust and old his wife to write away.

"You must be one heck of a talker to get my husband interesting in healthy eating in the middle of Spring field work," the woman wrote.

Enclosed was a check for the cookbook and newsletter.