Thirty-year publisher combines newsletters and magazines, farming tips and sports coaching advice.

Frank Lessiter has been editor of No-Till Farmer since 1972 and bought the publication and launched Lessiter Publications in 1981.

Today, with a staff of 14 in offices in Brookfield, Wisconsin (outside of Milwaukee), Lessiter publishes three titles in addition to No-Till Farmer: American Farriers Journal (a magazine for horse-shoers), Winning Hoops for basketball coaches, and his newest launch, Gridiron Strategies for football coaches.

It's unusual, NL/NL remarked to Lessiter, for newsletter publishers to publish magazines also.

"They're probably just smarter than I am," Lessiter commented, but added, "It isn't that much different if you can find the right niche--it's niche publishing.

"Now, we owned a publication called Farmer's Digest for a few years, but it was just so general, I couldn't ever find quite how to position it, so we sold. Today there are 300 farm publications and 200 in the horse business and probably room for more in niches no one has thought of as yet."

Lessiter continued, "Yes, selling advertising is a different business than selling newsletter subscriptions, but we also have a big annual conference for the NoTill title, which attracts over 700 participants, and we have a position on staff that combines handling arrangements for that with ad sales, and it works quite well."

Lessiter said there are advantages in being comparatively smaller. "When the place is really busy and our staff is tied up, I'll answer the phone myself. Our subscribers think that is really neat.

"On the other hand, there are handicaps to being diversified in three or four different fields, because each area will probably have a couple of conventions or meetings where you really 'need to be seen' and so it increases travel," Lessiter said.

He also gave NL/NL his thoughts on a number of other publishing concerns.

Editorial

"We have editors on staff but in all of our publications we rely a great deal on contributions from the pros in the field. Now, it often does take quite a bit of editorial work to turn what they submit into publishable materials. In our Winning Hoops publication, I think 99 percent of the material has been written by coaches themselves. We like to say, 'Written by coaches for coaches.' It leads to another one of my favorite expressions, 'We can give the ingredients, not the recipe.'"

Marketing

"Well," Lessiter commented, "what's true for us seems to be true for just about everyone in the newsletter business, as far as I can tell, and that's that 'traditional direct mail' isn't working as well as it used to. ... I'm fond of saying 'We don't pretend to know everything,' but in marketing we have a good record system with Quickfill. We know which lists work for us and which don't."

Collateral Sales

Lessiter has been very successful in marketing books and special reports. "Our special management reports can run anywhere from 8-12 pages up to 3 2-48 pages," he said. "And we put them together for the most part from past editorial material. In the case of Winning Hoops, we often simply have more materials than we can use in the newsletter, so we will package 100 offensive plays into a special report or a book.

"As an additional benefit, after you market the new report for a year or two, you can always use it as an editorial premium for new subscriptions. Now, that does require a bit of judgement to pick the right titles. And one thing that is usually true is that if it didn't sell very well as a stand-alone, it probably won't be a dynamic premium for new subs."

Books

This has been an especially good source of revenue for American Earners Journal. "We've found 'historic' titles in the field, some originally published more than 100 years ago," Lessiter said. "We call them 'Farrier Classics.' They are out of copyright so all we have to do is put a new cover on them and write a brief introduction."

The web

Lessiter maintains separate web sites for each of the company's four titles. "Amazingly," he said, "once or twice we've found a crossover, a basketball coach who is also a farrier, but basically you come to one of our pages, you have no idea what other areas we publish."

And, of course, they cross-promote the print newsletters online and the web pages in the print versions. "I think we know all the U.S. lists for our titles, but the web allows us to reach some prospects internationally that we didn't have before."

While you might not have thought that the markets for Lessiter's publications--sports coaches and farmers--were not prime online targets, evidently you'd be wrong. Farmers, especially, he pointed out are probably as "computerized" as any business.

Each web page has an associated bulletin board, and the discussions there frequently lead to articles in the print publications. "We maintain them," Lessiter said, "but the readers provide the content. One farmer will discuss an equipment modification, which is a big deal in no-till, and before you know it, eight or ten others have responded with comments and ideas. One caution: Monitoring these bulletin boards can become a very seductive time-eater."

No-Till Farmer and Winning Hoops also have opt-in e-mail newsletters (again promoted on the web site and in print). For Winning Hoops, for example, each "issue" of the e-mail newsletter will contain a play or a tip; some current news, and usually a special offer for a management report. "Right now we're also offering a premium report to them [basketball coaches] if they give us the names of five football coaches for getting Gridiron Strategies going."

The future

"I'm a workaholic, I love doing this. My wife and I sometimes talk about getting far enough ahead of the game to hire someone to do my job and take some time off, but I don't know when that'll happen.

"My son--who wrote a special report for Lessiter on how pro sports teams got their nicknames when he was a teenager--is publisher of a trade magazine in Chicago. He's probably making too much money to want to come back here and take this over."