Second time around

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July 1, 1992 by Susan Hovey

"On April 1, 1990 - suddenly and without warning - Games magazine mysteriously vanishes. Subscriptions end midstream. Contest winners are never announced. Hundreds of thousands of readers are left completely puzzled . . . "

So begins the direct-mail appeal that helped bring a magazine back from the grave in what has become a publishing success story of the most improbable kind.

This month, Games celebrates its first anniversary since relaunching last July. With a new publisher, an efficient operation and a fanatically devoted core of former readers (currently 150,000 subscribers and newsstand sales of 65,000), the New York-based bimonthly is predicting a profitable 1992. What really makes it all so laudable, though, is that it underscores the energy and excitement that a quality editorial product can ignite.

The story of the Games replay begins in the fall of 1989, when a Boston-based catalog called Bits & Pieces rented 10,000 names from the Games subscriber file of 600,000. The catalog's owner, Eli Segal, himself a Games subscriber (and currently chief of staff for Bill Clinton's Presidential campaign), had a hunch the list would work well in attracting buyers for the games and puzzle products featured in Bits & Pieces. After the list pulled a 5.5 percent response, B. & P. Publishing decided to rent 100,000 names the next spring.

Meanwhile, as Segal would soon discover, Games owner PSC Publications had filed for bankruptcy. Although the magazine and its spin-offs - Games Junior, Games Deluxe and Games Special Edition - were said to be cash positive, it was not enough to offset losses incurred by another PSC title, Needlecraft for Today. With the company crippled by liabilities in excess of $7 million and no crutch to be found, a dozen employees were let go and a completed issue of Games was left sitting at the printer.

It is likely that the magazine might still be moldering in the printer's warehouse today if not for Segal, his brother Alan (executive vice president of B. & P.) and the efforts of a cadre of impassioned puzzle junkies who saw something special in the unparalleled allegiance of the typical Games devotee.

How devoted? A recent study revealed that readers - 65 percent of whom are women - spend an incredible five and one-half hours with each issue, attempting to solve everything from word puzzles and mazes to murders and wildly perplexing mind-benders manufactured by editor Will Shortz and his staff. (Each issue also includes one or two contests that reward grand-prize winners with $1,000 or $2,000, and runners-up with the highly coveted - i.e., unavailable by any other means - Games T-shirt.)

Hoping to capitalize on some of that fervor, Segal originally thought he would simply purchase the magazine's subscriber file in an effort to boost the 400,000 customer-base of Bits & Pieces. "But then we had one of those epiphanies," he recalls. "Renting those names was quite fortuitous. My guess is that I would have never had a reason to go into the magazine business otherwise."

A dicey proposition

After buying the assets to Games in an all-cash deal in October 1990, Segal hired back editor Will Shortz and art director Rick Stark to produce what was at first intended to be a free, 12-page supplement for catalog buyers. Then, encouraged by Alan's analysis of the numbers and a dozen of his own phone calls to past subscribers, Segal decided to explore a relaunch.

"I didn't think this thing had a chance," says Richard Riccelli, a copywriter based in Newburyport, Massachusetts, who was instrumental in the game plan. "Talk about a marketing challenge. Here's a magazine that was dead, and now they're going back to the reader and saying, |Yeah, you got screwed a little bit, but now we're asking you to pay for it again, cash up front.' If it takes courage to be a publisher, then it takes extraordinary courage to relaunch."

Riccelli's reservations receded in dramatic fashion during a late November 1990 trip to a crossword puzzle convention in the Catskills, where Shortz was one of the featured speakers. "I asked Will to introduce me to the audience so I could see if there were any ex-subscribers there," Riccelli remembers. "Then I held up the magazine and said we were considering a relaunch. The words were barely out of my mouth when I got a standing ovation." Afterward, he held an impromptu focus group of about 100 people - one of whom offered the advice that shaped the entire Games campaign: "Just apologize, and nobody will mind."

As implausible as that may sound, it worked - and to an astonishing degree. Another advantage was Alan Segal's ability to approach the numbers from a mail-order perspective, calculating the lifetime value of a subscriber. "Alan is the nearest thing I know to a spreadsheet on feet," Riccelli quips. "He was able to see, where nobody else could, how this magazine could be circulation-driven and make money."

Under the PSC regime, nearly two-thirds of the Games file was agencysold. So when circulation director Mark Hollister began preparing for a series of spring 1991 direct-mail tests, he focused on former direct-sold subscribers: "We segmented very carefully - from source, to number of times renewed, right down to the existing liability at the time the magazine went out of business. We probably ran about 20 different offer and price tests."