Second time around

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

As the results started rolling in, says Hollister, "We found that the people who had lost the worst - those who were owed more than 20 issues - actually responded the best. They had the easiest time swallowing that what had happened was not the fault of the current ownership. They were just happy that the magazine was back."

The response was nothing short of eye-popping. The first test, a 140,000-piece February mailing, pulled in a 40 percent gross response, with pay-up in the high nineties, from directsold subscribers. Although further mailings saw a gradual fall-off, Hollister says the results were still far more encouraging than originally expected.

On to the next round

While the circulation drive was coaxing back readers (some of whom like to send subscription requests written in code, crossword fonn or glow-in-the-dark

ink), Shortz and Stark were working out of their homes pulling together material for the first issue. "When Games ceased to exist, it was very traumatic," says Stark, who joined the title in 1988. "I spent six months sitting around in a bathrobe and a bad mood."

Shortz says he always felt that someone would come along to gather up Games and start again. "I'm the eternal optimist." As a puzzle fanatic (he started making games at age nine and sold his first at 13), Shortz was sure there would always be readers hungry for such a conveniently packaged product. "There's no other magazine like it out there."

Shortz has been with Games since November 1978 (it launched a year earlier), serving as editor since 1989. He has his own weekly five-minute segment on National Public Radio, and also holds what is reputedly the world's only college degree in enigmatology - the study of puzzles - which he earned from Indiana University. He is a former president and current historian of the National Puzzlers League, as well as a two-time captain of the U.S. team that in 1990 captured first place in the International Crossword Marathon.

When it became clear that enough readers wanted Games back for good (the magazine relaunched with 70,000 subscribers), Segal rented office space in Manhattan's low-rent Chelsea district and hired back six former staffers in May 1991. He eliminated a couple of positions and entrusted the work of what had been an eight-person art and production staff to Stark and his enthusiasm for Macintosh desktop publishing.

"Previously, we had used Macs just for typesetting and page composition," Stark notes. "But I knew it was possible to produce a magazine in a very new way." He encouraged Segal to invest about $30,000 in the necessary tools: two Mac IIfx computers, each with a 320-megabyte hard drive and 19-inch, 24-bit RasterOps display; two Syquest removable external drives with 45-megabyte capacity; a Laser-Writer II NTX printer; an XRS 3C scanner; and QuarkXPress 3.0, Adobe Photoshop and FreeHand software - all of which allows the magazine to produce most of its own color separations.

Stark is now able to create a page of 15 to 20 four-color images for about $300, compared with $3,000 or more in the past. "For a much more colorful, creatively expanded, same-size book (68 pages), our production costs are running between $10,000 and $14,000, as opposed to about $35,000 for the old Games."