What's your ad percent?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June, 1998 by Jeffery Parnau

That said, here's what's happening next. In order to allow all of this automation, the USPS intends to certify each publisher's use of postal-related planning software by title for three consecutive issues. If they agree that the publisher is appropriately determining ad percentages, weights and counts with the software, they will draft a letter of agreement that allows the publisher to use calculated weights (rather than measured weights), and the automatic ad percentages. They will not certify the software itself, and they will not certify the printer's use of software in determining either ad content or book weights.

The final kicker in the agreement is that you must forfeit any right to claim an overpayment made with the software. On the other hand, the USPS will reserve its existing right to audit your magazine at any time, and to demand additional payments if you have messed things up. No such agreements currently exist, so the final wording isn't available.

These will be pleasant changes for those publishers who have been measuring ads the way the USPS now demands they be measured. But for those of you who are now reading this in a prone position adjacent to your chair, things are about to get very, very ugly. If the USPS sniffs around, whether you are using automated software or not, you could have a financial disaster on your hands.

So what should you do? I can only recommend you slowly stop doing what you are doing. Start inching your ad percentage up bit by bit. Certainly nobody in the business would have deliberately flirted with this potential debacle. In my opinion, the wildly different opinions offered by the USPS over the years are the true reasons this is an issue in the first place. But you can't change the financial nature of your magazine overnight, either. Some publishers will have to slowly implement a rate hike to cover their increased printing and paper requirements.

Okay, back on your feet. You have been warned: You will be audited. There will be zero tolerance for error in the future, compared to virtually unmonitored compliance in the past. And a few unfortunate publishers who can't make this adjustment will, sadly, become former publishers. But hey, flipping burgers ain't the worst job in the world.

Jeffery Parnau, creator of Impoze publication and planning software, and author of Desktop Publishing, The Awful Truth and FOLIO:'s Handbook of Magazine Production, can be reached at www.impoze.com.