Before my Internet Tour Guide became a best-seller, but after the acquisitions editor pulled my proposal out of the publisher’s trash bin, the book almost didn’t get published. Writing books and magazine articles had become a full-time gig for me from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s and I saw a way to expand. My idea was simple: Merge the best parts of magazine publishing with book publishing. And try it on someone else’s dime. In the back of the book would be a tear-out card for two free quarterly electronic updates to the book, along with an offer to subscribe for a year’s worth of updates. Get it?
This was 1993—the dawn of the commercial internet—and the only interaction I had with my readers was through email and speaking engagements. I wanted to know more about what they were interested in because I suspected it was the same folks buying each work.
Having written for a lot of magazines I was always curious about why the business side—especially the circulation director—was paranoiacally protective of and disturbingly enamored with “The List” (of subscribers). It didn’t take me long to figure it out. Here was a list of hundreds of thousands of people who were willing to pay for what you produced. In addition to name, address, phone, and the like, it had a good bit of demographic information about each individual, as well.
My publisher for that book, skunk that he was, was not stupid. He understood the value of “The List” as well as I did. Probably better. He argued that readers should send their cards to him, not me. I was having none of that, and it took us several days to negotiate an arrangement: The publisher would receive the cards from the readers, have an employee enter the data in a database, and send me the files. It was pitched as saving me the trouble of data entry. I stupidly, stupidly took the deal. Stupid because the skunk publisher never sent the complete database.
That’s the frame of reference for what Time, Inc. is currently going through with Apple. Time, Inc. wants to sell iPad subscriptions to its publications through Apple’s iTunes Store. Not being stupid, it’s not about to let Apple control it’s list. But Apple, not being stupid either, won’t have it any other way.
