10 Years and Counting
by P.D. Lesko
Whenever I hire a new writer, I always make a point of telling the individual that my desire in publishing the Adjunct Advocate is not to simply report on what has happened, but rather to anticipate trends before they become national news. I like to believe I am a forward thinker. The most compelling evidence of this trait has to be that I founded the Adjunct Advocate in 1992. Who, in 1992, was writing about adjunct faculty on a regular basis? Not The Chronicle, LinguaFranca, Academe, or the newspapers of the national academic labor unions, the AFT’s On Campus and the NEA’s Advocate. In 1992, adjunct faculty were higher education’s “dirty little secret.”
I was 31 in 1992. I had no spouse, no kids, no mortgage and no idea what publishing a national magazine was all about. I had a teaching job, which I desperately wanted to leave behind, and this idea that maybe I could publish a magazine for part-timers. I did what I always do in these situations: I read books, newspaper and magazine articles. I read about the proper launch of a 4-color, glossy, national magazine (at a minimum cost of $250,000). I read about media kits, and gorilla marketing. I read about the difference between managing, copy and production editors, and I read about desktop publishing. Then, I jumped–with $5,000, and health insurance thanks to COBRA.
In many ways, it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I knew nothing about running a business, even less about marketing, managing free-lance writers, soliciting advertising, postal regulations governing bulk mail, and charting a course through uncharted editorial waters. I earned a salary of $25.00 per week. In the first year, 300 people subscribed. I still remember many of their names. I prepared the mailings back then, printed out the labels, sorted the bundles for the Post Office and filled out the necessary paperwork.
Last year, I joined the Independent Publishers Association–partly because I saw that LinguaFranca, was also a member publication. The IPA e-mail listserv is populated by editors and publishers sharing information with one another about every aspect of the magazine publishing business you can imagine. I wish I had known about the IPA and its listserv in 1992. I wouldn’t have had to reinvent all those wheels along the way.
The last decade has been one long apprenticeship in desktop publishing, graphic design, marketing, management, new media, computer programming, e-commerce, and editorial content management. Along the way, I have made some spectacular blunders. I employed a printer to produce the magazine in 1993 who quoted me a rate, printed the magazine, and then claimed the original quoted price hadn’t included the cover. Edwards Brothers of Ann Arbor sued me for the then astronomical amount of $3,500. We settled out of court. I would learn, over the years, that printers are the bane of a publisher’s life. You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.
I didn’t pay my payroll taxes on time. I didn’t keep good accounting records. I didn’t have a good system of tracking free-lance contributions. I didn’t market the magazine aggressively enough. My media kit was awful. The cramped, photo-less layout of early issues was the result of my poor desktop publishing skills and lack of graphic design experience. I experimented with content (at one point there were fiction and poetry in the magazine). In short, I did everything wrong that I could possibly have done, and still free-lance writers contributed, the IRS worked out a payment plan and adjunct faculty subscribed.
My five-year-old son looks forward to each issue of the magazine. He told me the other day that I should put a photo of him in it. Sometimes, he talks about being the editor, and with his two-year-old brother goes around the house singing “dot-com,” “dot-com” “Adjunct Advocate dot-com.”
I never planned to make a life out of the Adjunct Advocate. I wanted to keep it for 10 years, sell it and then do something else–maybe write (I have an MFA in creative writing).
However, I’m in the groove, and it feels good to know what I’m doing and why. Readers look forward to each issue (we get calls when it goes out late). I can even feel comfortable giving a bit of advice to those new publishers on the IPA listserv. I love my job, and believe that the Adjunct Advocate has impacted higher education in America in a positive way. It has impacted the lives of tens of thousands of part-time faculty.
In 1992, I set out to publish a magazine for part-time faculty. The idea was mine, but without the support of readers, advertisers, business associates, writers and family the Adjunct Advocate wouldn’t ever have stood a chance. Thank you to each and every one of you who helped along the way.
