STEVE BAYLESS : Thank you, Dr. Wagner. Finally this morning 

 we're fortunate to have the Editor of the National Rifle Association's 

 TH^ AMERICAN HUNTER magazine, the largest pure hunting magazine 

 inJ^he United States today, with a circulation in excess of 700,000. 

 Earl Sheisby hales from Baltimore, Maryland. He has earned several 

 awards as a columnist and is most proud of a 1968 award as the 

 National Wildlife Federation Conservation Communicator of the Year for 

 Maryland. In 1978 THE AMERICAN HUNTER magazine was given the 

 first-place award by the Association for Conservation Information for 

 the outstanding magazine. He will speak on the issue of access to the 

 national magazine market. Earl. 



EARL SHELSBY : Thank you Steve. Everybody's taller than me. Well, 

 my object is to tell you how to sell to the national publications and I'm 

 going to tell you about my basic experience. 



I was lured out of the East to the Midwest to take over seven 

 weekly outdoor tabloids. In just a few months, with astute management 

 I managed to reduce them to one weekly publication. Well, the 

 recession of '74 hit about that time and the money problems got tighter 

 and the publisher couldn't afford to pay me anymore and I couldn't 

 afford to work for nothing so I became a free-lancer. I was one of the 

 eight million people out of work. For nine months I went down the 

 mountains of Virginia and free-lanced. In those nine months I made 

 $136.18. The $36.18 was from substitute teaching. So, I know what the 

 free-lancer is going through. 



I want to tell a little bit about the fantastic growth of THE 

 AMERICAN HUNTER because it's going to relate to some of the selling 

 possibilities. We went into 1979 with a circulation of 93,000 and at that 

 time NRA started to look to the hunter as a number. And in that time 

 we've grown to about 700,000 right now. The June issue will be 

 730,000. That's a fantastic population growth. The free-lance writers I 

 deal with say, "Hey, you're really growing. How about giving us some 

 more money?" Well, we are growing and we are taking in more money 

 but there's a big problem in the publishing business today and that's 

 costs, costs in paper and postage. This is where all the money is 

 going. Last month I was $81,000 over budget. Not because I paid the 

 writers that much, but because we were budgeted for 250,000 magazines 

 less than we published and all that extra cost was mostly paper and 

 postage. That budget will be readjusted, it's not that we're losing that 

 fast. We couldn't stay in business, otherwise but all that money... 

 $81 ,000. . .was for press time and mostly paper and a lot of postage, in 

 fact, the postage has gotten so critical that the American is now being 

 published half on the east coast and half on the west coast, just to 

 reduce the postage costs. My budget this year will be over $ 2 million 

 because it will fluctuate depending on circulation. Of that, $70,000 is 

 spent on stories by free-lancers, so you can see that a very small part 

 of the budget will be to buy more stories. 



In the last few months, with inflation, writers have been saying 

 "How about some more money? Our transportation costs are going up. 

 Our film costs are going up. We need more money." And I said. 



