VETERAN women’s magazine editor Betsy Carter is making a comeback.
Carter is the editorial director of a new company that hopes to launch a magazine and website tied to the health industry sometime next year.
Curtis Kemeny, a wealthy consultant to the health care industry from California, has provided the early seed money.
As part of the deal, Carter plans to develop and edit a new health magazine to be called “Dx” – short for diagnosis.
“There was an extensive direct mail test and it did very well,” said Martin Walker, a publishing industry adviser who heads Walker Communications and has been advising the would-be entrepreneurs for the past seven months.
“They want to redefine health magazines in much the same way that Wired and Fast Company redefined business magazines,” says Walker.
If all goes well, it will roll out as a six-times-a-year magazine sometime next year and then go monthly, he says.
Carter has a wealth of experience in starting or relaunching magazines. She launched the defunct but critically acclaimed New York Woman.
When American Express Publishing pulled the plug on the magazine, Carter hooked up as the executive editor of Harper’s Bazaar with the late and great Elizabeth Tilberis. They restored the buzz factor to the Hearst fashion monthly.
But Carter had a falling out with Bazaar’s creative director Fabien Baron and eventually exited for the Hearst magazine development wing.
She left there for the top editor’s job at New Woman when it was still owned by Primedia and oversaw the transition to current owner Rodale Press.
If that is not enough of a resume, she’s married to Gary Hoenig, one of the founding editors of the red-hot ESPN Magazine.
“We hope to have the first issue out by next March,” says Carter, reached at her East Hampton home. She is also putting the finishing touches on a book, with the working title “Sunshine Girl” and she has just signed Joe Klein’s agent, Kathy Robbins, to search for a publisher.
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The publishing industry was flabbergasted at the pre-emptive $2 million bid that Viking made last week for the rights to the small-press hit “How to Behave So Your Children Will, Too,” by Sal Severe, and a planned follow-up title for preschoolers.
Severe is a school psychologist who works with “at-risk” kids, but it was not until he hooked up with Tim McCormick that sales of his self-published book began to take off.
McCormick and his wife, who have two children, had been to one of Severe’s seminars on childrearing and were impressed.
“I have two kids,” said McCormick, “My nine year old has a Ph. D. in sibling rivalry, and my five year old has a Master’s.”
They were so impressed by the change in behavior after listening to one of Severe’s seminars that McCormick formed a partnership with Severe to market the book.
He quit his day job as a salesman and formed Green Tree Press, a single-title publisher in Tempe, Ariz.
He redesigned the book, added a few chapters – and sales began surging. It was picked up by the Book of the Month Club as an alternate selection and by the Children’s Book of the Month Club.
Going the direct-market route, the book sold 185,000 copies, but because it was not in most bookstores, it did not make any of the major best-seller lists.
McCormick hopes that will change now with Viking as a partner.
“They have the relationships with the book retailers that we don’t,” said McCormick.
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Is a fight looming over a guest gig on the “Today Show”?
Working Mother editorial director Judsen Culbreth, who has been doing a guest spot on the show for years, is jumping ship to Scholastic Inc., where she will be a vice president and editor-in-chief of Scholastic Parent Publishing Group. There she will oversee Scholastic Parent & Child Magazine.
Culbreth’s spot at Working Mother is going to be filled by Working Woman managing editor Nicola Godfrey.
While Culbreth is vacating that office, she said she hopes to keep her long-running guest gig on NBC’s “Today Show” for herself.
It has helped her develop a national following as an expert on parenting and the workforce.
“I hope to keep it going, – maybe doing some different things for them,” says Culbreth.
No comment from NBC producers on which way they are leaning yet.