Selling magazine subscriptions by mail used to be an artistic science.

We’d test offers, prices, premiums, creative look, creative voice, color vs. b&w, brochure vs. no brochure, buck slips, lift letters, long letter, short letter, who should sign the letter, terms.

Once we tried to find out if it made any difference whether a subscription cost $19.99, $19.98, $19.97, $19.96, or 19.95. I once discovered, accidentally, that if we put the long term (52 issues) ahead of the short term (27 issues) we got a lot more long term orders with no reduction in overall response.

Now I’m seeing plain envelopes with one short-copy inserts offering a year of Time for $10, 3 years of Fortune for$20, a year of National Geographic for $20. And Fortune sends me emails with sanctimonious gobbledygook about saving the environment.

This used to be a fun business.