The story of Modern Ferret. In 1994 Eric and I took money from our wedding as well as money borrowed from Eric's mom to start Modern Ferret. We started going to ferret shows and talking to people. Many people were wary of purchasing a subscription because 10 years earlier there had been a ferret magazine (American Ferret) that only put out one issue. Of course, we had nothing to do with that magazine. We didn't even have ferrets in 1985. (Heck, we didn't even know each other in 1985!) Over time, people began to subscribe. The first issue came out in 1995 (February). It was very hard for us to get ads (which traditionally fund magazines). But we continued. We were living in two rooms at the back of my mother in law's house, so we didn't have much in the way of overhead. Early on we encountered all kinds of resistance from ferret groups. We were associated with no group, yet each group claimed we were associated with one of the others. One group even suggested that we were affiliated with Marshall Farms because we had the same initials! Another group refused to take an ad from us for their newsletter because they claimed we were a competing organization (we were never a ferret organization -- we were a magazine). When they finally did accept our ad, months later, they gave us no time to update the ad. That group made it clear to us that they wanted to put us out of business. Why? I have no idea. I didn't know the people, so I don't know what they had against us. We wanted to help ferret owners; we though ferret groups would be happy about that. Another group published an editorial about us when we were first starting out making claims that were simply not true. The writer said we were anti-ferret shelter because we didn't allow pricing to be displayed in ads we took -- never mind that when we sent this person the ad materials we were asking her opinion of them and it said clearly on the materials that they were not written in stone. She said we were only interested in money. As you read the rest of this, you'll see that money had nothing to do with it. We were trying to make a living, yes. Hopefully be able to move out of Eric's mom's house, yes. But our mission was to get accurate and current information to as many ferret owners as possible. We made a lot of sacrifices to do that. We tried to go to as many ferret shows as we could; we wanted to learn as much about ferrets as was available because we wanted Modern Ferret to be accurate. I have a background in medical editing and I applied the same standards of accuracy to the articles we published in Modern Ferret (Bob Church was quite surprised when I told him I did fact-checking even on Dr. Williams' articles). For the most part, people at ferret shows were cordial to us. However, one group placed our table in a virtually invisible spot in the small exhibition hall -- a friend of ours who knew we were there had to walk through twice before she could locate our table. A couple of years later one of the leaders of that ferret group complained in a letter to Eric that we never went to any of their shows. Well, that's how invisible that particular spot in the exhibition hall was -- one of the people in that group didn't even know we were there! (Never mind that no one from that group ever approached us at that show to say "hi" and no one told us that we had to be out of the hall at a specific time, which made us have to rush in putting everything away.) Some time early on TFH (which publishes Tropical Fish Hobbyist magazine and numerous books about animals) started up a distribution company called Direct Sales. Until then, the only magazine distributor into pet stores was Global Distribution Services, a company owned by Fancy Publications (the publishers of CatFancy, DogFancy, Ferrets, Critters Annual et al.). It was a big thing in the pet magazine industry for independently published pet magazines (that is, not published by Fancy Publications) to have a way to get exposure in pet store chains and independent pet stores. As we later learned, most pet magazines are sold in pet stores; bookstores do not sell large numbers of pet magazines. We struck a deal with Direct Sales and Modern Ferret got into PetCo and many, many other pet stores along with the independent magazines like Reptile and Amphibian, Dog World, and Cats Magazine. This is what finally made it possible for us to move out of Eric's mom's house in 1997. We couldn't buy a house (and still do not own one -- we will likely never own one), but we rented a house. We finally had space to put all the magazine stuff. By this time we were selling a lot of back issues of the magazine and were trying to start-up The Ferret Trading Post. Modern Ferret was barely making enough money for us to make ends meet. Every month was stressful when it came to paying bills. But still we continued. We had invested a lot of time and, by this time, money (we took very small paychecks -- ranging from $100 to $200 a week -- the rest went back into making Modern Ferret a better magazine). As soon as we moved in 1997 we got health insurance; we knew something was wrong with Eric, but we didn't know what. His lower back was hurting him a lot, he lost a lot of weight without trying, and he would have bone-shaking chills and spiking fevers. He started seeing a gastroenterologist (a guy who my brother was friends with from medical school). Eric was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease in December of 1997. He was able to manage it with steroids (prednisone). For a while... By this time, Fancy Publications had launched Ferrets magazine. At first, it didn't affect us too much. We were in PetCo and we were holding our own. To backtrack -- just as Fancy was launching Ferrets, the owner of Fancy Publications, Norman Ridker, invited Eric and me to dinner. We went, curious to see what he was really interested in. He told us his life story, how he started Fancy Publications and slowly but surely grew it and bought up a bunch of the independent magazines. He was looking to buy Modern Ferret. Maybe we should have sold it to him then, but we knew Modern Ferret was not just another magazine in a line of carbon-copies. We knew we really cared about what went into Modern Ferret -- and we thought it would be letting down our readers if we sold it. Mr. Ridker wasn't very happy about that, but he was cordial. I still remember my shock when he kissed my cheek when we left the restaurant. Creepy. With Eric's Crohn's Disease under control, for the most part, we continued on our merry way. We weren't really making enough money to move forward, but the money from Direct Sales was keeping us afloat. It was about $50,000 a year. Now, keep in mind that each issue of the magazine cost us about $20,000. We were living month to month, week to week. Several of the people in the ferret groups that had given us such a hard time early on immediately jumped at the chance to write for Fancy's Ferrets magazine. Several wrote articles or columns for them (one person even wrote an article for Ferrets that Eric had initially worked up with her for Modern Ferret). Advertisers who we had been friends with (or we thought), were spending more money with Fancy than they ever did with us. When we tried to raise our ad rates (this particular company was still paying 1995 rates in 1998 even though our readership through distribution and subscriptions had increased to about 15,000 or more), they balked and pulled their ads from us, saying it was "business." Meanwhile, they'd been very chummy with us for all the years that we didn't raise their rates. I didn't know friendship had a monetary value. At the end of 1999 Direct Sales went out of business. We received a fax in December telling us that they were ceasing distribution in January 2000. A fax. Modern Ferret had been one of their top selling magazines, getting a whopping 70%-80% sell-through (frame of reference: a magazine is considered successful and profitable if the sell-through is 50%). Now the only distributor into pet stores was Global Distribution Services, owned by Fancy Publications. They offered us a deal: we would pay them $25 per store (a one-time fee) and they would put Modern Ferret into pet stores. If Modern Ferret didn't sell well, they would drop it (stop distributing it). They said that they would refund the $25 per store if they dropped Modern Ferret soon after picking it up, but they refused to put that in writing. How would we know if Modern Ferret was selling well or poorly? They would tell us. They would NOT provide any proof of the sales (for example, an affidavit, which is what our distributors into book stores gave us). It would just be them telling us Modern Ferret was or wasn't selling well. They would pay us based on what they said our sales were -- again, no proof one way or another. Just their word. Now, maybe Global Distribution Services' word is as good as gold, but we were not willing to put Modern Ferret in the hands of a company owned by our direct competitor magazine. Thus, we had NO distribution into pet stores. We suddenly had lost $50,000 a year. But we didn't stop. We had readers who relied on us. Unfortunately, the stress of all of this caused Eric to have a terrible flare up of Crohn's Disease. He wad bedridden. His lower back was so inflamed he could barely walk. He was on stronger and stronger pain medications, which made his Crohn's worse. He was in physical therapy. They tried new medications on him. One of them caused him to vomit a lot. They thought he had pancreatitis. No. Back on the medication. It still made him sick. Back on prednisone and other meds. He was spiking fevers even after taking two extra-strength Tylenol and ibuprofen. His doctor finally had him admitted to the hospital in August. He was put on mega doses of prednisone, which finally stopped his back pain. He gained a lot of weight. Things with Modern Ferret were going from bad to worse. We had a huge gap in publishing while Eric was sick. We borrowed money from his mom (again) and got out Issue #27. We had thought years before of starting a mail-order company, The Ferret Trading Post. We struck a deal with The Ferret Store to fulfill the orders. I'm not really sure when this happened. By the summer of 2000 I was at the beginning of a bout of depression (I've had problems with mild depression since I was a child, my first major depression occurred when I was about 13 or 14, a few years after my mom died), so some of these events may be a little off as far as when they exactly happened. The deal with The Ferret Store helped us out a bit, but it never made all that much money for us. We finally decided that selling ferret products wasn't profitable for us and stopped selling them a few months ago. The products we sell now are through affiliates, we never even touch the orders. We continued to lose money. We nearly got evicted. But we pressed on. We got out Issues #28, #29, and #30. We started doing give-aways through The Ferret Store and some other companies. We were trying to reach more people. That was always the thing: Trying to replace the distribution we'd lost when Direct Sales went out of business. In the spring of 2001 we had to cancel our health insurance. We were way behind on all our bills and that was just something we couldn't afford anymore. Eric was maintained on prednisone, which is cheap. We were working on Issue #31. It was going to be a big deal. We were going to get publicity. By some stroke of luck, author Tama Janowitz decided she loved Modern Ferret and she wrote an article for us and committed herself to helping us get lots of publicity. She also got Todd Oldham to do our cover and centerfold photos -- for free. Todd Oldham is a big animal lover and he was happy to help out. That July of 2001 our car was repossessed. It seemed like we were fast heading for a new label: White Trash. It's not what I ever imagined when I was in college, getting awards for my poetry. Not what Eric had imagined when he was studying at RPI. If it hadn't been for Eric's mom, we'd be living on the street now. Eric's mom paid for us to get our car back. We had to drive several hours into another state to get it back. I do not recommend getting your car repossessed. Eric starting having a pain on his upper right side radiating through to his back. Eric's doctor saw him for free (being that he was friends with my brother). He thought it might be an enlarged liver. Eric's blood sugar was dangerously high from the prednisone. If he didn't get off the prednisone and change his diet, he would become diabetic. In case I forgot to mention this: Crohn's Disease flare-ups are triggered by stress. Our printer (the company that printed Modern Ferret) did a work slow-down on Issue #31. It took them several weeks longer than planned to print the issue. This was August 2001. We were behind in paying them, and I'm sure that's what the problem was, though they didn't bother to tell us that. The issue finally mailed at the end of August. We owed our printer for part of Issue #30 and for Issue #31. We had already sent them the materials for Issue #32. Then it was September 11th and the whole world changed. It triggered Eric's Crohn's even further and it sent me -- finally -- into the suicidal depths of major depression. On September 12th, our printer called us and told us they would not print anything else from us until they'd been paid. This phone call was in the worst possible taste, after all, we were only about 50 miles from New York City -- for all they knew we could have lost family members in the attacks! (Fortunately, we did not.) I still can't believe their timing. Then there was the anthrax in the mail scare. Several large magazines went out of business. Advertisers in all magazines pulled ads. Issue #31 generated no publicity and no sales. We waited to send out renewal notices because no one was opening their mail ... and because we felt it was really tacky to ask people to buy things in the wake of 9-11. Our sales rep from our printer told us if we paid off Issue #30, they'd print #32 for us. She didn't tell us that this was moot if we didn't pay the total #31 bill by October. We sent them $3,000 -- half of what we still owed them on #30. When we called to set up a schedule for printing #32, she told us we'd have to pay the more than $10,000 we owed before they would print for us. They had all our Issue #32 materials. We were screwed. In December 2001, I started on medication for my depression. My aunt (a nurse practitioner) helped Eric and me apply for Medicaid so Eric could get treatment for his worsening pain. An ultrasound had shown that Eric had an enlarged liver from the prednisone. He was coming off the pred, but his Crohn's was flaring up. Fevers, chills, pain. We found a new printer and Eric's mom -- yet again -- helped us pay for printing Issue #32. By some stroke of luck someone at our previous printing company sent us back all our materials for Issue #32. We still owe our previous printer more than $10,000. In early 2002 Eric was an emergency admission to the hospital. They did a CAT scan and found a huge abscess in the muscle on lower left of his back. They drained a liter and a half of crap from that abscess. He had a drainage tube and a bag hanging out of the abscess when he left the hospital a week later. He also had a midline venous access so I could give him IV antibiotics several times a day at home. He would end up in the hospital two more times before having the drainage bag removed in summer of 2002. Fortunately, we were eligible for Medicaid, so Eric could get medical treatment. He also applied for Social Security Disability (SSD), which he got. During this time we had vet bills, too. Eric was so sick when Sabrina -- our very first ferret -- died that I had to take her to be cremated by myself. It was very sad. Bosco had lymphoma. Knuks had hemangiosarcoma. Cauliflower had lymphosarcoma. They all died. We were down to Trixie, Balthazar, Koosh and Gabby. In the meantime, we had interviewed Richard Bach for Issue #33 of Modern Ferret. Eric has been a huge fan of Mr. Bach for most of his life. It was a high point for Eric to be able to talk with him. We pressed on, believing that this might be the thing that finally got Modern Ferret back on its feet again. Where we used to have a renewal rate of near 80% (again, unheard of in the magazine industry), we were barely getting any renewals. I can't blame anyone for not wanting to renew. We didn't know what was going to happen, but we were still committed to creating Modern Ferret. In July of 2002 our landlord raised our rent to $1,800 a month (up from $1,500). Our parents and siblings had been paying rent for us for a while; this had to end. Eric's mom has a rental property with a huge, unattached garage. Eric's stepdad and his friend converted it into a living space for us. We moved from a four-bedroom house to this converted garage in October 2002. We had to throw away or otherwise get rid of much of our belongings. My parents paid to have a garage full of back issues of Modern Ferret moved to one of the barns on their property. We continued to be committed to publishing Modern Ferret. Just before we moved into the garage, we mailed out Issue #33 with an interview with Richard Bach. Eric was extremely debilitated from his 8 months of being hooked up to a drainage bag and an IV pole. He couldn't climb stairs. He tired easily. It would be a full year before he was steady on his feet again. Of course, living here, we do not pay rent. But we had to reapply for Medicaid because we're in a different county. As of today (March 1), Eric finally has Medicare (which means that his doctor will finally get paid again). He is still receiving SSD. That is basically all the income we have. We haven't had the money to put out another issue of Modern Ferret. We still have to borrow money every month to pay all our bills. We stopped processing new subscriptions at the end of May 2003 (and we stopped processing multiple-year subscriptions before that), because we had no idea when we were going to get another issue of Modern Ferret out. I have a stack of online subscription orders that were never processed. I stopped cashing checks for renewals and subscriptions. I have continued processing and fulfilling orders for products like back issues and books. Like I said, we have thousands of copies of back issues of Modern Ferret at my parents' house. Unfortunately, I'm not much better off than Eric is. Although I'm not on disability, it's really only because of the business. I've had four episodes of major depression in my life, this most recent one being the worst. I've had dysthymia (chronic, mild depression) since I was a child. With all that has happened with Modern Ferret, Eric's illness, losing ferrets, and other personal issues, I'm functioning at about 60% to 70% of my potential -- despite medication and therapy. I'm just not the girl I used to be. When I've tried to arrange for job interviews, I've simply broken down. Certainly I hope to be able to get a "real" job (that is, a job outside the home) at some point in the future, but it's not going to happen anytime soon. We started an free online newsletter (ferretnews.com) so we could continue to help educate ferret owners. We advertise things that we can still fulfill: items sold through Cafe Press, items sold through affiliate links (both are order types we never even touch), back issue and book sales. In the last couple of months we've bounced a bunch of the the checks we've written. I've had a couple of people e-mail me asking for refunds. The money's just not here. We have nothing but a bunch of books and back issues. We owe our vet over $2,000 for the surgeries and care of Koosh and Trixie, who both died despite our efforts. I'm not looking for sympathy. Eric and I chose to publish Modern Ferret and to continue publishing even when everything turned against us, when we were ill or broke or when various ferret groups attacked us for things we hadn't even done. We were committed to getting accurate information out to ferret owners. Until the last month or so, we fully intended to continue publishing. I have a half-done Issue #34 on my computer. But the bottom line is, we can't afford to publish. We need to make a living. We need to be able to pay our bills. We need to be able to live. We need to stop having all this stress, because it's literally killing us. We have never failed to ship merchandise to people (though there may have been a couple of times when we were working with The Ferret Store where an item in an order was missed, which we corrected as soon as we were notified). As soon as we realized there was going to be a huge gap between issues, we stopped processing subscriptions and renewals. I've always done the best I could do with what I have. I now have nothing. Still, I'm committed to helping educate ferret owners through our free online newsletter. I could crawl under a rock and not comment on the "What happened to Modern Ferret?" topic. Surely plenty of people in the ferret community have disappeared that way. But there's no compensation that can rival the feeling that you've helped someone or their ferret. I intend to continue reaping that reward for as long as I can still write (which is hopefully the rest of my life). All I can say to those who subscribed to Modern Ferret and only got a couple (or one) issue is this: I'm sorry. I've done everything I could possibly do to continue publishing Modern Ferret. It was never our intention to "steal" people's money; we always operated on the up-and-up, from day one. I wish I had money to pay you back. But I don't. I'm sorry. I don't think anyone can fathom how I feel about this. Note to Mr. Ridker (because I know there are employees of Fancy Publications on the FML and I hope they'll forward this to him): You may be able to play a part in destroying what I've created; but you can't lay a hand on my spirit. --Mary & The Fuzz ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Mary R. Shefferman and Gabby, The Lone Modern Ferret Depression Info: http://www.depressionplace.com Read my blog! http://www.modernferretblog.com/mary Read my other blog! http://blog.depressionplace.com [Posted in FML issue 4438]