Steering Down East

The Rockport mansion that houses the offices of Down East Enterprise was once a family home lorded over by dozens of cats. The felines are gone, but the family atmosphere remains at the headquarters of Maine’s most famous magazine and book publisher.

According to President and Chief Executive Officer Robert Fernald, there are two reasons for this. One is employee longevity. “We had an all-company photo shoot recently,” Fernald says, “and it struck me how many people have been here for a long time, had children, and raised them in the area. I take a lot of satisfaction from that.”

The second reason for those familial vibes is that Down East Enterprise is truly a family business. “My parents were summer people; we’d come up every year from Connecticut,” Fernald, 48, recalls. “They bought the company [from founder Duane Doolittle] in 1977. At that time, it was just the magazine, with a couple of books, and eight employees.”

Bob Fernald, like his parents, came into the publishing business through an abiding love of Maine. After earning a BA in English literature from Syracuse University and an MBA from the University of Maine, Fernald moved to Boston and then to New York City, where he worked for a technical school company. “I discovered that I really liked business,” he says. When his father, H. Allen Fernald (now retired though still officially chairman of the company), offered him the job of controller at Down East Enterprise in 1992, he jumped at the chance to move back to Maine with his wife and children.

Today—30 years after Allen and Sally Fernald purchased the company, and 15 years since Bob Fernald came on board—Down East Enterprise employs 75 people in its spacious headquarters on Route 1. In addition to its signature magazine, Down East: The Magazine of Maine, the company also publishes Fly Rod and Reel, a fly-fishing magazine; and Shooting Sportsman, a publication for wing shooters and fine gun collectors. At a satellite office in Salisbury, Massachusetts, another company enterprise employs 10 people who produce Speedway Illustrated magazine and other NASCAR-related materials. Down East Books has grown from the few titles Fernald’s parents bought in ’77 to its role as the state’s largest book publisher, producing about 25 titles per year, including children’s books, cooking and gardening guides, and anthologies of regional fiction and nonfiction, and more. Book publishing constitutes 10% to 15% of the company’s business.

Clearly, Down East Enterprise is responsible for a lot of presses rolling each month. Yet the company’s most recent growth area does not involve paper. “Our biggest expansion in the past decade has been online,” Fernald says. “We registered our domain name when Internet advertising was just starting up, and have been kind of waiting on the sideline, waiting for that business to mature. It’s finally happening.” Both on its new website and in the printed monthly issues of Down East, many readers are shopping for a piece of Maine paradise. “Real estate advertising,” he says, “is now our single biggest advertising category.”

Under Fernald’s watch and with editor Paul Doiron’s guidance, Down East magazine has also evolved in its content, becoming more issue-oriented in editorial focus and sophisticated in its design. “At one time, all people wanted to know about Maine was feel-good stories about how beautiful it is here,” he says. “Readers’ tastes have changed dramatically.”

Book publishing, too, requires Fernald and his staff to constantly monitor readership trends. Like any successful publishing company, Down East Books receives many more manuscripts than it can possibly use. Occasionally, Fernald admits, a big fish gets away. “We were one of several publishers that had a chance to look at [Sebastian Junger’s] The Perfect Storm,” Fernald says. “We rejected the manuscript, because we thought, ‘Who wants to read a story in which everyone knows what happens at the end?’ That was probably one of the more famous Down East blunders.”

One of the few.