People’s New Kid on the Block Right on Target With Teenagers

The mail has been bringing one boastful announcement after another from magazines.

Men’s Health will mark its 10th anniversary with the September issue, which will carry a record 147 ad pages (as well as different covers, front and back).

Details’ September issue will be the largest in its history, carrying 163 pages of ads.

Esquire’s September edition will be its biggest in six years, with 111 ad pages, 52.4% more than last September’s anemic issue.

And at Harper’s Bazaar, September’s 363 ad pages will swell the issue to 556 pages, making it the biggest in the magazine’s 131-year history.

Still, you might expect these kinds of strides from established publications that know what they’re doing, especially in these flush economic times.

What you don’t expect is a new monthly magazine to guarantee advertisers an initial circulation of 500,000 and then raise that guarantee to 800,000 after only six issues.

But that’s the amazing success story of Teen People, which Time Inc. spun off from People magazine in January. Principals at Teen People say the magazine actually is selling about 1 million copies per issue, so another hike in the guarantee, or rate base, may be announced before long.

The August issue, which features the singing group Backstreet Boys on the cover, has 114 pages of editorial content and 108 pages of ads. The 220-page September issue, which goes on sale Friday with James Van Der Beek (of TV’s “Dawson’s Creek”) on the cover, will have 109 ad pages.

“I’ve started to think of us as the magazine on steroids,” said Christina Ferrari, Teen People’s managing editor.

Teen People has clicked with a smart editorial mix that includes generous coverage of celebrities, such as Leonardo DiCaprio and the “Dawson’s Creek” cast, and sobering real-life stories. Among the latter is a September piece about a young man in Yorba Linda who turned police informant to beat a drug charge and ended up being killed. It concludes with a cautionary box (“Know Your Rights”) advising teens that, if arrested, they enjoy the same protection against self-incrimination as adults. There’s also an upbeat profile of a Utah girl with Down syndrome who became her school’s homecoming queen.

“Teens were really hungry for a magazine that took them seriously and talked to them as smart young people instead of as airheads,” said Ferrari, who previously was editor in chief of the teen mag YM. “Besides all the fun stuff on celebrities and fashion, we wanted to approach serious issues. We’ve found that there really isn’t any topic--whether it’s AIDS, gun violence, suicide or drinking and driving--that our readers won’t respond to.

“Teens are very aware and media-savvy. . . . They know what’s going on.” They also constitute the fastest-growing segment of the population. As of last spring, there were nearly 31 million Americans 12 to 19 years old, a number that’s expected to continue rising before leveling off in 2010.

It’s also a group known for spending and gravitating to brand-name products. A study done by Teenage Research Unlimited, a marketing-research firm in Northbrook, Ill., found that teens last year spent $84 billion of their own money and $38 billion of their families’ money. In the summer of 1997, the study found, teens spent an average of $53 a week of their own funds and $27 a week of family money.

“I think a lot of advertisers have recognized the power that teens have when it comes to long-term brand loyalty,” said Anne Zehren, the publisher of Teen People. “Prestige beauty advertisers, for example, are starting to add the youth market to their ad spending.”

As rapidly as Teen People has grown, its circulation is still dwarfed by those of the teen giants: Seventeen, 2.5 million; YM, 2.2 million; and Teen, 1.8 million.

Jump, launched in September by Weider Publications, plans to raise its rate base to 350,000 (from 300,000) in January.

Meanwhile, though, Teen People’s numbers show that the enormously profitable People, which has a circulation of 3.6 million, is the mother of success stories. Four years ago, the weekly chronicle of celebrities and ordinary people spun off InStyle, a women’s magazine that showcases glamorous stars in their fabulous homes. In 1997, InStyle topped 1 million in circulation and its ad revenue is soaring too.

People followed by rolling out Teen People and People en Espanol, which went from quarterly to monthly frequency in February and has a rate base of 200,000.

Stephen King’s Next One: Scribner says it will back Stephen King’s next novel, “Bag of Bones,” with a $1 million marketing campaign that will include trailer advertising in movie theaters, radio station giveaways, TV commercials and other reminders. This first book under King’s contract with Scribner involves a bestselling novelist who returns to the lakeside retreat he used to share with his late wife, only to be drawn into a local battle for custody of a 3-year-old girl.

“Bag of Bones” is on Scribner’s schedule for September.

Close-Up of Salinger: J.D. Salinger was perhaps the most private author in the world until Picador USA announced in the fall that it would publish writer Joyce Maynard’s account of the months she lived with him in the woods of New Hampshire.

Now comes an excerpt from Maynard’s “At Home in the World,” which appears in the September issue of Vanity Fair and suggests that the author of “The Catcher in the Rye” could be a possessive, dismissive and pretty cruel guy.

Maynard recalls that the reclusive Salinger, older by 35 years, sent her a fan letter at Yale University in April 1972 after the New York Times Magazine featured her on its cover as author of “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” Leaving school, she moved in with the twice-married “Jerry” months later.

Maynard describes a mutual infatuation that was complicated by a physical problem she had that apparently kept their relationship from being fully consummated.

Although Salinger hadn’t published anything since 1965, Maynard reveals that he wrote for hours a day and had completed at least two books that he stored in a room-sized safe in his home.

Readers of the excerpt should be warned that Maynard, who has made a career of sharing her life on paper, details how Salinger, who practiced homeopathic medicine and meditated daily, routinely purged himself of disagreeable foods that he might eat, such as pizza. He showed her how to do so as well.

As Maynard’s public profile grew (to Salinger’s dismay) and publication of her first book neared, he dumped her during a Florida vacation with his two children in 1973. He told her to return north and clear out of his house before he returned with the kids. He gave her a couple of $50 bills.

She bawled.

The cad.

* Paul D. Colford is a columnist for Newsday. His e-mail address is paul.colford@newsday.com. His column is published Thursdays.