Paul Roman, 1931-2024
FHB staff remember the founder of Fine Homebuilding, who enriched millions with high-quality publications focused on crafts like woodworking and home building.
Paul Roman, Fine Homebuilding’s founder, died on January 5 at his home in Newtown, Connecticut, surrounded by his family. He was 92.
In 1975, despite having five kids to worry about, Paul and his wife, Jan, cleaned out their savings account and spent it on a direct-mail marketing campaign. They were soliciting subscriptions to a magazine that didn’t exist. Industry norms said to expect a 3% to 4% response, at best. They got six times that, and had to enlist their kids, friends, and neighbors to help open all the envelopes and process all the orders. The magazine was Fine Woodworking.
As it turned out, a high response rate wasn’t the only unusual thing about Fine Woodworking. Most magazines were written by freelance writers and funded by their advertisers. But Paul was an amateur woodworker, frustrated by the lack of good information about the subject, so he sought out experienced woodworkers and convinced them to write about their process. He also limited the advertising to products relevant to woodworking and relegated the ads to the front and back of the magazine, away from the feature articles. Providing readers with authoritative information was the primary goal, not pleasing advertisers. Paul’s dictum was “the reader comes first,” and it proved a successful formula.
Under Paul’s guidance, the company launched more than half a dozen magazines, including Fine Homebuilding in 1981. There were countless books and videos (Paul was an early proponent of how-to-videos). Circulation numbers of the various magazines were modest, but readers renewed their subscriptions at rates that were the envy of the industry. If you were passionate about a craft, whether woodworking, home building, or any of the others covered by Taunton publications, once you found these magazines, you loved them.
Over nearly fifty years, Paul Roman enriched the lives of millions of people with the company that he and Jan built, the people they hired, and their commitment to authentic, high-quality publications. Those of us who have benefited from what he created will be forever grateful. We will work to keep his legacy alive.
—FHB STAFF
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