“I’ll do that,” promised the farmer. “I’ll bring in the copy Tuesday and get the bills Friday morning.”
“My brother will have them ready for you,” said Helen, “but if you want to get the most out of your sale, why not run your bill as an ad in the Herald. On a combination like that we can give you a special price. You can have a quarter page ad in the paper plus 500 bills at only a little more than the cost of the ad in the paper. It’s the cost of setting up the ad that counts for once it is set up we can run off the bills at very little extra cost.”
“How much circulation do you have?”
“Eight hundred and seventy-five,” said Helen. “Three hundred papers go in town and the rest out on the country routes.” She consulted her price book and quoted the price for the combination ad and bills.
“I’ll take it,” agreed the farmer, who appeared to be a keen business man.
“Tell you what,” he went on. “If you’d work out some kind of a tieup with the farm bureau at Gladbrook and carry a page with special farm news you could get a lot of advertising from farmers. If you do, don’t use ‘canned’ news sent out by agricultural schools. Get the county agent to write a column a week and then get the rest of it from farmers around here. Have items about what they are doing, how many hogs they are feeding, how much they get for their cattle, when they market them and news of their club activities.”
“Sounds like a fine idea,” said Helen, “but we’ll have to go a little slowly at first. My brother and I are trying to run the paper while Dad is away recovering his health and until we get everything going smoothly we can’t attempt very many new things.”
“You keep it in mind,” said the farmer, “for I tell you, we people on the farms like to see news about ourselves in the paper and it would mean more business for you. Well, I’ve got to be going. I’ll bring my copy in tomorrow.”
“We’ll be expecting it,” said Helen. “Thanks for the business.”
She went around to the postoffice and returned with a handful of letters. Most of them were circulars but one of them was a card from her father. She read it with such eagerness that her hands trembled. It had been written while the train was speeding through southwestern Kansas and her father said that he was not as tired from the train trip as he had expected. By the time they received the card, he added, he would be at Rubio, Arizona, where he was to make his home until he was well enough to return to the more rigorous climate of the north.