We had to google "Yukon." The GMC truck was the first hit, of course, and second, but the Canadian territory was third and it was in this illustrious page (Wikipedia) that I learned these very important facts: The Yukon was officially called the Yukon Territory until 2003 when it was changed to just the Yukon, by law. It is the most northern and western territory in Canada and borders the following things: British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Alaska, the Beaufort Sea. It has a flag, a seal, but no motto, and though it is very, very large, it is also very, very cold, and is home to just 34,000 people; the largest city, Whitehorse, has 20,000 of them, and the second largest, Dawson City, has 1500. Dawson City is where Greg Karais started his first publication at age 23. Today he is 38, and publisher of four profitable magazines about the Yukon.

Three of them are annuals: The Last Great Road Trip is a tourist magazine; its German-language counterpart is the in-flight magazine for Condor flights from Frankfurt to Whitehorse; and ArtsNet Yukon focuses on arts and cultural events in the territory. The flagship publication of Harper Street, Greg's company, is Yukon, North of Ordinary, a quarterly magazine which is also the in-flight magazine for Air North. We spoke to Greg by phone at his home office, which is in his house, on a hill, overlooking a lake, many mountains, and quite possibly, Alaska.

THE AWL: Tell me about how you got into publishing.

GREG KARAIS: Oh that's going way back. I was living in Dawson City. I got there about 1991 or so. I put an annual out, and that then morphed into a weekly after about 2 or 3 years.

THE AWL: Why publishing? Was this to make money?

GREG KARAIS: As a kid I always had newspaper routes at one time three and I always won the awards for selling the most subscriptions when there was a decent prize to be won. Aside from that I had no money-so I was able to sell ads to pay for the printing.

THE AWL: And what was the content?

GREG KARAIS: It was mostly history, but unfortunately history doesn't pay the bills, so it became advertorials, which we used to subsidize all the good stories.

THE AWL: So were you just winging it, and figuring out how to make money on these publications? Or was there something you were basing it on?

GREG KARAIS: It was based on stubbornness. I was just really stubborn. I was pretty young, I was 23 when I started. I had no business experience, no advertising experience, no experience in publishing. But I was just looking for sales. It was really small potatoes at first; I think I sold $3000 in ads the first month, and then more the next.

THE AWL: Did you have funding?

GREG KARAIS: My tip money funded it.

THE AWL: When were you able to quit being a waiter and focus on the publications?

GREG KARAIS: I was about 28, so ten years ago.

THE AWL: And were you doing the editorial, too?

GREG KARAIS: I always had someone else do editorial. I can write a mean check and that's about it.

THE AWL: So you started with this annual in Dawson, and now you have four publications, including two seatback magazines. How did that happen?

GREG KARAIS: The Last Great Roadtrip was the first one. I put a proposal in with Condor, saying that we would like to produce an in-flight magazine for the summer season for them. They accepted it under the guise that I would pay to put the magazine on the flights, plus I would pay freight to get them to them. And I based it on ad sales. The magazine is free to Condor, they didn't make any payment or anything like that. They charge me a fee per magazine to put it on the flights. And that's not unheard of; that's pretty common I think. And after that they don't want anything. And I was able to take those seatbacks, those eyeballs, and sell that. And that's what people want, those eyeballs.

THE AWL: Tell me about Yukon, North of Ordinary.

GREG KARAIS: Yukon, North of Ordinary was based as an in-flight magazine. So what we did, the first two years, we put a lot of locals in the magazine, to build loyalty with the locals. And there is also a huge loyalty to Air North, because they broke Canadian Air, or Air Canada's prices. Air Canada used to have outrageous prices, and with Air North, the fares got a lot cheaper. So there's a lot of loyalty to them. So we put a lot of people in the magazine, so people would go, oh I know that person. It literally feels like everybody in the Yukon knows someone that's been in the magazine. So loyalty was the first thing, but now we're gearing it more towards more of a national audience. Someone picking up the magazine in the bookshop doesn't care about a local person, it might be interesting here, but it's not really outside.

THE AWL: And how did you get involved with Air North? Did you approach them?

GREG KARAIS: I approached the airline about it. I knew when I got the Condor deal, I knew it opened a hallway with a bunch of door handles in it, it was just a matter of shaking the door handles and eventually one of those doors would open. I think it took about a year and a half of badgering them and making it happen before we actually got permission to put the magazines on the planes. I know they had many, many proposals coming in, but the key for us, everybody wanted to sell them a magazine, whereas I wanted to give them a magazine. So we print two covers. One has our UPC code on it, and the other one has the Air North logo on it, so it is branded for their flights. And they also get six pages in every magazine. So they get a percentage of the magazine, and they get to the vet the magazine. But there's a trust there now, they don't pay too much attention. It's nice. It's friendly. I'm not looking to create controversy.

THE AWL: So there are no battles between your editor and Air North at all?

GREG KARAIS: No, no. No battle. We get along really well actually. We submit our story ideas, and they say, yeah, that works for us. They just like to make sure we don't have stories about plane crashes, or things that would upset people. In this market, I don't think this magazine would be able to exist without the airline. The business people, the ones who are buying ads, they know there are thousands of people a year with that magazine in front of them for hours on the flights.

THE AWL: How does it compare to your relationship with Condor?

GREG KARAIS: Condor doesn't seem to care. They seem to be so big that they don't care what we do. They just want a paycheck. The airlines are really competitive. They are looking for revenue.

THE AWL: And these magazines are profitable.

GREG KARAIS: Yes. We are doing pretty well. We have just under a thousand subscribers to North of Ordinary, so that doesn't represent in much dollars. It's ad sales, I would say 95% of my business is ad sales.

THE AWL: And the rest of your distribution, how does that work?

GREG KARAIS: There's a company in Montreal called Presse Commerce, and I ship them 8000 magazines or so, and they ship them across Canada, to doctor's offices, lawyers offices. And that's been really good for subscriptions. They charge, I think, like quarter per magazine that goes out. And we have a deal with the Department of Tourism and Culture and they take 5000 magazines and when people request information on the Yukon, they include a copy of the magazine.

THE AWL: So to have a profitable magazine right now: that's pretty special.

GREG KARAIS: My ad sales are going up. Partially it's because of where we are. It seems like there's a lot of doom and gloom down south, but I think the small magazines are doing well, or at least holding their own. For the last issue of The Last Great Road Trip, I thought my sales were going to go down, so I cut the pages back, and in the end my sales were up a quarter of one percent, plus I saved on freight, so that ended up being really good for me. Sales are going up for three of my four publications.

THE AWL: So how is this possible-is the economy not messed up there?

GREG KARAIS: The economy here seems to be holding its own. I think we always hit the cycle about two years after. There are a lot of federal dollars up here just to keep the Yukon open, for mineral exploration and so on. Lots of people with federal jobs, which help out small business owners.

THE AWL: Who advertises in your magazine?

GREG KARAIS: There are a few anchors, but it is a lot of smaller guys, a lot of quarter pages. And those quarter pages seem to pay the bills.

THE AWL: And you do the ad sales?

GREG KARAIS: Yeah. I've had help in the past, but that's really expensive, so I've had to the cut them out. We don't have a large staff staff, and the workers comp, and the unemployment to pay, and the pensions. Being small, we can move a lot quicker. If sales go low, we can cut more pages.

THE AWL: How long did it take you to become profitable?

GREG KARAIS: North of Ordinary made money from the first day, when it came out in February 07.

THE AWL: And the others?

GREG KARAIS: Bookkeeping was the curse of my life for so long. I'd say it took about 7 years before I was making money on it. What's happened with the North of Ordinary is that I've been able to hire a fulltime editor, fulltime designer, so it all fits together now. Since North of Ordinary has been around, everything else has become a lot more profitable. Everything is spread out over more dollars. The editor is responsible for some stuff, but everything else is contracted out. Elaine Corden is fulltime, there's a separate editor for the German publication, but Elaine is responsible for the other ones. Our new editor has a great sense of humor. Most magazines lack humor, and everyone just wants to laugh, so we're trying to put more humor in the magazine.

THE AWL: You have PDFs online of your magazine. That seems unique.

GREG KARAIS: Is it? I didn't know. I just want people to read the magazine. My job is the sell the Yukon, get people up here so people can make a living.

THE AWL: Tell me more about the Yukon. I had to Google it.

GREG KARAIS: You need to come up! You need to visit. We'll set you up with a place to stay. From your front door [in Portland] it takes about 40 hours to drive, pretty much nonstop. On average there's about 11 square miles per person. White Horse is the main city, there's 24,000 people there. It's the most beautiful place in the world. There's no one here. From our windows we can see lakes. People don't know about it, they just think it's cold. Yeah, it's cold, but the summers are beautiful, the daylight is incredible. No one expects you stay the whole winter. Everyone goes away. Last winter we went to Paris and then flew to London and backpacked around Portugal with our 4-year-old and year-and-a-half old for six weeks. I would never get into a weekly again, or monthly.

THE AWL: So is winter in the Yukon like August in Europe, everything shuts down and people leave?

GREG KARAIS: In Dawson City even the coffee shops close. Over Christmas there's just one hotel open; they take turns shutting down. You could fire a cannon down the main street and not hit anyone. The coldest I've ever seen in there is -56. That is cold. -30 is comfortable. -35 is bleak, and anything after that starts to hurt. Literally like if you started your car and started to drive you'd just hear thump, thump, thump, from where they are square and sitting on the ground. I don't know if I'm going to die here, but I'll spend the rest of my good years here, for sure. The winters are harder for older people. But the quality of life here is very rich. We don't have traffic like you have down there, the I-5.

THE AWL: How'd you end up there?

GREG KARAIS: I was going to go to college for business management and I was doing course work right out of high school and I was thinking, this is stupid. So I cashed in my tuition money and bought a ticket to Calgary and I worked there for a while and I ended up getting fired, and I went for a bike ride the day after I got fired for about 1200 kilometers, then went up to Vancouver Island and took the Alaska Marine Highway to Skagway then cycled into Whitehorse. I hated the Yukon, went to a horrible place called Beaver Creek. So I left, but I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I came back, this time to Dawson City. And now 17 years later I'm grey and bald and getting fat.

THE AWL: Do you have plans for more publications?

GREG KARAIS: I'm all about quality of life right now. My kids are young; I only get one shot with them. And without exaggerating, I bet I don't work more than 20 hours a week. I'm 38 years old and I paid the price before, I was working 70 and 80 hours a week before when I was making no money and blah blah blah, I don't want to go back to that. My only niece died in a car accident, and it was a big wake up call. Life is short, tenuous, and fragile, and I don't want to work my life away.

THE AWL: So what did you do this weekend?

GREG KARAIS: My in-laws were in town, we worked on the boat. I've been working on the house. We just got a couple of donkeys. They are amazing creatures, I never grew up around livestock like that. But our daughter is not even two years old and she just walks up under their bellies and stands there and will pick up a piece of straw and they'll stop what they're doing to eat that little piece of straw. We are on 65 acres, on a mountainside and we have bears here, and so that's one of the reasons we have them, for bear controls. I trust my kids' lives with these animals. They'll scare the bears away. They are funny characters. They are like 500 pound dogs.

THE AWL: Where are you in relation to Alaska?

GREG KARAIS: I can probably see Alaska from my window.

THE AWL: Can you see Russia from your window?

GREG KARAIS: My God, thank God she resigned. What a horrible, horrible person. What a disgrace to America. Thank God Obama got in. No, I don't think I can see Russia from my window. But I'm probably about 60 miles from the Alaska border. We're going there in a couple days. I spend a fair amount of time in Alaska.

THE AWL: What's it like? My main Alaska education comes reading profiles of Sarah Palin.

GREG KARAIS: Well, there is a bit of that there. Billboards proclaiming Matthew 10:21, or whatever, I don't get it. There's a lot of Christians up there, a lot of military up there. It's fairly transient as well. I find Alaskans to be incredibly generous, friendly, helpful, outgoing.

THE AWL: If you live in the middle of nowhere how do you get the internet?

GREG KARAIS: This place is incredible. It's DSL here. We called the phone company and they were here in two days. The federal government had a program across Canada, they felt that the internet would put places on more of a level footing, so there was a big push to get the Internet across Canada and the Yukon certainly benefited for that.

THE AWL: What do you want people to know about the Yukon?

GREG KARAIS: I think there's a total misunderstanding of what's up here. I think people think we're kind of backwater up here, kind of hillbillyish. It's well-educated up here, nice clothes, good cars. It's completely misunderstood. People think cold weather is bad, but we can drive in the winter here. The humidity of southern Ontario or Lake Michigan is far worse than the winters here. A hundred steps down my driveway, and this is obviously not everywhere here, but I have a hundred-mile view in either direction. If you go hiking, you feel like you're the first person that's ever been somewhere.

Previously: Michael K., Web Entrepreneur, Blogger, Pottymouth

Logan Sachon is a writer in Portland (Oregon).