By Richard L. Bryant
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OPEN LETTER![]() After many hours of agonizing appraisal of the Courier's mission as we see it and the press of the careers of the three major stockholders we have reluctantly come to the conclusion that some changes have to be made. In spite of our best efforts to achieve the bi-monthly schedule that we have constantly promised, we have not been able to achieve a quarterly rate for several years now -- I think that the best we ever did is 5 in one year. The fact is that the Courier is, for us, simply a part of the hobby, generated essentially out of our cellars on an all volunteer basis (except for the printer, typesetter, and Post Office), often costing us money out of pocket to get out. We are not supposed to be non-profit but it has turned out that way. We three, Leo Cronin, Joe Miceli, and myself, Dick Bryant, all have highly responsible full time careers that often eat up the spare time that we normally use to put the Courier together. These careers have become more intense, not less and have to have priority in our lives as they are what puts bread on the table. Trying to get more help, we have tapped everyone in our wargame acquaintance that is willing to help on a volunteer basis. It has not been enough. The Courier has suffered as a result of our inability to relieve the pressure. Note lower ratings of late on each article; we get low ratings and high non-interest quotients on the theme articles. Fewer are writing to tell us what they want to see in the magazine, most of the mail is on WRG controversies and yet Ancient articles get high non-interest quotients. Where are all the people who game in WWII, those also get low votes. In short, in spite of reaching several thousand gamers, The Courier is in trouble. We want most desperately to keep The Courier going. We believe that our articles, on the whole, have more wargaming meat in them than our competition. We don't have pretty color pictures but our articles set a standard in the hobby aimed at the reader who is serious about this hobby. We wouldn't try to continue if we did not feel that The Courier provides a necessary service to the hobby in the U.S. To strengthen The Courier and gain back the respect of our readers we must be ON TIME (for one thing, this will reduce the hours I spend answering letters starting "where is my issue!"). It will assist our advertisers to plan and enable us to establish meaningful deadlines for ads, articles, and address changes. And these are the areas that are critical to us timewise. To accomplish this after 9 years of unsuccessfully trying to be a bi-monthly, THE COURIER IS GOING QUARTERLY! It's the best we have been able to do and now you won't expect it any sooner than you should. The Sub price drops to $15 for 4 issues ($19 for Canada and Foreign Surface rate, $35 for Airmail). The cost per issue goes to $4.95 in stores (this covers the 21% increase in printing and other costs that we have absorbed over the past 1.5 years). Every subscriber will get the number of issues that he has subcribed for before August 1, 1990. That is, you will get the full number of issues that we owe you. New Subs and renewals after August 1 will be for 4 issues. The Courier will be the same size as it is now unless the numberof advertising pages dictates the need to change the size. We continue to maintain a ratio of article pages to ad pages. Support our advertisers; the more they advertise, the more pages you get in articles. We cannot afford the space to store back issues. To help to keep printing costs down we are not going to print many extras in the future. Back issues will become rarer and more of a collector's item. Back issues will now cost $7.25. After the Mexican American War Theme is finished, we will discontinue Theme Years for a while. I'm not even sure if a Theme can be covered in 4 issues... it was sometimes tough to do it in six. Besides the above, we have upgraded our computer to allow us to be desktop publishing using Ventura on the IBM. This will speed up typeset and paste-up and reduce the costs in these areas. Authors with IBM and Compatibles will be able to submit articles on disk, another simplification of effort on our part (if you are interested in author's notes for this drop me a line). All these changes are geared to allow us to bring you a timely magazine, responsive to your hobby needs. With your continued support, we cannot fail. Sincerely,
Richard L. Bryant
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