The following was posted by Ty Bomba, publisher and editor of Command in the Command folder on the ConsimWorld board in recent weeks. Back about a year ago, when I announced here we three principals at XTR (Chris Perello, Larry Hoffman and me, Ty Bomba) were "going off salary," I explained the idea was to try to keep Command from devolving into "another CounterAttack" magazine. Sadly, that’s pretty much what’s happened anyway. That came about because -- as we foresaw and feared, but really had no alternative plan we could put in place -- as our publication schedule slowed, so too did our advertisers begin to drop out or stop paying, while a good number of newsstand-edition subscribers quit renewing. That meant the down-spiraling revenue led to even more slowing of the publication schedule, which meant more down-spiraling of the revenue, etc. All of which meant we’ve gotten out something like four magazines and one, twin-printed, double hobby edition in the last 18 months. More recently, Business Manager Perello learned that our distributor for the magazine-only edition, Eastern News Service, had changed owners. The new owners instantly stopped all cash disbursements while their accountants went through the old owners’ books to make sure everything was as it was supposed to have been. So we still haven’t seen our check for last issue, the delay of which has pretty much ground us to a complete halt in respect to doing anything major, like sending the next issue to press. On a sweeter note, our paying down of our debt has allowed us to improve our credit rating to the point where we’re now again being offered actual lines of credit. Likewise, the computer game project, under David Conklin, is moving ahead and should start producing revenue sometime around the end of 2001. Taking all this into account, then, from what we can see now, it seems we won’t be back on our feet until the end of this year (2001). Those of you who are getting impatient, feeling you’ve been cheated out of your last subscription order, etc., all I can ask is that you be patient. I can also assure you, no matter what psychological discomfort you now feel your misspending of $80 or so dollars has caused you, it’s nothing compared to the discomfiture I’m going through. If you’ve come to dislike me over the years for any reasons, you should now take comfort from the fact my life’s dream is presently on the rocks, and the metaphoric tugboats are still back in port, just getting up steam. These days I work as what amounts to the techno-age equivalent of a field hand ("data submission technician" at a web site optimization firm). My one hope in that area is my application to become a California Corrections Officer (prison guard) will come through sometime this year. That way, even if the other revenue-enhancing stuff I’ve described above fails to come through, I’ll still be making enough to pay off the $22,000 in credit card debt I ran up during 1998-99 in a stupid effort to keep Command’s printers happy and the magazine thumping along. Of course, if any of you know an investor-sugar daddy who’s got $100,000 or so burning a hole in his pocket and has always wanted to get on board with an excellent history publication, please let him know now’s his time to make a move. (We’re still looking for him from here, too, but whereas from 1995-99 every venture capitol project "worthy" of funding had to end in dot-com and promise to double investor money in a year, these days the recession scare simply has all the money frozen.) As it stands now, it looks like we’ll put out the main magazine portion of issue 55 during April. That should finally bring in enough revenue to allow us to go to press with hobby edition 54/55 sometime early in the summer. Finally, I’d like to ask those of you who have an article or game design in our production line-up to try to remain patient enough to not ask for it to be returned until we go through this calendar year and can see where we are then. Back to Cry Havoc #34 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com