The bitter cold is slowing everything down. I don’t even have any winter work clothes left. Our place, while far more comfortable than most, is still dependent on a single heater in the living room. Wallace found that the baseboard heaters in the bathroom and dining room are functional, which is an immense help. These were the units built into the mobile home when new and which barely last.One of the first priorities is the placemat flyer. Things have merely been on hold for a few weeks, plus Theresa brought some extra samples. I failed to find anything helpful on the Internet, as most responses either try to sell you a startup kit or nonsense like that. I had to draw conclusions on limited facts. Happily, I was mostly right on the big matters. For example, there is far more to the layout than meets the eye, there are different “grades” of trivia, and it is easy to make dumb mistakes that turn off your customers. My conclusions show that others who at least recognized the same pitfalls solved the problems in much the same way I did. I needed that confirmation.
I was able to increase the subscribable area by 6.25% (with $74.73 single-issue revenue potential) and make certain alterations to the design, changes I would have hesitated without seeing somebody else do it first. All that is fine, but in my opinion the biggest leap forward was my guess that the filler should be totally trivia of the highest quality. That’s my department, I expect to be well paid for it. I correctly spotted the other publications contained stale material, I want this flyer to be looked forward to for some of the best and newest information.
Here is a sample of quality trivia. Did you know a few hundred years ago, it was illegal and also considered immoral to “engross”. This meant to buy something in a large quantity, then to split it up into smaller packages and thereby sell it for a far higher total price than was paid for it. The peasantry took this crime seriously; when you read about the windmills and watermills being burned down by angry mobs, this was usually the cause. From the word “engross”, we now have the word “grocery”.
That’s trivia. Now, why is it always an “angry” mob. Is there any other kind? And you thought they burned things down because Frankenstein was hiding there. Trivia should at least focus on items with at least some current content. For example, did you know in some countries, they auction cell phone numbers? I don’t remember the ungodly sum, but for around $8,000,000 some Arabian princelet bought the lucky cell phone number 666-6666. Try selling that in China [where 6 is considered very unlucky]. Anyway, let’s get back to the flyer and see what can be done about that today.
Well, sales are dependent on that first issue, and that issue is still not producible with existing equipment. To show what a shoestring budget we have, the printer must be used for total output of the initial run because it comes with 25% full trial ink cartridges, and that is all we can afford. Those trial cartridges may have to suffice for the entire first production run.
Enough hard work. Theresa and I went to Jimbos for the bingo game. She picked up what was going on with all the sound effects. Like myself, she was slow to understand why all the fancy games. Picture frames, hat pins, postage stamps and crazly letters. If not for those, somebody would be yelling bingo every five minutes. Our average game lasts nine minutes, not counting breaks.
