Saturday, May 31, 2008

Slingshot 258 Delivery Update

I just got back from a week's holiday in Istanbul, to find my advance copy of Slingshot 258, and a note from the printer to confirm that this issue would be mailed to members on 30 May (i.e. yesterday); I'm guessing the first copies will start arriving in the UK on Monday. Your feedback is welcome. I should add that this wouldn't have been possible without Richard Jeffrey-Cook having successfully untangled the complex web of arrangements around our Royal Mail account, which had to be transferred to the new printer.

Having seen an actual copy of 258, I'm extremely pleased. I think we still have a bunch of stuff to do on the internal aesthetics to bring the look and feel up to date; it's also clear that we need to be careful on what kinds of images take best advantage of the new paper quality. I would expect to see further tweaks on format in July.

Something I didn't mention yet was that the last SoA committee meeting agreed to fund Slingshot at a page count of 60 pages through the end of the year; that's 60 pages of content, with pretty much no advertisements (where "pretty much" glosses over the two boilerplate society information pages, an event notice for Conquest 2008 and a competition notice, so leaving those aside it's about 57.5 pages, and I expect to regain at least one of the inside pages back for boilerplate next issue). So I expect to go round and canvas for more material to fill it shortly. I've been tracking the amount of system specific material (ie how much DBA, how much DBMM, how much WAB material) I've received since starting the editor's job with 257 - I'll pull together the latest statistics this week as I think it makes interesting reading.

No comments:

Post a Comment