Brief by Central Staff
Colorado Central – November 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
A subscriber in New Mexico sent us a reasonable complaint. His September edition arrived on Sept. 4, he wanted to write a letter for publication, and the deadline for that was Sept. 7 — not enough time.
We agree that’s a problem, but there’s not much we can do about it, since when it comes to delivering magazines to subscribers, we’re at the mercy of the U.S. Postal Service.
Because our schedule is an attempt to fit a monthly operation onto a weekly world, we can’t just set a constant deadline like “the 12th of the month prior.”
We mail the magazine on or before the next-to-the-last Tuesday of each month, which means most of our subscribers should get each magazine by cover date — for example, you should get the November edition before Nov. 1.
It goes to the printer during the week before that penultimate Tuesday, and we need time to get it all put together before that. So our deadline for just about everything is 11 days before that next-to-last Tuesday. Thus the relevant Tuesday in November is the 20th, so the deadline for the December edition is Nov. 9.
In general, the Postal Service does a pretty good job, but not always. We mailed the October edition on Sept. 18, right on schedule, and it didn’t show up in Salida mailboxes for four days, until Sept. 22. So we hate to think about how long it might have taken to get to nearby New Mexico, let alone Alaska or Maine, where we also have subscribers.
We also have two foreign subscribers (England and Germany) who pay an extra $40 a year to get our magazine by airmail.
Our first foreign subscriber, who has since moved back to the United States, was an engineer in Saudi Arabia. Every month, we had to fill out a customs declaration, as well as a special affidavit which said that, to the best of our knowledge, the magazine contained nothing “offensive to the tenets of Islam.”
Since our content is not all that racy (hardly any photos of women with bare arms), we figured we were safe there — and to be honest, we avoided learning anything more about those tenets then, so that we could in all honesty sign the affidavit while continuing to publish what we chose to publish.
We were also glad we live in a country where all citizens have the Bill of Rights, and you can publish and distribute without worrying whether something offends the tenets of Jerry Falwell.
