This article uses cost estimates that were obtained in 1994, so you may have to fudge them a little to convert them to 21st century dollars.

I also want to urge everyone to be sure that if the editor is not a good bookkeeper, that he finds someone DEPENDABLE who is, to handle advertising. I spent about 6 weeks booking advertisers when I first started, and they lasted for at least three years. A few would drop out, but enough new ones would see the paper and call up to get in, that I did not have to sell ads at all. Just call them and tell them the number of months they had paid for were up, and to send more money if they wanted to continue. Most did, and just ran the same ad.

I got busy with other things and did not have time to do the calls so I found someone who said they would take over for me, and I turned everything about advertising over to him, telling him to call people when they need to send more money, to send the money to the treasurer, and call me if they wanted to change ads. That was my big mistake. I just kept running the ads (they usually did not change them), and found out when the treasurer called me and told me we were almost out of money, that the guy who said he would take over only did it for a month or two, and just stopped, without telling anyone.

A few people helped me for a short time and we were able to keep going for a few more months, but we had lost the $5000 nest egg I had built up when I had more ad revenue in some issues than I needed to print that issue, so I told them that if I could not find someone dependable to take over, I was going to have to shut down the tabloid.

No one stepped forward, so now we are publishing "Only On The Web". But let us not dwell on how our tabloid publishing effort collapsed. Let us talk about how we got it going, and hopefully knowing the problems that killed ours, will let you avoid them if you give it a try.

This User Group Success Story is particularly appropriate for a Comdex Proceedings book, because it all started at Fall Comdex '92. Our newly-elected president, Bruce Carson, and I (serving as both President and Editor at the time) met with four members of the Oklahoma City PC Users Group at one of the pre-Comdex roundtables. The OKCPCUG folks described how converting their newsletter to a tabloid format, and distributing it widely all over town, made many more people aware of their organization, and caused them to double in membership one year, and then double again the next year.

I had seen samples of tabloid newspapers from other groups at Editors' Roundtables in the past, and had tried to suggest that we convert, but was never able to persuade The Powers That Be in our club that it was a good idea. Everyone was happy with what we had then, and feared change, and did not think that the ability to have more pages at the same cost warranted the change to tabloid newspaper. But I did not have the information on how the change had been used to increase membership, and so I had been unsuccessful persuading them to let us do the change.

Bruce came back with the knowledge that a nearby club had used it successfully to increase membership, and he began talking it up with other members of our board, and had them so sold on the idea that people began to worry whether I might resist the change, but when Bruce finally approached me to sell me on the idea, I surprised him with how quickly I took the ball and began running with it. In slightly over two weeks I had the next month's newsletter ready, and it was in a tabloid format. I made a lot more improvements by the next issue (switching to Aldus PageMaker rather than WordPerfect, because PageMaker had the ability to "tile" the large pages necessary for the tabloid format), and we have improved the paper each month since then, and in slightly over one year we have tripled our membership, and it is still growing at the same (or an accelerated) rate.

How does converting to a tabloid newspaper allow you to increase membership? Because you can afford to print many more copies for the same cost, and distribute them free in computer stores and other locations all around town, and thereby make people aware of the existence of your group.

At the time we were printing about 500 copies of a 16-page 8-1/2 x 11 newsletter, and it was costing us $150 per month (excluding postage). I tried several newspaper printers in town, and the least expensive was able to print 2,000 copies of a 12-page tabloid or 3,000 copies of a 8- page tabloid for about the same amount of money, and since you get about 175% as much information on a tabloid page than an 8-1/2 x 11 page, we were talking about 4 times as many copies of a larger publication (more articles) or 6 times as many copies of a slightly smaller publication. And with the increased distribution I was able to attract advertising (which I had not been able to attract before), so I could afford to print even more copies of an even larger newspaper.

Our first edition was 5,000 copies of a 12-page tabloid, and in 14 months we have grown to 10,000 copies of a 20- or 24-page tabloid, and as you can see in the attached chart, we tripled our membership while we did it.

Where did you get printing for those prices?

Our printer has quoted us a much higher amount.

I got several different quotes, and they varied all over the ballpark. For 5,000 copies of a 16-page tabloid, I got quotes of $318.31, $325.75, $320.90, $562.64, and $640.00. The three lowest prices were from newspapers in the suburbs that had their own presses, and they had plenty of idle time on their presses, and had already covered the cost of their presses and building in their ad rates and subscription prices for their paper, and all they had to do with our paper is cover the cost of paper and ink, and perhaps the pressman's time, and anything else was all gravy. The two higher quotes were from companies that were set up to print small newspapers, both for suburban areas and specialty papers like ours, and since that was their whole business, they had to include the cost of their plant and presses in their prices, hence they were a lot higher. We were fortunate in starting our tabloid when we did, because now the printer that quoted $562.64 has bought out the small papers giving the lower quotes, and shut down their presses, but the company that quoted the $640.00 has gotten more hungry for business and has come down some, and they are now the least expensive of the two remaining printers. When I get some time I may check again and see if I can find any other less expensive source, but now that we are established I have enough advertising revenue to cover the higher cost.

Here are the first figures I got from the company that printed our paper until they were bought out by the other company:

Here are some figures I got from my current printer:

You will note that this particular printer's cost structure makes it difficult for them to consider a job less than 10,000 copies. I am not sure exactly what number I would get going to them now with a job that really called for smaller numbers; it is possible that they might give me a different (either higher or lower) quote, but I got these figures from them just for this article (and a presentation I am making at Spring Comdex), and they are used to thinking about my paper being a 10,000 copy paper, and smaller print runs just are not something they normally think about.

Here are the figures I originally got from them:

If you decide to try the tabloid format, I urge you to try all small suburban papers in the area to see if you can find papers with their own presses, and see if they can print your paper too. Otherwise you will need to convince your board to pay a higher cost for a few months, until you can build up the advertising revenue to pay for the paper, but even then I think it is a good investment.

We distribute our paper primarily in computer stores and colleges and universities in Tulsa, although there is some distribution in other stores, and in the surrounding countryside we distribute it wherever our distributors can find some counter space they can use. I have heard reports of it being distributed in Gas Station / Convenience Stores, restaurants, flower shops, department stores, etc -- wherever the people in that town hang out.

The tabloid-style newspaper has worked well for the Tulsa Computer Society. Hope it works for you.

As indicated above, this presentation was originally made at the Spring '94 Comdex Roundtables. Attached is the Transcript that was recorded from that presentation.

Association of Personal Computer User Groups

Comdex Spring/Windows World '94

User Group Roundtables

Tabloid Newsletters

Moderated by

Don Singleton

Tulsa Computer Society

Copyright (c) 1994,

Association of Personal Computer User Groups.

All Rights Reserved.

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

The program for today has to do with Tabloid Newspapers, however, it has even more to do with the APCUG pre-Comdex events because the success I'm going to relate to you today is something we learned at an APCUG event at the pre-Comdex session in front of fall 1992. So these sessions are the most important part of Comdex. If you do not have your people here you are making one heck of a mistake because the show is nice, the meals you get fed Monday though Thursday are nice but what is happening here today is the most important things because you are hearing from members from user groups as to how their success has happened in their user group and all of these pre-Comdex shows are arranged by very hard working young lady, Di Booth. Di, (Applause) we are deeply indebted to Di for what she has done to make this day a success.

For those who have not figured it out, all of the handouts are available who are sitting down at the tables. There are still some copies up front if you don't want to face me. I'm surprised these aren't the premium seats. There are plenty of copies here. There are on the chairs over there some additional copies.

What I'm going to talk about here on a success story that starts on page 95 in your proceedings, so all of the foils that I will be showing, all of the tables that I will be showing are in your deal here so you don't have to take fervent notes on that. As I indicated, the thing we are going to be talking about today, Growing Your Club with a Tabloid Newspaper is some thing that we learned about from the Oklahoma City PC Users Group who prints this newsletter, The PC Monitor. We had hoped that their editor was going to be here but something at the last minute came up business wise and he is unable to make it. I'm very sorry that he is not here to be honored as well because we deeply appreciate what we learned from David Mc Duff, the editor of PC Monitor; from Mark Voiles, their president; from Dick Alexander, their special events vice president; and one other member whose name escapes me at the moment. These four gentlemen were at the roundtables in fall of 1992, they were at a Birds of a Feather session which I was a moderator of, and I'm not sure if Di is trying to tell me something by scheduling Birds of a Feather, where we learned about this at the same time as my presentation of what we learned. I think that's accidental, but we learned about this at one of those Birds of a Feather session.

I wasn't able to sit in on all of the discussion because I had to moderate the whole Birds of a Feather and I had to go out and try to get warm bodies to come in and sit down at one of the tables and participate, so I was only able to catch little snippettes of what was being learned but our current president, Ruth Carson, was at the meeting and he picked up on the whole 30 - 45 minutes that he got talking to these gentlemen from Oklahoma City. They related to him that by converting their newsletter to a tabloid newsletter they doubled their membership in one year. The kept it going and doubled it again the second year. We said if they can do it we ought to be able to do it so we sat down and tried to do it and were more than successful.

You'll see where we started the tabloid newspaper, and in 14 months we tripled our membership. We took it from 165 to 520 in 14 months. The slope is still increasing. We are continuing this and we expect to at least double, maybe triple, we don't know but we expect to at least double it again in the next year. The whole key to it is the fact that we can get the news out to more members.

You may have been around for 10 or 15 years and you may figure that everybody knows that we're here. If they want to come they will, if they don't they won't, but everybody knows we're here. I got news for you, that's wrong. Everybody don't know you're here. Everybody doesn't know the Tulsa Computer Society is here and we've been putting out a 10,000 copy newspaper that we distribute all over northeast Oklahoma for the past year, over a year. We still get calls, I didn't know you all were here, this sounds like a good organization, I ought to come check you out. You ought to come check us out. We're getting new people in every month who didn't know we existed.

The question was, he wants to know how people feel, whether we're going to double or triple our membership or add 200 or 300 members. For us, both of those are approximately the same. If your group is starting at 2,000, the question is are you going to double. Maybe not, but you ought to be able to accomplish significant increases in awareness of the existence of your organization.

Speaker: ??

Are you attributing this to the form of the newspaper, the tabloid?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

Not the format, but to the fact that it enabled us to print many, many, many more copies for the same dollar investment. We were paying $150 a month to print enough copies of our 16 page, 8 1/2 by 11" paper to send to our members plus a few newsletter exchanges. For that same $150 we were able to print between 2,000 and 3,000 copies with the same information. It was an 8 to 12 page tabloid because the tabloid page is larger, but we could for the same dollar investment could afford many, many more copies. We take those extra copies to computer stores, to colleges, Tulsa Junior College, University of Tulsa, each of the schools of higher education we take at least 200 copies to sometimes more, and they are distributed at various places throughout the campus. We also distribute them throughout computer stores, some libraries. We can't do it in the Tulsa Library because they've got a rule against it, but in some of the smaller suburban cities we distribute them in the libraries. We distribute them in gas stations and in some of the smaller cities I think we got them in a flower shop one place, couple of restaurants. 10,000 copies are distributed and it's the additional distribution that gets your group out there and a paper that has value to people and makes them want to get it.

The first time or two we said can we distribute them in your store and got an I guess so. Now, if we're a little bit late getting copies over to the store, we get a very nasty telephone call, where are my copies, my customers are berating me because they can't get the latest.

Speaker: Jerry Fyffe, San Diego Computer Society Q&A Plus

Don, what method do you use for your distribution? Do you have a volunteer member, do you pay someone, or what is the physical aspect of the distribution?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

Everything in the Tulsa Computer Society is voluntary. Now I know that is not true for some user groups, some groups pay their editor, some pay either an individual to distribute or pay a mileage charge for people to distribute, I'm not looking down on any of these, I'm just saying we don't do that. We feel that we are in the organization to help people and we are looking for people to distribute for free. We have been able to find them. Most of my distributors only take a couple hundred copies, but some take more. One takes 400, one takes 1,000. They each cover a few stores nearby where they work and live. Not a big imposition to ask. I call everybody up and tell them the papers are ready at my house, they come by and pick them up and distribute them. I understand that Oklahoma City has the city arranged in regions, the northeast, the southeast. I think they have sub-distributors where they get a lot of copies to one guy and then he distributes to the other distributors in his area. We haven't found the need to do that yet but it's a good idea one we're thinking about adopting.

We figure if you ever let the camel's nose in the door it's awful hard to stop the rest of the camels from coming into the tent so we are not paying anybody for doing anything. We're saying it's not a big task, we're not asking you to cover the whole city of Tulsa, I'm asking you to cover a half dozen stores where you live, you probably drive by them anyway, why don't you come by the house and pick up and leave off at the store. Not a big job and people are more than willing to do that. Now if I asked one person to cover all of Tulsa he'd say give me some money or something but we prefer to do it the way we've been doing it.

How do you get the costs so low? The key is finding the right printer. in Tulsa we have a large newspaper, Tulsa World. We've also got a bunch of satellite cities around Tulsa. Each of them has their own paper, they have to. They can't just have their citizens reading the world even though a lot of them read the World. The Broken Arrow had their paper, Sand Springs has theirs. Some of these the printer has his own press. Others are printed by one of these companies that print the penney post and you know, the real estate papers etc. so what you identify which printers in the small satellite bedroom communities have their own press. They are the place you're going to get the best prices. They have already paid for their press and the room that it's in by doing their paper. So all they have to look at is the incremental cost of printing your paper which is paper, ink and maybe a little pressman's time. So they are able to give us a lot better prices than neighbor newspaper that prints a bunch of other small suburban papers.

The prices I got here I got from the Broken Arrow Ledger, and I got similar low prices from the Sand Springs Paper and one other that all have their own presses. Unfortunately Neighbor Newspaper, a few months ago, bought all three of those papers and shut down their presses. They had offered me a price about twice what they were charging. Another paper had offered a paper even a little more than them but they got a little hungrier and they dropped their price down below what Neighbor was going to charge so I'm now having them printed by a printer who is a good way out of Tulsa, but they come down into Tulsa every day to pick up copy and to deliver the papers so I don't have to drive all the way up to Nawada to get them printed.

These prices are what I was quoted from Broken Arrow Ledger and they are the sort of prices that I think you can probably get if you can find a small suburban newspaper in your area that has its own press. If you look at the thing, we were paying $150, so for about that, let's say $160 I could get either an eight page 3,000 or I could get a 12 page 2,000. What we were doing was somewhere between an 8 and 12 pager so we could either say that for about 2,000 to 3,000 papers the same dollars would buy us a tabloid newspaper and we were printing 500 of the other, so we could get four to six times as many copies and we could take them out there and start distributing them. But, once we start doing that and having that extra distribution now stores are more interested in advertising. They really didn't care about advertising for 500 circulation club newsletter, but one that's got 3,000 going out there, yes, I'll try a small ad. By our second issue I had four or five advertisers lined up.

My first issue I had a little club subsidy in addition to the $150 dollars that I insisted they keep paying every month which is what the used to pay, they gave me an extra $150 subsidy. So for the first month it was kind of a boot strap thing, I was able to go a 5,000, 12 page, so I had a little bit left over from my $300 that first month. After that month I was able to bring in enough advertising that I went 8,000 my second issue and I very quickly got up to 10,000. In fact, over Christmas I even did a 12,000 because we were going to do a larger distribution over Christmas but then I brought it back to 10,000. Right now I'm at 10,000 and I'm a 24 page paper. Most of my issues have been 10,000 copies of a 20 page, but I'm now 10,000 copies of a 24 page paper.

Basically, as advertising revenue comes in, if I have the distribution facilities to distribute to others I'll go up on the distribution numbers. If it doesn't, I'll go up on the pages because the more pages I put into it the more I make the thing worth something to somebody picking it up and the more likely they are to come and try out one of our meetings. I've had people call me and say can we subscribe to your paper? No, we don't have subscriptions, but it only costs $20 a year to be a member of the society, well that's worth it for the subscription, ok, we'll join the society. You get the paper in the mail each month but if you come to a meeting you're not eligible for the door prizes because you're a member. Well, I might try a meeting or two.

We have 24 SIGs so we have a couple of dozen meetings every month and there's bound to be something you're interested in. If you're interested enough to find this paper of value I can't imagine you not being interested in at least two or three maybe 10 or 12, the question is will your spouse allow you to attend 10 or 12 meetings, but you'll probably find at least 2 or 3 meetings that you will want to come to. We don't have to hard press people to come to them, all we have to do is print what the program is going to be in the newspaper along with the other news and articles of interest.

Our prices, like I say, went down. Our cost went up as Neighbor bought the three local papers that had their own presses. So here is our current cost structure. This is something that I know you can get because I know you will have the small newspaper printer in your facility. Whether you can find a small pressman, incidently all of these charts are in the proceedings so you don't have to write down all of the price numbers if you don't want to because they're all in the article that starts on page 95. These are my cost numbers now. For 10,000 copies of a 24 page, $930. I got them some numbers initially and they gave me some estimates for this presentation of lower quantities than I'm normally going to be using. You can kind of play with some of those numbers there and they are also in the proceedings. Try to see if I were having to do business with them. What that says is that my original $300 that I started the paper out on for an 8 pager, I'd have to get a little bit more contribution from the club because it would now take me $425 to do that first on. It's still worth it even if I had to go at those prices. I think if you look around and find an independent printer that can print your paper for you, you can probably come close to the first set of numbers that I gave you.

Speaker: Joe Feldman, PC 101, New Jersey

Was there a size to the paper at which it became very attractive to the advertiser? I mean in pages. At the four page size did they look at it and say, there's nothing there, but when you got to 20 pages let's say, did that light up their eyes differently?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

I think what lights up their eyes is the content not the number of pages. I have never tried anything less than an eight page publication and I wouldn't. Eight pages filled with trash is still trash, and in fact, I know of one publication that has tried precisely that and they have a lot of difficulty getting regular advertisers in. I have them beating my door down and it's not that I'm 24 pages, but that I give value for the thing. If you pick up a paper, thumb through it and then throw it in the trash, you didn't have very long exposure to their ad. But if you pick up a paper and every article is something that you will want to read, then you're going to keep that paper around a lot longer, you're going to read it and that is where you become more valuable to the advertiser. This is a place where APCUG can help you get boot strapped as well because your editor has access on GLOBALNET to the newsletter files from a lot of user groups including the Tulsa Computer Society.

We get from that thing a couple of articles that we run every month, the Beginners Column, it's by Kenneth Johnson from the Chicago Computer Society. Kenneth is here at the show somewhere; he usually brings a floppy with all of his beginner articles on it. If he doesn't have those with him you can definitely download them from GLOBALNET. They are fantastic articles with information for the beginners in your group.

Tulsa Computer Society has got a very good author. Bruce Carson, our current president who writes modem articles. I have uploaded a package of them to GLOBALNET and will be soon uploading a newer package with a more expanded, I think right now there's five on there, and I'll be uploading another five to GLOBALNET so there's about 10 modem articles available. I believe this is in the articles section and it's something like MODEM something, maybe tulmodem, maybe modemtul. Look in the editor's section. I'll also be uploading as soon as I get one of these round to its, our last six months worth of articles. I'm a little bit behind and I apologize to everyone, but we do try to get our newsletter up there along with several other very good papers whose editors are a little more prompt than I am about getting their papers up on time and they all have very good articles in them.

If you select out copies to make your publication worth while, your advertisers are going to find it in their best interest to get into the thing. It used to be I had to try to sell adds, not all I have to do is sit back and the advertisers call and say I need in the issue. I need to got from a quarter page of a half page, or I need to go to a full page, how do I do it. Well, we can arrange that. So there's a lot less ad selling that has to go on now because we've got experience under our belt, they know that our publication is going to be of value to them and therefore that their ad is going to be seen by people that they want to see it.

I've had one advertiser that was taking out of an eight page paper, you take them out in a three month series. I call and tell him his three month period has run, he says I'll drop a check in the mail for the next six months.

Speaker: Rick Fischer, Memphis PC Users Group, Inc.

My question is to do with co-op adds are national adds that the national folks would pay for to either supplement a local vendor or they actually place them themselves. Is there such a network nationally for co-op adds?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

The stores certainly have co-op money to spend, so far none of them have spent any of it with us. All they have done with us is institutional adds for their stores themselves. We feel that they ought to be able to do this. There are some of the larger clubs that have solicited the vendors directly, we may be to the point soon where we feel that we can try that, but it seems more reasonable that the vendor would feel they were getting the best result from their monies if the monies that they are paying through co-op funds to the stores if the stores would start to spend those co-op funds with us. They just haven't so far.

Speaker: Pat Geis, PC Users' Group of the Redwoods

My two questions are what luck are you having as far as the mail to your membership with these tabloids, do they get them on time? We're having trouble with our little 8 1/2 by 11 publication, and we're running either Ventura or Aldus and how do you get your editor to convert over, and what are the real logistics for converting from that format and laying out a tabloid?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

The answer to the first question is how fast your mail is delivered is a function of your local post office and not a function of the format. We have found that local mail for most of the mail will get there in a couple of days regardless of whether it's a letter or a flat. Bulk mail that goes across the state will take between one and two weeks to go cross state and across the country, two to three weeks regardless of whether it's a letter or a flat. So we don't see going to the tabloid format which is a flat, significantly different. In terms of the postal regulations, if it's more than 6 1/8 inches by 9 1/8 inches, if it's larger than that it's a flat and it costs a little bit more to bulk mail it than if it was our letter size. 8 1/2 by 11 folded in half goes as a letter rate, but an 8 1/2 by 11 laid flat charges as a flat. This has to go as a flat.

We have found no significant difference in the format to the thing. Now some people don't like the newspaper format as the East Tennessee PC Users Group points out. If you're willing to pay a little bit more for the paper, the same printers that can print this can print this. It's going to cost you more for your paper. We're considering going to that but right now I'd rather fit the extra pages into a larger paper. We may do that at some point in time. We did have a major selling problem with selling the concept of a tabloid newspaper until we learned about using it to grow the club.

I had come to APCUG meetings for several years before that and had seen three or four papers in tabloid and I thought it would be nice to try this. I tried selling it to our board and they were notably unimpressed. The members won't like it because it's too big or it won't look as professional so we need to stick with what we've been doing. When Bruce came and talked to the guy and found out how they had doubled the size of their club in one year and doubled it again the next year and come back and sold that as the thing, and changing the format of the newsletter was just oh by the way we have to do it, then it became a lot easier to sell. In fact, it was so much that they thought Don was going to resist this because he's used to doing it the other way so they were very cautious about approaching me about the concept of doing it.

Finally Bruce got up the nerve and he came up and said I talked to a lot of people and we really think we want to try this, don't be too mad at me but will you try it. I said do you think they're going to object to the newspaper format? No, they definitely want you to do it, we just want us to go along with us and try it. I said get out of the way I'm headed. They said if you need to take a little time to get started, you don't have to do the next issue which was two weeks away. No problem, we'll do the next issue in a tabloid. It didn't take long to convince me, what I needed was for them to be convinced that they were willing to accept the newspaper format because it was going to bring us in additional benefit.

One of the questions was raised about converting to PageMaker or Ventura. I do it in PageMaker. My first issue was done in WordPerfect. WordPerfect doesn't have the ability to tile so I had to print out columns and paste them up on the layout sheets and basically do my own layout in that form. Fortunately I was used to doing that because back in the late 1060's I published a photography magazine using exactly that. I'd get gally copy set by a compugraphic and I'd do the truly the layout and paste up on the paste board so I knew how to do it.

By the second issue I got a copy of PageMaker and it's a piece of cake in PageMaker. It has the ability to print 8 1/2 by 14 pieces of paper which means I get half of it on one page, half of it on another with a half inch of overlap and I can butter both of those sheets, lay them down, knife exactly where I want the cut-line to be and paste them up to my paste down sheets, it's a piece of cake. If I had an 11 by 17 printer, which costs a little more dollars than I can afford, I could actually print the whole thing on one piece of paper. So I'd completely eliminate my paste up except for adds. It's not at all hard to convert to the tabloid format with PageMaker. I'm sure Ventura is the same way, I just haven't used it, but I have zero doubt that it is equally capable of doing it and probably some other products.

Getting back to adds, this is a copy of my ad rate sheet and if you're going to be approaching advertisers, you ought to prepare a rate card, that's what they call this. It lists all your adds, the different sizes. Now whether you use my same dollar numbers or not, I took the numbers that the Oklahoma City group was doing and lowered them a little bit because we were going to do a smaller paper than they were doing initially and I haven't increased my rates. They subsequently went up on theirs so their rates are now twice mine. I'm probably under priced. I could probably get more I just haven't gotten the nerve to change my rates and see what effect it has on my ad revenue. Because I'm successful right now, I'm able to bring in enough money with the funding that the club gives me. The second year they're giving me more than the $150, they've increased my club subsidy but I'm able to bring in enough ad revenue that I can still keep the thing going.

Some of the clubs, I believe Oklahoma City is in this boat, actually with their higher ad structures bring in enough to make the paper totally self-sustaining. I could do that but I really think the club ought to pay for part of it because it's a major benefit to membership so part of your dues ought to go for paying for the paper. That's at least my thoughts on the matter.

My rate sheet shows you the different dollar charges, it shows you the inches of width and height and it shows you a little picture of what the thing looks like. The other side of the rate card is a kind of a boring listing of copy requirements, deadlines and so forth, but you need to have those sorts of things whether you use those exact words or not is immaterial, but to appear to an advertiser like you are a professionally done thing you need something along the lines of a legitimate rate card. Rather than just say I can get you an ad for this number of dollars.

Speaker: Web Austin, Ridge Area Computer Users Group

Do you find that adds based on a predetermined size or on a column entry would be to your advantage?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

We do them on a predetermined size simply because we find that people in most cases merely need to know the sizes and I'll prepare something that meets those. If you just tell them a column each charge for most of our advertisers they get confused on that. Now I have an implicit column inch charge and so if someone came to me and said would you run an ad that was this size by this size, as long as the width meets one of my columnar numbers, I can compute you whatever the height ends up being and I can handle your ad. Most of our advertisers are not that sophisticated, they are not used to dealing with that so it's a function of what your advertisers are used to. I think if I were to reprint my rate card I may include a column inch number as well. I may also include a preference for certain size adds. I don't want the paper to start looking like a computer shopper so I may raise my rates on full-page adds just because if I get a full-page ad I feel obligated to put a couple of pages with no adds around it to avoid that computer shopper look.

Also, it's a real hassle to handle the real small adds so I may increase those a little more than my normal column inch rates. The adds I really like are the quarter and half page adds and eighth page adds. They're big enough to warrant a width and yet they're are small enough that I don't have to worry that there's too much ad on a page that has one of them. I do find that dealing with onsie adds is a hassle. So I've got a thing that if you take out and pay in advance for three months, I'll give you a 10% discount. If you take out a six month ad, pay in advance for all six months, you get a 15% discount. If you take out a full year in advance, 20% off. That's printed, that's available to everybody and it's worth it to me because I don't have to hassle with do I have the revenue each month to do this month's issue. If I've got a three month or six month commitment from most of my advertisers I can afford to know how much I'm going to be in terms of break even before that issue starts out. So I really like those 3, 6, and year adds. For some reason the only year add I've gotten is from this fat guy standing up at the mic. I've taken out my own ad and I've taken it out for a year simply because I know the paper's going to be there and I've made the commitment. Most people are doing the three month and a few are now starting with the six month.

Speaker: Lang Murphy, Atlanta PC Users Group

I'd like to back track just a second. You said before that if you don't have a printer capable of printing the paper, you've got to do the paste up yourself, how easy is that to do for someone who has no experience doing physical paste up.

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

When I said a printer capable of doing the paper, I meant a laser printer that could handle the size sheet. Like I say, most printers can now handle 8 1/2 by 14 sheets, and that's what I'm doing right now is just two 8 1/2 by 14 sheets and there's a half inch of stuff that's on both sheets and so I can go along one sheet and say well, I'm going to cut right above this line and then I'm going to skip down and cut right above this line and I'll just knife it across. Then on the other page I'll cut just under that line and I've got them ready to line up.

Speaker: Lang Murphy, Atlanta PC Users Group

So you're not working with prop marks, just eye-balling it?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

Just eyeball it, and what I do is I take each of the sheets as it comes out and I butter it with a product called one coat, you can get this from your art supply stores. It looks a lot like rubber cement, but take my word for it, it's not. Rubber cement you do two different ways, one you spread it on one side and then lay it down wet, with that you can peel it up and it leaves "goopygunk" around but you can reposition. Or you can rubber cement both sides, let them air dry and then when you lay them down the first time it's nailed, it's there permanently, you cannot reposition. With one-coat, you butter one side of the paper, let it air dry and then you lay it down on your sheet. If it's not where you want it you peel it up, lay it down on the sheet, you can do that 10, 20, 30 times if it takes it to get it lined up exactly the way you want it. You can even go back and steal an ad from last month's issue, peal it off, it's still got sticky on it, lay it down on this month's issue. Works like a champ. Now you steal an ad from six months ago you're probably going to have to re-butter it. But with one-coat you can actually reposition it several times and it doesn't leave any residue on your paste up board.

Speaker: Maralyn Henry, Upstate IBM-PC Users Group, APCUG Secretary

You might want to check with your printer on this. I was doing that faithfully month after month with ours and one time I was late, I had someone else do it for my and I took it into my printer and I said we didn't have time to do the paste up, can you do it for us and just add it to the bill? We find out they don't charge for it, so he does it all the time now.

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

It's worth checking out. I've been trying to get our printer to actually accept things on disk, and print it directly to their deal. The problem I have is that they are a Mac shop and they don't understand PC's and they cannot handle zip files. They handled it one time but they had very short memories and they lost the knowledge of how they unzipped it the first time, and they haven't been able to repeat that. They offered to loan me their syquist drive and a 44 meg syquist cartridge and I said but I need the drivers for it. Oh, you just plug it into your scuzzy, it'll work, I says, you don't understand, you need drivers for it, oh no, just plug it in, it'll work. I know you're wrong but I will do what you say, I plugged it in, it didn't work, surprise, surprise. Maybe one of these days I may spring for a syquist drive with PC drivers, and get it to them in that form. That would be the best of all worlds because I could then just spin off a postscript image and they could take the thing and directly plug it into their compositor and print out a better quality than I can get on my laser printer and we'd be able to go direct from that. I just haven't found the dollars in my budget to pay for a syquist.

Speaker: Neil Edwards, Tampa Bay Computer Society

I noticed on your discount schedule you specify consecutive months of advertising. A lot of times some advertisers will want to alternate months, every other month etc. Do you have any provision for that and what about copy changes?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

I will allow copy changes at no charge, the only thing is the copy has to get to me by the publish deadline. If it doesn't, previous month's ad runs and you still pay for it.

As far as two in and one out, anything is negotiable. I would prefer not to do it simply because I lay my ad into PageMaker and it's there every month. If you're in and out, then I've got to take that ad, slide it off onto the board or whatever they call the area in PageMaker that is not part of the printable area, and remember that it's there so that I can pull it down a couple of months later when the guy goes back in. I haven't found any that insist on that. I'm willing to negotiate though if someone were willing to make a long term commitment, every other month kind of a thing, I can handle it, I just haven't been required to.

Speaker: Jerry Conger, Senior Education & Community Service UG

Don the question is again, you're pasting up two sheets of paper for every page, and I wondered, if it's text I can see how you can knife through it as you call it, but here on one is a picture and did I see a cut through that picture where you pasted them together?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

Well, I hope you didn't, but you might have if you're eyes are good enough. I'll tell you where it is. He's looking at the dinosaur picture on page nine, the cut is right along the fold, June issue, the line that goes under the box. You can see it. We try to avoid those situations but it is sometimes not avoidable.

Speaker: Jerry Conger, Senior Education & Community Service UG

I noticed mostly you've avoided it.

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

I try where ever possible to avoid it and like on the back page this boarder around the thing, the way I handle that is when I'm knifing it out, I knife to the boarder and then I jog down and pick up about a half an inch of boarder. Then I can overlap and take my friskit knife and move it just slightly. Most of the time you won't see it, but the particular example on the dinosaurs we got a little sloppy there and you saw it.

Speaker: Jerry Conger, Senior Education & Community Service UG

Couldn't you do the air brush or something like that.

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

You could. I'm so busy trying to get this issue out that I generally just try to avoid as many layout problems as possible and I'm just a little careful in laying them out. Most of the time I'm reasonably successful.

Speaker: Jerry Conger, Senior Education & Community Service UG

Another part of the same question, of course you're doing paste up, I understand that, but items, adds, rather than pasting them in do you ever scan them?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

Sometimes I will. My scanner is a little cheap scanner from Logitech and the quality isn't quite as good as if I lay the copy in myself. I've got a logo or something I have to do that with, I'll do that.

Speaker: Jerry Conger, Senior Education & Community Service UG

I guess what I'm disturbed about is the size of the paper, the 8 1/2 by 14 aspect of it and the need to paste them together. Is there anyway to your knowledge where it can be one page?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

Yes, if I could afford an 11 by 17 laser printer it would work. It used to be those were about $10,000. I understand they've dropped in price now, but I still don't have one.

Speaker: Bruce Morris, East Tennessee PC Users Group

I was pasting mine up until recently. I get PageMaker to print some registration marks, I use legal size paper, I tile it sideways, I only cut one page, I turn them upside down on a light table, stick them together with scotch tape, turn them over and paste them up. If I have a graphic that's going to hit the fold, and sometimes I'll plan around that, I'll get PageMaker to print out a piece tiled sideways or in another space so that the whole graphic fits on it. I'll cut just it out and paste it on. Better solution than that, I've found that LaserMaster is real good about sending 11 by 17 printers for evaluation.

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

The primary thing that I'm trying to get across here to you folks is not the techniques of printing tabloid, but the techniques of building your user groups by virtue of having a tabloid format. I think that there is a lot of potential in this for going to tabloid, being able to afford to print a lot more copies and use those copies to promote what it is you do. I even made an attempt to persuade the board of directors when I became a director for APCUG to change APCUG's paper into a tabloid because I wanted to be able to send copies to every user group officer in an APCUG user group. So far I've been unsuccessful in persuading them of the wisdom of that. They were of the same notion as my board was in Tulsa Computer Society on previous years where they didn't see the benefit that it was going to have to membership. But I think if more and more clubs try the tabloid out and get the same results that Oklahoma City PC and my group got, I think you will find you can duplicate these same advantages and maybe if we can get a number of clubs saying at subsequent meetings how wonderful having a tabloid newspaper has been to our membership, maybe we can persuade them to consider that for future years. The whole idea is let's get these things rolling.

Speaker: Jerry Gillette, Bowling Green Area MS-DOS User Group

I'm the proud editor of the newsletter up there and I'm in charge of the printer tabloid copy of our newsletter. Which I'm not down here to boast on how big we are, on the contrary, I'm here to tell you how small we are and how much we're growing with the assistance of APCUG. I just learned about APCUG last year during Comdex, I've been corresponding with Miss Henry and all the officers and it's get togethers like this that's made it worthwhile for us so far to help us grow a whole lot.

Primarily what I wanted to do is tell you what supplement we've found in addition to our printed newsletter, is a newsletter on disk. Our user group is primarily geared toward BBS users with the information highway at the top of news now our attendance and membership is increasing from modem users and we have chosen to put our newsletter on our BBS in a format that users can read it. We've been in contact with Adobe about Adobe Acrobat, you've heard a lot about that. They made a tremendous offer for all user groups during the past year, and I see the National Computer Techtronics Issue has got a review on the common ground, another way of distributing your newsletters on disk.

What I've shared with you today is I've given everyone in attendance here a copy of our newsletter and it's more than a newsletter. What this is, you have to have Windows to use it, you go to the file manager, double click on the help file, that's the only file on the disk, but this tells about our club. It tells about the officers, how to get in touch with us through the Internet, or locally, it gives our current newsletter and we can include all kinds of graphics. This is done by our assistant editor, Shawn Stallings, by using a format or program called Visual Help. It is something like the visual basic so you might want to look into the Visual Help programming and that's what created this disk. We're just scratching the surface with this. We haven't perfected it yet but we are very proud of it and we wanted to come and share that with you. Also, we want to thank Don and everybody else for these wonderful get togethers. This is our first one, we got a whole week together and glad to see all of you.

Speaker: Neil Edwards, Tampa Bay Computer Society

That's very interesting and I know all of us are, should be or supposed to be die hard computer users, but 99.99% of the population of the United States will pick up a printed piece of paper rather than a disk. The printed word is, if you put it out on a video tape you'd have 20 times the amount of people who would look at it than on a computer disk. Even though computer users. The printed page has far, far more value, I think, and particularly a kind of format like Tulsa is doing.

Another question based on that is how many of the new members do you think that you get from this tabloid newsletter that don't even own a computer yet?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

I think we get a fair number that don't own a computer yet but are thinking about buying one and come to the club to learn about them. I think that a publication like this gentleman's is useful on things where BBSs are the main way that people distribute because they can download the file, they can't download my printed copy. I don't see the two as being in competition. I see them being both alternatives that should be explored. You might want to do both. I fact, we've got somebody looking into taking Acrobat right now and making a disk version of our newsletter. If we do that, we won't drop the paper newsletter by any stretch of the imagination, but we may supplement it with something that we can put on the bulletin board.

Speaker: Jerry Gillette, Bowling Green Area MS-DOS User Group

Just for the record I want to get on record as saying I didn't mean that this was a replacement for your newsletter, it is a supplement. I believe that you will see that this thing on disk and this Visual Help format expresses color and sometimes it cannot be expressed in printed format. It also gives you the ease of clicking though out sections instead of turning pages but nothing will ever replace the printed tabloid newsletter and that's our foundation. We strongly believe in our printed copy, this is a supplement.

Speaker: Bob Kazmierski, Hernando Citrus Computer Club

Before we came here about roughly in the past two months we were discussing taking our newsletter and going on to the BBS with it. We ran a survey, I had 48 people fill out the survey as to how many people wanted to go on the BBS, I had roughly 36 people who want the newsletter on the BBS. Yes, this will cut down our cost of preparing our newsletter as far as paper and stamps, however, the person who does not belong to our club, the person who does not have any means to download, he will not be getting that, so we did make provisions for the fact that the newsletter will be mailed out to the people who request it.

Also to put the newsletter in places that it can be evaluated by other people who don't even belong to the club so we can get new people in there. A few other important facts come out of this here; 47 of the people really feel that the newsletter was very, very important because we ask that question also. So the written paper is important to everybody in there and of course just a means of operational expense is what we all try to save.

Speaker: Jim Dyker, Cincinnati PC Users Group

Don, unless you have $50 additional cost on spot color, looks like you just started that in the last couple months or so.

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

I had the thing in the rates sheet all along, this is the first time somebody has taken advantage of it. I take advantage of the fact that they are paying for the spot color. I find out from my printer which pages are on the same plate because I can get other pages that are on the same plate, I can get spot color for free when the advertiser has paid for the plate.

Speaker: Jim Daiker, Cincinnati PC Users Group

So that's how you're working it then.

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

Yes, it turns out that the front and back in the two center pages are on the same plate so that's why you'll notice that the ad in color is on our centerfold. It's because that guy is paying for us to have color on the front cover.

Speaker: Jim Daiker, Cincinnati PC Users Group

The printer that we use has additional colors available, different days of the week you can have a different color choice for no additional cost. So I play that pretty heavily. We have the same kind of idea, but we're still in the standard size, 8 1/2 by 11. I just wondered how that was affecting what you do, so you're just using PageMaker to create the spot-color plate then?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

Actually, I don't even do that, I take a PageMaker 60%, which is 8 1/2 by 11 and I mark the things I want in a particular color and the printer handles it himself, in the burning of the plates.

Speaker: Joe Feldman, PC 101, Inc., Warren, N.J

My question, I'm very attracted to your publication and would love to have it for our own organization. To bring it to my group I'd have to supply them with a little information as to how much labor goes into this each month, how much man hours of work is involved?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

For the same amount of information, it takes no additional labor than it did to do the editor's job the old way. Now the editor's job is a thankless task and it takes about 17 man years to get every issue out and how we do this is yet unclear, although I've been doing it for six years. It doesn't take any extra to do it in the tabloid format. So, the circulation is extra, but I have distributors to do the distribution for me so just the preparation of it is not really that much more difficult. Maybe the extra paste up step because I got to the point where I was doing the other straight, but it's not that much harder.

Speaker: Vicki Sceifers, Cincinnati PC User Group

I had a question, our newsletter is the major benefit for our membership. I think these people hold it very sacred that they are a member to get the newsletter, and I think maybe Jim can help with this, we might have a problem, I think we've discussed it with we start taking our newsletter and putting it out in the stores. We love that idea. Several of us on our board, but we don't think our members, I paid the dues for this, and they think that makes them special that they get something special because they're a member.

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

They do, they get it in the mail. You see if it's in the stores the chance is that that store is going to run out, and then you're not going to get your newsletter. Whereas, these people are getting a taste of what membership is all about. We distribute a lot of them out there, but stores run out after the first week or two. So distribution through a store is erratic. If you're going to count on saving your $20 and see if you can get it in the stores, you may or may not get all of the issues. We tried to make them where a couple of issues is worth the $20, than being certain of getting all 12 issues, if that's worth the membership dues for you, then you ought to be a member and then everything else if free.

Speaker: Vicki Sceifers, Cincinnati PC User Group

Do people mainly get it in the mail before they might happen to see it in the store? Or is that at kind of the same time?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

We put the labels on as soon as we get them and they go to the post office at the time we start sending them out to our distributors. It's possible that if you go to a store that the distributor has just hit, you might see it before you get it but no guarantee.

Speaker: Jerry Fyffe, San Diego Computer Society

We're going tabloid within the next two or three month. We're just now working out the final financial arrangements and we've been having this same argument. Our newsletter is the big benefit etc by some of our people, and my answer to them, and I don't mean to offend anybody by this, if that's our biggest benefit to our membership, we better get our butts to work and go find better benefits to give our membership and highlight those and let the newsletter supplement it. It's gotten our board off their butt and we're doing some bigger and better things because of it.

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

We need to cut this off because we were supposed to cut it off two minutes off.

Speaker: Bill McCabe, Space Coast PC User Group

Just a quick one, how much does it cost you to publish this 24 page, per copy?

Speaker: Don Singleton, Tulsa Computer Society

The 10,000 copies, my printing bill was about $1,000, so about a dime a copy.

The one thing that people have asked me, how do we get all these graphic images in. It's a piece of cake. The dinosaurs, they had a screen capture program that made a BMP file. Most of the cases were some program running under Windows. You press print screen, copies the clip board. You tab over to the clip board, save it as a CLP file, then you keep running the program, start running the next one, hit print screen, go over to the clipboard, copy that off as a CLP file. Send me a bunch of CLP files along with your article copy and I can go to the clipboard, load one of them in, paste it into PageMaker. Load the next one in, paste it into PageMaker, resize it, it's easy. A lot of people don't realize how easy it is to include the graphics in their articles and yet they add so much attention, eye grabbing to that article. I strongly encourage you to do that.

I will be here, I don't leave until next Friday, so I'll be here all the time, I'll be happy to talk to anyone about publishing a tabloid newspaper.