Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brown Jenkin" data-source="post: 913415" data-attributes="member: 2572">Johnny is right to some degree. A more civil and articulate expression of what we want is needed, not just complaints about what is wrong. So here goes nothing.Look at your core mission, what is the purpose of Dungeon magazine. I have always as a customer viewed it as providing adventures and adventure ideas to the D&D community for a great price. I have not had an issue so much with quality, although I will admit that I don't like every adventure but then I don't expect to as long as I like most of them. The issue that is coming up for me though is quantity which is related by price to whether it is a value or not. When the magazine starts providing adventures for the same price per page of adventures as non-advertising supported supplements then I have to start thinking about what to spend my money on when I would rather support your magazine as the obvious best value. The question then becomes for me what cost saving measures am I willing to accept to achieve that. As a prospective customer who wants to purchase your product again I am willing to do without some of the extras such as color and glossy paper. If its an issue of keeping the magazine running then by all means feel free to go back to the old B&W days. As for ads I don't mind them and understand the need for them. I would be perfectly willing to have a magazine with 50% ad space as long as the content is still there. You have pointed out that smaller circulation results in some advertisers choosing only to purchase in the larger Dragon. Is it possible to bundle ad space in Dragon/Dungeon with a discount so that like airlines a seat sold at half price is better than the seat not being sold at all. Another issue you raised with having separate magazines was that the mailhouse/distributor charged you monthly whether you were monthly or not. How about separate monthly magazines then. You could charge 4.99 a month for 40 pages of adventures + as many ad pages as you can sell (plus you get the coveted back cover to sell again). This would give us as many pages of adventures as we are getting now but at price that is between the 94-97 rate and the current 98-100 rate. Poly could also be sold separately on a monthly basis for 4.99 as well and advertising could still be bundled. While this may result in slight loss of subscription revenues compared to the joint issues (you previously stated in another thread that the subscriber bases were about equal with a 50% overlap) you may end up with a larger subscription base as Dungeon and Poly readers both start getting a magazine that is focused on what they want. Combine this with going back to Black and white non-glossy and there may be a profit again. Another thing I would suggest is something that the company I work for does on a bi-yearly basis with its magazine. Include a readership survey in an upcoming issue. It will cost some money but it will help determine what your readership really wants. Do they want larger or smaller adventures. Is color important to them. Is the reader mail important. Do they want dungeon crawls or non-linear town adventures or both. What are their demographics. All sorts of questions can be asked and proper decisions can be made off of it. While some reasonable suggestions and possible problems can be gleaned from the internet and its self selected sample on the message boards it is only with a true readership survey that you can get a real representative sample of how all your readers really feel. If this is done and the majority of readers want something that I don't care for that is fine with me, but decisions about the future of the magazine should be based on what the readers really want.</blockquote>

Verification