.C:!DW .M:1 .L:99 ..What Should You Put into Your Newsletter? 14 .. How do you persuade club members to write? 14 .. Letters 14 .. Is it moral to edit letters? 14 .. Free publicity 15 .. Can directors and officers tell you what to print and how to print it? 15 .. Should you solicit advertisements? 16 .. Suppose a grant of money comes with strings? 16 .. Fillers 16 .. Material from other publications 17 .. Your own copyright 18 .. How to waste space 18 .. Page labels 18 .. Photos 19 .. Table of contents 20 .. Reverse lettering 20 .. Black space 20 ..dh:--------------- ..dm:1 ..pb ..xl:4 ..xr:18 ..X:12 ..XB:7 ..L:66 .IF:Index3.man .KF:Content3.MAN .N:14 L---P----1----+----2----+----3----+@10-4----T-#V-5----R----r----r----7--T-+--r 87cL---+----1----+----2----+----3----+@10-4----+----5----+----6----+----7----+----8----+-C--9----+ ---L--P-----1----+----2----T----3----+@10-4-C c/c V---L--P-----1----+----2----T----3----+@10-4-C V-- ---L--P-----1----+----2----T----3----+@10-4-C c/r V---L--P-----1----+----2----T----3----+@10-4-R V-- ---L--P-----1----+----2----T----3----+@10-4-R r/c V---L--P-----1----+----2----T----3----+@10-4-C V-- ---L--P-----1----+----2----T----3----+@10-4-R r/r V---L--P-----1----+----2----T----3----+@10-4-R V-- 87rL---+----1----+----2----+----3----+@10-4----+----5----+----6----+----7----+----8----+-R--9----+ ..$$Z:MI$$, $$Day$$, , $$D Mon Year$$ 87rL---+----1----+----2----+----3----+@10-4----+----5----+----6----+----7----+----8----+-R--9----+ .HL:How to Edit Your Club's Newsletter...page $$$ .HL:________________________________________________________________________________________________________ .HR:What Should You Put into Your Newsletter?...page $$$ .HR:________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 87cL---+----1----+----2----+----3----+@10-4----+----5----+----6----+----7----+----8----+-C--9----+ ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿWhat Should You Put into Your Newsletter? ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ .K:What Should You Put into Your Newsletter? ---L--P-----1----+----2----T----3----+@10-4---------------R Deciding what to put in is what we mean by "editing"; that makes this the most important chapter in the book. It is also the one that is going to be the least help: I don't know why you are publishing a newsletter, and can't tell you what ingredients will accomplish your goal. Luckily, a clear idea of why the newsletter exists will almost automatically tell you what to put in it: if your club exists to show off the members' talents with pen and typewriter, you are going to select those items that show the members' skill to best advantage, and you are going to try to give each one a fair share of the space. Other purposes will call for other criteria. How do you persuade club members to write?  .K:-How do you persuade club members to write? Amateur editing is like trying to pull teeth in a henhouse. More energetic editors than I spend hours on the phone nagging committee chairmen; I hate to initiate a call, and already have ten or twenty pages to type, so I allow committees that don't report to languish. When a new officer or committee head is chosen, tell him about your deadlines and the acceptable ways to submit copy in a matter-of-fact way that does not breath the slightest hint that it has ever entered anybody's head that he might neglect his duty. I try to reassure members that hand-written mss. are acceptable if submitted well before deadline; the only people who have handwriting that gives me any trouble are the people who won't listen to me anyhow. When I take a story over the phone, I make it clear that this is a procedure for dire repeat dire emergencies only. If you are ear-minded and haven't ten year's experience as a public typist, you might want to do it the other way around, but it takes surprisingly little time to learn how to read longhand, particularly if you read many contributions from the same small group _ and if they try to write clearly. A hand-written ms. that arrives soon enough to get a proof back to the author before hardcopy time is easier to handle than a typewritten ms. that arrives at the last minute. I encourage members to telephone corrections, particularly when I mail proofs shortly before I start to hardcopy. I made "If nothing is wrong, throw the proofs away and forget about them. If changes are needed, mark up the proofs and send them back." part of my "computer-generated letterhead". If you use the club's letterhead, type your own name, club title, and address immediately under the club's name and address; no matter what you say in your letter _ even if you center and boldface your address _ they are going to send their replies to the address they see at the top of the letter. I have had none of my mail sent to the club's post office box since I began putting my address above the date on each letter. The ad manager tells me that he dealt with the problem by whiting out the club's address on one sheet of letterhead and having it duplicated. Our new letterhead, which has the club's address in 8- point letters at the bottom, causes much less of this kind of trouble. If the contributor has a carbon-ribbon typewriter, or if he knows how to reserve a brand new ribbon for reproduction copies, tell him your precise format. Give the measurement of the column from the left edge to the right edge; I was once surprised to find that my Writer's Exchange bureau report had been retyped even though I'd made it precisely four inches wide. The editor had measured his columns from the center of the space between them, and actually meant 3.9 inches. My study of other people's 'zines suggests that if you print fiction, offering to pay will get you up to your neck in stories even if the fee you pay is a fraction of the cost of the ribbon the author used to type the final draft. All writers would like to make a living at it, but for the beginning writer it's the principle that's important. By paying even a small token you recognize that his work is work; you verify that you are printing his work because you need it and not just to do him a favor. "I sold my story!" sounds much better than "I found somebody willing to print my story." If you print non-fiction, writers do not respond much to token fees; even the highest-paying non- fiction publications sometimes print disappointing articles. Good non-fiction is easier to write than good fiction (primarily because merely "good" fiction isn't good enough), but even a bad job of non-fiction writing is work. You won't find a lot of people who do it for pure entertainment. When you do find a volunteer, he's likely to express something he's been thinking about for years, and wait several more years before writing again. Attend carefully to all the little points of etiquette: returning proofs, saying thank you, sending contributor copies, and generally making the author feel appreciated. Letters  .K:-Letters If the newsletter exists so that the members of the club can communicate, letters are perfect. Letter-writing proclivities vary. The N3F has about 300 members and puts out a "letterzine" six times a year; #160 contains nineteen pages of letters in very small type. MHW has over a thousand members, and it's a rare issue of the Bikeabout that has any letters at all. It has been my experience that club members either write or they don't; all you can do is to let them know that letters will be printed. When an announcement is particularly important, printing the cover letter serves both to call attention to the announcement _ everybody reads the letters _ and to keep the letter column alive. Controversial statements sometimes elicit letters, but it's difficult to do it on purpose, and the letters elicited are often emotional and boring. A direct request to a specific person usually works. Is it moral to edit letters?  .K:-Is it moral to edit letters? It's immoral not to. Dues are $15/year and it costs $56 to print a page of the Bikeabout: would it be right for me to let someone hog three or four pages? How sharply does one edit? It varies. The Bikeabout is absurdly large, letters are scarce, and Wheelmen tend to be terse. If the letter was written for publication, I don't remove anything but mistakes; sometimes I'll go so far as to include the words printed on the letterhead, and I've been known to cut out and paste in the decorations. If it's a personal letter, I remove those parts that aren't of general interest, and I'm particularly careful to get a proof back to the author: at least once, the author didn't want the letter printed at all. The Writer's Exchange Bulletin, on the other hand, is a single letter-size sheet, and it's distributed only to people who can relax at the keyboard. If all the  15 writer has to say is that he's moved, I edit the letter down to the return address and the date. Such text as remains in other letters is full of ellipsis marks and even those are edited from " . . . " to "...". Never edit the date off a letter; when a letter was written is a part of its meaning. Dates on letters are particularly important in publications with long lead times. If some event presents you with an unusual clump of letters on the same subject, the best way to deal with it is to excerpt the best expressions of each opinion and patch them into an article explaining how the club feels about the matter. Should you put names on the quotes? You must make a separate decision for each situation, perhaps for each quote. On the one hand, there's the principle of mentioning names as often as possible, on the other, you could end up with more space given to the attributions than to the quotes. "John said 'x' and thirty-five people agreed with him" isn't cluttered, but may put undue emphasis on John. Try "thirty-six held that, as one of them put it, 'x'." Or if there are only a few, "John said 'x'; Bill, Mary, and Frank expressed similar sentiments." Don't forget that for some quotes, the identity of the person who said it is part of the meaning. Suppose that the members pay dues, in part, for the privilege of publishing letters. Then the editor is a sort of secretary and may not edit except for repairing mistakes. If you have time, and if you feel that training writers is part of an editor's job, you may return letters with suggestions for improvement; the author will then accept a change, make a different change, or leave the work as originally written. On the other hand, you are also in the position of a commune cook dipping soup for your housemates: it's your job to apportion space fairly. You not only may, but should, return incoherent letters with a note saying that they must be rendered decipherable before you will print them. Excessively long letters may be rejected entirely, or you may print a section of the letter with the comment that it is an excerpt. You may want to suggest to the author that the unused parts of the letter be re-written as shorter letters for later issues. If you are a glutton for work and don't mind being called names, you may try to help an author condense an overlong letter. Should there be a hard-and-fast page limit? No. In the first place, it is very difficult for most contributors to estimate how many printed pages a letter will occupy, in the second, some three-page letters are much shorter than other three-page letters. You're in the kitchen, take the heat. The worst they can do to you is to let somebody else sweat instead. Free publicity  .K:-Free publicity A press release is an offer to trade: the author has done free writing for you and hopes in turn to receive free publicity. For the author, it's a gamble: will the parts that you deem of interest to your readers be the parts that he wants publicized? Will you print anything at all? He improves his odds by considering the needs of your readers and by doing a good job of writing. One clever release-writer presented me with three versions: a bare minimum in case we were tight for time and space, a short release for the normal situation, and a tells-all release in case he got lucky. A press release may be edited and re-written as you please, as long as you don't distort the information or print your own words over somebody else's name; you are free to use it as raw material to write your own article. Some "press releases" actually are only raw information, and sometimes publicity seekers will send me whole magazines from which they hope I'll glean the relevant information. When a release is too long or too disorganized to print, I seldom spend hours re-writing it; I just extract the name of the event, the date, and an address or phone number for obtaining more information _ if I don't discard it altogether. If your newsletter contains any material at all that is gathered by your own news staff, articles made from releases must mention the source of the information so that the readers can judge its accuracy. The editor of a typical club newsletter may assume that his readers are clever enough to know that all information about the Founder's Day Cotillion came from the Cotillion's publicity committee, but if you get ambitious, be alert for the possibility that you are conning your readers into thinking that you have checked the facts yourself. You must ruthlessly consider only your readers when deciding whether to use a contribution, but sometimes considering your readers means considering whether or not you will be able to get more material from this source. If you want to keep a good author writing, now and again you've got to throw him a bone. With a little consideration, you can usually serve your author and your readers at the same time; for example, if you are printing an authoritative article on how to make a buttonhole, including the information that the author is the proprietor of Joe's Tailor Shop at Fifth and Main establishes his credentials as an expert on buttonholes. Rule #1: always be nice to your authors _ and to your printer. Then there are people who don't want to trade, but demand that you print their views and cry censorship if you don't. A censor is someone who decides what somebody else should say, and that is exactly what these people are trying to do. By good luck I have never had to deal with a demand that I put the Bikeabout at the service of outsiders, but I've seen enough other publications under siege to know that thinking about it ahead of time is at least as wise for an editor as learning how to control a skid is for a driver. I've got an easy way out that most club editors don't have: If someone should demand that I print his diatribe, I can tell him to talk to our ad manager about it. The most important thing to remember when dealing with thieves is that they are thieves; you must not let them make you feel guilty. Can directors and officers tell you what to print and  how to print it?  .K:-Can directors and officers tell you what to print and how to print it? That depends on what you agreed to when you took the job. The Omaha Well-Diggers Society shouldn't have to spell out that they don't mean to finance a Star Trek fanzine, but the default assumption is that you're doing the work and you are going to do it your way. If the president makes suggestions, you are free to file them in the wastebasket unless the purpose of the newsletter, as  16 you understood it when you accepted the job, requires you to listen. Do not accept as a condition that some other person or persons may lean over your shoulder and jog your elbow while you are working. Conditions should be clearly understood and mutually acceptable when you accept the responsibility for the newsletter; new conditions should be regarded as suggestions to be accepted or rejected, unless they are voted on at a meeting at which you are present to express your views. If they cut your budget, however, you must either resign or do as much as you can with what you've got. You can't spend money that isn't there even if you think they should have talked to you before deciding to spend it on something else. What conditions have I accepted? The latest mailing date of the December issue is in our by-laws, together with the requirement that the December issue contain the election ballot. Other deadlines are set by agreement of the editor, ride-calendar editor, and publisher. Certain announcements _ a vote to amend the by-laws, for example _ must be printed in the Bikeabout. Anything submitted as an official committee report must be printed _ I must get around to telling the committee chairmen that; they are annoyingly diffident about asking for space. The only loc I have rejected, so far, was so hastily-written that I couldn't make out what was meant. I feel obliged to print locs because one purpose of the Bikeabout is to provide communication (we don't have meetings during prime riding season, and not all members can attend meetings). In addition, we get so few locs that I'm afraid to discourage anyone. Suppose a grant of money comes with strings?  .K:-Suppose a grant of money comes with strings? Once upon a time I accompanied my nephew into a dime store when he had a quarter burning a hole in his pocket. He paused before a display of books and noted that they were fifty cents. "If you want to buy one of those books," I said, "I'll give you another quarter." He immediately grabbed a fifty- cent toy. A three-year-old can be forgiven for failing to comprehend that an offer of a book is not an offer of a squirt gun, but a full-grown editor has no excuse. If someone offers you money with strings attached, don't go off into a "free expression" tizzy, but calmly consider whether or not you want the money enough to do what is demanded in exchange. If the 'zine cannot continue without the money, ask yourself whether or not your benefactor's version is worth your time and worry. If you decide that you want the money, accept it with thanks. If you decide that you can't use it on those terms, refuse it politely. Never, never bad-mouth someone just for offering you a present even if you are shocked and astonished that he thought you could use it. Fillers  .K:-Fillers "A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." _ William Strunk Jr. And a newsletter should not contain any unnecessary paragraphs. If you use the simple linear layout described in "The jigsaw puzzle bit," you don't need any fillers. There is no more reason for the last page of a newsletter to be full than there is for the last page of a letter or the last page of a book to be full. Even in page-by-page layout, there is no more reason to object to a ragged bottom than there is to object to a ragged right margin, but I have to confess to liking a square look to the bottom of the page, and my readers sometimes tell me that the odd bits I stick in to make things come out even are the best part. Amusing the readers is always a legitimate purpose, especially if it can be done with space that otherwise would go to waste. When you collect fillers, look for things that you hope that you will someday find space for, not for things that will do to plug holes. When you have space left over, look for ways to use it. If you have two or three blank lines, don't look for places where they won't show much until you have looked for places where they will make a change of subject plainer or a heading more emphatic. Collect designs that are the same width as your columns and not very high. Should you solicit advertisements?  .K:-Should you solicit advertisements? No. Not nohow. No way. If your club has enough members that you can offer an honest deal on advertising, you don't need the money. If you need the money, ask for charity or sponsorship, and print a thank-you note in a conspicuous part of the newsletter, perhaps in a box on the back of page one or on the back cover. If your club is already committed to printing advertisements, say that you will edit, but you won't manage ads. No human being can do both jobs at once. Full-time paid professionals won't attempt it; what makes you think you can handle it in your spare time? The classified ads in most newsletters aren't really advertisements, they are a way for the members to communicate with one another. I recognize their dual nature by listing them in both the table of contents and the index to advertisers. (If you do take ads, you should index them; it is annoying to be unable to find an ad again after thinking up a use for the advertised item.) Bikeabout's classifieds are technically available to outsiders, but we can usually persuade a potential paid-classified customer to join the club and get the ad free. We delete classifieds after three months if we don't hear from the member again. If I were doing the work myself, I'd simplify the chore of keeping track by insisting that a separate request be made for every insertion. Another way is to put the remaining number of insertions in braces at the end of the ad, and decrement all the codes while editing last month's ads into next month's ads. {2} This way, you automatically delete all ads that were printed with {0} codes, and it is up to the advertiser to notice what code is on his ad and renew it when it runs out. This method makes it feasible for the editor to handle paid classified ads: type a paid classified with a code for one less insertion than the number paid for (i.e., the number to be printed after the one now being printed), forward the check to the treasurer, and forget about it. The code takes care of all record-keeping. If you have time, it's a good idea to mail a proof to the advertiser. Enclose his original copy with the proof. If you don't have many reader ads, you may call them announcements and mix them with the other reading matter. Classifieds should, by the way, be classified. Categories may be as few as "For Sale," "Wanted," and "Misc." (Omit any empty categories, unless you want to call attention to the unused category in the hope of getting some ads for it.) Within each category, ads should be arranged alphabetically by the first word in each ad, using the second word to break ties. Numerals go before letters, in order of their size. Other characters go before numerals. Example: "#10 tubing, 1-way street, 3.9", 1994 Schwinn, Eight-mile ride, Three-way light bulb". "#" is an "other character", "1" and "3.9" and "1994" are in ascending order, then the spelled- out numbers are in alphabetical order. If by some mischance you have more than one "other character," arrange them in order of their ASCII values. (I don't think any human will notice if you don't bother to look up the ASCII numbers.) Ignore quote marks and the words "the" and "a". If you type classifieds on a typewriter, use fewer categories, and arrange them in order of age: the ones you copied from last month first, then each new one as it arrives. Job Description for Bikeabout Advertising Manager, cribbed from Norm Shartzer's letter of resignation: DISPLAY ADS: 1. Suggest advertising rates to MHW Board at yearly budget meeting. 2. Assist treasurer in determining ad manager's projected expenses and income for the next twelve months. 3. Secure ads from shops and other establishments. Frequent telephone calls are helpful. 4. Generate new income by sending out "invitations to advertise" to tour groups, clothing and  17 accessories manufacturers, inns, and other related services. 5. Bill advertisers. Develop a standard bill for requesting payments. Include with bill a self- addressed envelope. 6. Keep file of all advertisers' addresses and phone numbers. 7. Prepare ads (cutting, pasting, enlarging/reducing) when necessary. 8. Communicate monthly with editor regarding space to reserve for display ads. Either mail or hand- deliver all "originals" to editor by established deadline. 9. Keep record of dates when ads appear in Bikeabout. 10. Request Membership Chairman to send Bikeabout issue to paid advertisers who are not on our mailing list. 11. Collect and record checks. Be persistent, as some shops need constant reminding to pay. Occasionally, a personal visit is required. 12. Prepare monthly accounting sheet for treasurer. To be sent on the first of each month for the preceding month's transactions. 13. Send checks received to the treasurer twice per month. (For instance, on the first and fifteenth.) 14. Purchase required postage. Send receipts to the treasurer. CLASSIFIED ADS: 1. Type out list of new ads for editor. Keep originals to check for mistakes (telephone numbers, prices). Give editor a copy of last month's classifieds on which you have marked ads to be deleted. 2. For the reader's benefit, all ads should contain the following: if bicycle, must include make, model, tandem or mountain bike if applicable, frame size, number of speeds, price or B/O, telephone number. Optional information could include color, condition, extra equipment, age, touring/racing/sport, etc. 3. After three months, call member to find out if ad should be continued. Otherwise, delete ad after three months. 4. Keep track of number of months each ad has been running. Keep track of ads belonging to members (others must pay). 5. Record money paid, if any, on monthly report to treasurer. We burned out Norm's replacement, and now have a committee doing the job _ someone to represent us to the bike shops in each county of the Capital District, and a chairman to keep the books. [That plan didn't work; we didn't have enough volunteers. At the moment, we are getting along without advertising money.] To find the minimum price that you can charge for ads without losing money on them, add up the total expenses of one issue of the 'zine and divide by the number of pages in an issue. This is what it costs you to print an ad _ not just the printing expense, but also the mailing expense and other expenses. You needn't assign a monetary value to the labor of the volunteers who work on your 'zine, but you should be aware of the psychic cost. Since a 'zine ought not to be more than half ads, you can't be sure of not-losing money on your ads unless your price covers not only the expense of printing the ad page, but also the expense of printing the extra page that you may have to print to balance it. (Some 'zines are read primarily for the ads; if this is the case, you don't need to balance ads with reading matter, so your minimum ad price will be lower.) An advertiser doesn't like to pay more than $.03 to have someone look at an 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper. If the audience is really prime _ for example, the antique-book collector's society is peddling an ad to someone who sells a cleaner which won't work on anything except antique books _ he might bid as high as $.06/reader-page. To calculate the maximum price of your ads, pick a number between 3 and 6 to reflect the quality of your mailing list. Multiply this number by the number of copies of each issue actually distributed. (Not by the total printed.) Multiply again by the ratio of your page size to a letter-sized page. If your minimum exceeds your maximum, forget about selling ads unless your readers are willing to pay to read them. If you are committed to offering ads and haven't got an ad manager, announce that you will print any ads which arrived camera-ready, with checks, before deadline. You won't get many ads, but you will remain technically available. Offer a discount for payment in advance. Material from other publications  .K:-Material from other publications If the publication is an exchange newsletter, you may plunder freely as long as there is no copyright notice on the bit you want or the newsletter as a whole; the newsletter was sent to you for the specific purpose of plundering. It is considered polite to send the author a copy of the issue his work appears in, and if you make extensive changes, it's best to give him a chance to approve before you print the modified copy over his name. You can print an article you wrote from mere notes over someone else's name if the official writer has final approval, but if you make serious changes without the author's approval, tell your readers that it was edited or condensed. The word "serious" appears in the previous sentence because minor errors should be corrected without comment; the presumption is that when you change "back form the trip" to "back from the trip" or "they brought their bicycle in" to "they brought their bicycles in", you are reproducing the author's original intent. But when in doubt, confess to altering the copy; "they brought their bicycle in" might refer to a tandem, or it might have been "they" and "their", rather than "bicycle", that was the wrong number. If you have time, it is good strategy to ask permission even when you don't have to. Authors sometimes respond by sending you a new and improved version, or unexpected goodies. You must ask for permission if you want copyrighted matter from an exchange newsletter, or anything from the following: a newsletter not intentionally exchanged, a magazine dealing with the topic of your club, a publication with page charges (a scientific or medical journal, for example), or a catalog that regards your members as prime customers. Amateur authors are usually flattered and ask only that you send them a copy. People with something to sell to your members are usually pleased at favorable publicity, and grant permission provided that you print their names, addresses, and subscription fees. People who have paid to have an article printed are likely to consent to having it printed free. Include a copy of what you plan to print (acknowledgement and all) and a sample copy of your newsletter; in your letter mention the size of your club or the number of copies that will be distributed. When writing your letter, remember that you are asking a favor, not granting one. Asking for copyrighted matter from a professional publication with nothing to sell to your members is like walking into a bike shop and saying "I want to use that 12-volt lighting system in a bike I'm building;" the proprietor will smile, say you can do anything you like with it, and write you a large bill. Unless your club is a well-heeled national organization, don't mess with copyrighted material. One exception is what the copyright law calls "fair use". You may quote short pieces of a long work without getting permission or notifying the copyright owner, if you give a proper citation,* if you have a reasonable reason for quoting (a book review is always a good excuse), and if you don't unfairly deprive the owner of the right to profit by his property. For example, if you should say "Two  Wheels on the Sidewalk is not only full of inaccurate data and dangerous advice, the prose is this bad:" and follow with a quote which ought to discourage anyone from buying the book, you have certainly deprived the author of revenue,** but you have not done so unfairly _ if the quote chosen really is representative. You may not, however, reveal that the butler committed the mysterious murder with a frozen leg of lamb and then roasted the evidence and fed it to the detective, or otherwise quote enough of the copyrighted matter to blunt the urge to buy the original. If you get an item from a member of the club or an exchange newsletter, you don't need to send a contributor's copy unless you suspect that the author would like an extra copy to send to his mother. Since most of your newsletter comes from inside the club and most of what remains comes from exchanges, --------------- *"as Dan Henry once wrote" or "as John Forester says in Effective Cycling" will suffice. **or at least you fondly hope you have; it's usually better not to mention bad books at all. 18 it becomes difficult to remember that every author is entitled to a copy of every issue in which his work appears. Try to form the habit early on of taking care of contributor's copies as part of some step you can't overlook -- proofreading the table of contents, for example. The easiest way to take care of contributor's copies is to type the names, addresses, issue date, and page numbers on sticky labels and mail the labels to the publisher. If you are the publisher, type them on the same labels that you use for the subscription copies; that way, you won't forget to use them. (The reason for including the date of the 'zine is to guard against the accident of putting the label on a later issue, or at least to avoid keeping the contributor up at night wondering what he did for you.) Take great care about contributor's copies even if you don't mind looking chintzy; authors who learn that you like their work are inclined to send you more. When borrowing from an exchange letter, it is a good idea to send a contributor's copy directly to the author in case he isn't on the circulation list for exchange letters. If the author's address isn't in the newsletter, send it in care of the editor or in care of the club. When you are wielding your handy-dandy copy machine, pause to reflect that even though the words you are copying are open domain, the typesetting might be copyrighted. The design on an antique rug is free to all, but a photograph of the rug can be protected by copyright. Nobody can claim copyright to the music of "Aura Lee", but Presley could, and did, claim copyright to the arrangement he called "Love Me Tender". Your own copyright  .K:-Your own copyright Your work is copyrighted from the moment that you embody it in some tangible form. That includes the orientation of magnetic domains on computer disks. You no longer have to register your copyright to be protected, but registration is a good way to prove ownership. You may put a copyright notice on unregistered work to notify people that it isn't in the public domain; use the copyright symbol (¼) followed by the year of creation and the name of the copyright owner. If you have no pre-formed copyright symbol, spell out the entire word: "Copyright 1993, John Doe." Remember that if you publish something with no copyright notice, you may be presumed to have relinquished all rights to it; many readers will assume that work with no notice is "public domain." It may be the practice among your peers to leave the newsletter as a whole uncopyrighted in order to encourage other editors to reprint your news. You should claim copyright on your nameplate and on any item the author intends to re-use later. The nameplate and other club logos should be claimed in the name of the club or in the names of the club and the author or artist; articles should be claimed in the name of the author. You may claim copyright in order to give conditional permission to copy. It is common, for example, for "This form may be duplicated freely as long as it is an exact copy." to be printed across the bottom of an entry blank. Stating the terms under which the item may be copied notifies people that the work is copyrighted, but you may want to include a formal notice in order to mention the date and owner. Page labels  .K:-Page labels If your publication consists of more-or-less independent multipage documents, each page should have something in common with the other pages in the same article or story, and that something should be different in different stories. Heavily illustrated publications composed of sharply differing elements need not worry much about this; when I open a copy of "Threads", I'm not apt to wonder whether I'm looking at the pattern for blue jeans or the discussion of Pueblo fabric collage. Publications that are less visual have to distinguish their parts on purpose. It will suffice to print the name of the publication on the left-hand pages and the name of the chapter or story on the right-hand pages, but some publications go further. For each story, "Alfred Hitchcock" uses a different border to separate the page-number line from the body of the page, and the "Mystery Classic" and certain other items have a thin rule completely around the page. You can buy rules and other borders on .i:rules transparent tape at any drafting-supply store. The stretchy kind of border tape is for following curves; get the kind meant for straight lines. Caution: even non-stretch tape will curve somewhat if stuck down casually, and transparent border tape is not removable. A book-length fanzine called "Potpourri" used sections of floral borders to good effect. (I recognized many of them as Ed Sibbet's.) Each story has its own decoration at the bottom of each page; the first page of a story may have a decoration at both top and bottom; poems often have complete frames. If an intriguing paragraph in one of the stories catches my eye, it is easy to find out where the story begins. Another way to label pages is to put the title of the section at the top of every page, and the name of the publication at the bottom of every page. If the sections are more than quasi-independent, you can go so far as to give each section a separate page-number sequence in the top line while the bottom line gives the overall page number, the date etc. If you print the sort of thing that people might photocopy and pass around, make sure that the information needed to track down the original will photocopy too; putting your name on a shaded background gives it emphasis in the original, but reduces it to an illegible smear when it's pirated. If the 'zine is only four pages and printed all on one sheet, you don't even need page numbers. Engage brain before putting typewriter in gear. How to waste space  .K:-How to waste space If I hadn't gone to visit my mother, I'd have never thought of including this section, for my usual problem is trying to squeeze everything in. While I was there, a copy of Mother's apartment-house newsletter arrived, and it said something like this: "On January 22, Mrs. Smith gave birth to a baby girl." That was all there was to fill up a legal-size sheet of paper. I don't think that editor had any alternative to scrappy-looking fillers and lots of white space, but the following tips may be helpful in less- extreme cases: Save up during the fat seasons. If you type something and can't use it, don't throw it out before it has gone stale. Keep a file-folder or a computer file of fillers to leaf through when awkward holes appear. If you use a computer, you can punch in things just to keep on file. If you use a typewriter, pre-typed material has too many ways to be spoiled to be worth creating on purpose: you're likely to use fewer characters per line when trying to use up space, and reproduction-quality hardcopy is easily damaged. Clip out the item, or file a photocopy of it. With each filler, keep the name of the author and the address where you should send the contributor's copy. If you use a word processor, you can keep this information as a note under the filler; when you use it, move the whole entry to the proper place in the newsletter, then move the address to your file of contributor's-copy labels for that issue. In a paper file, write the name and address on the margin of the paper or on a slip of paper stapled to the filler. File fillers by size, not by subject. Use bigger type or a larger reproduction ratio. One of the pleasures of having a word processor and access to a percent-increment copying service is that I can decide how much space an article should occupy and then make it fill that space exactly; with a typewriter you can't cut and try, but have to plan for  19 a ratio small enough that you can be sure a little space will be left over. See "Scaling." Use clip art and borders. A fancy frame around a page can use up a good half of the available space, and a half-inch border around a small-but-important item can double its size. It is easy for artwork to look desperate; don't sit there muttering "gotta fill it, gotta fill it" while you stick in bits and pieces. Think of the shortage as a golden opportunity to indulge yourself in fancy decorations. If you can't stir up artistic enthusiasm, form whatever you've got into a neat rectangle and let it float in a sea of white; it will look better than a bunch of slapped-on clip art. On mimeo, where you can't use clip art, stenciled or hand-drawn headings can use up a lot of space. Since even the best handwriting can be hard to read, I wouldn't resort to hand-printing the body of an item unless desperate. If you find some antique trace-with-a-stylus art, photocopy it and trace the photocopy. Separate paragraphs with blank lines in addition to  indenting them. To keep things in proportion, you'll also have to increase the number of blank lines between items. Tell everything you know. But don't get carried away. If your nugget of information is buried in a plethora of excess verbosity, it will look even smaller than it is. Take this chance to use as many words as you need, but don't use more. Consider skipping an issue. Not often a reasonable option, for the readers will want to know why they didn't get a copy, and the sole item you have might be the announcement of an event that will be over before the next issue appears. Best used in ..Insert illustration of photo marked for cropping combination with the next suggestion: Change your format. If you skip an issue, you'll have to send out postcards to let the members know they won't get issue #2 until March _ so design a postcard that announces the Valentine's dance and tells the members that regular publication will resume next month. This way you can skip an issue and still not miss a mailing. Some newsletters change format in a planned way; they will be booklets folded from 11" x 17" paper during the club's busy season and single sheets of 8«" x 11" paper during the off season. Note that 11" x 17" paper folded in half measures 8«" x 11"; the change does not make it inconvenient to file the whole year of newsletters together. Try slashing instead of padding. Perhaps you can postpone enough items to get the newsletter into the next-smaller page count. Use an extra-wide left-hand margin. It will look as though you had left it for taking notes, or to allow for punching holes and putting into a notebook. A common plan is to put headings in a column beside the items, instead of over them. Since headings take up few lines compared to their items, this is equivalent to using two left-hand margins. The extra margin justifies the use of extra white space elsewhere, and it doesn't look the least bit desperate; many editors like the appearance so much that they put headings in their own column when the extra space has to be bought. A variation of this technique is to reserve one whole column for diagrams, regardless of whether or not there are any diagrams. Textbooks sometimes adopt this format because it allows every diagram to be close to the text that refers to it without interrupting the text. Usually the outside column _  that is, the left column on left-hand pages and the right column on right-hand pages _ is for diagrams, and the inside column is for text. The text column is usually wider than the diagram column, but if you are desperate to fill up a specified number of pages, you can reverse that. You don't need to have a diagram on every page, or even one on every two-page spread, but there must be some for the trick to work. Decorations can be pressed into service, if they mark the beginnings of chapters or can otherwise be made to appear purposeful. You can also put comments beside important items, or use the extra column for footnotes. Page Labels (see discussion above) present obvious possibilities. Photos  .K:-Photos To show a printer how to crop a photo, tack it to paper. I used to touch a well-wiped rubber-cement brush to each of the four corners of the photo and press the photo onto the paper, using clean junk paper to keep my fingerprints off the print. If the cement is rubbed off as soon as the photo comes back from the printer, it probably won't stain; if it should stain, at least I've confined it to areas where it won't matter much. Now that removable-glue sticks are available, I render a small spot of paper tacky, then press the photo onto it, using junk paper to protect the print. It's probably still a good idea to remove the print from the paper and clean it as soon as it gets back from the printer. Jan V. White ("Mastering Graphics") says to wax the photo down, but if you've got a waxer, you know more about creating reproduction copies than I do. After affixing the photo to paper, use a T-square and a triangle to mark crop lines on the paper. These are extensions of the desired edges of the printed picture. Underneath, write "crop as shown". Never physically cut a photograph, and never mark on it. The professional method is to mark on a transparent "overlay," which also protects the surface of the photograph. ..Insert illustration of photo marked for cropping  20 Another method is to photocopy the photo and mark up the photocopy. This also provides a back-up method of identification in case the print is separated from its label. If the picture is to be shrunk or blown up, put double-headed arrows between the crop lines with the desired finished size written in a break in each arrow. Print the picture the size you began with, if possible; it's cheaper, and presents fewer opportunities for surprises. It is more blessed to crop a photo than to shrink it. Few of us use printing methods so good that a landscape the size of a postage stamp can show any detail. Eliminating background clutter nearly always improves a photograph. Perhaps you haven't the skill to make a picture into great art, but by cropping down to the telling detail, you can always present it with drama. Almost any picture looks good if you show only its best part. From a letter FlintúMitchel wrote to the N3F Fanzine Editing Round Robin on 7/6/89: "A small tip: if you want to have photos in your zine, go to an art supply store and get something called Copy Screen 2. It looks like reverse Zipatone (i.e., it's white dots on a clear background). Go to a copy shop, have them put Copy Screen 2 on the copier glass, and then have them place your photos face down on top of the Copy Screen sheet. What you will get is not a 100% perfect halftone, but it will be passable for most purposes (naturally the quality of the screened photo will directly relate to the quality of the copier). And, considering what copies cost vs the cost of halftones, it's a real savings." Table of contents  .K:-Table of contents A very short newsletter, particularly one laid out in one column like a regular letter, needs no table of contents. A long newsletter such as the Bikeabout needs a formal table of contents which lists everything that isn't an advertisement, a filler, or an ornament. (Advertisements have their own index.) Is a given photograph an ornament or a feature? Often the decision rests on whether or not I need another line to make my table of contents fit its space. For in-between newsletters, there is an in-between way to list your contents: in a column headed "Inside" or some cute variation thereof, list those important items which are not on the front page. Or, between none and in-between, you can put blurbs on the front page for items that you fear readers might overlook. If a table of contents is not on the front page, the front page should contain a notice telling where to look for it. If the front page is a full-page illustration, the table of contents belongs inside the front cover or, if page 2 is reserved for the indicia, on page 3. It should be in plain sight when the reader first opens the 'zine. Not until your 'zine becomes so large that a list of its contents fills up an entire page can you assume that your readers will search for the table of contents without instruction. Even then, you should make sure that no-one has to inspect more than three pages before finding it. The table of contents can go on the back cover if that's what the reader sees first when he takes the 'zine out of the mailbox. Black space  .K:-Black space An expanse of black space is a severe test of a printer's skill; with some printing methods it is difficult to get black space to print completely solid; with others, it is impossible. If you try it on mimeo you will ruin the stencil and may have to clean up the machine after the stencil gives way. All printing methods do fine around the edges: if you need a big, dark area, make it all edges: hatching or a 90% screen may give the effect you are after. If you have big, bold letters that you paste in, inspect them before going to press, and fill in any pinholes with a drafting pen and a felt-tip marker. There's no point to letting one printing method's flaws pile on top of another's. If you feel that your printer can handle black space, give him a break: Don't hand-color the space; use block-out film. White Space  .K:-White space Some writers on publishing appear to think that the marks on a page exist only to define white space. Most club newsletter editors are on too tight a budget to indulge an obsession with white space; we just try to arrange the text so that it looks good and isn't too crowded for easy reading, and leave talk about "opening up" and "lightening" to graphic artists. Margins: For two columns on letter-size paper, the minimum for outer margins is half an inch, unless you are going for the oppressed-guerrilla look and want to suggest that you risked your life for every sheet of paper. The maximum width for outer margins with two columns is one inch, unless you want ostentatious white space. For one column on letter paper, one inch is a minimum, and I prefer an inch and a half; even if you don't bind your newsletter, you should consider leaving an extra half inch on the gutter-side margin in case your readers want to staple the 'zine or punch it for a notebook. Let the comfortable reading length of a line determine how much space is left for the side margins, then set the bottom margin to match and make the top margin slightly wider. A name and page-number line will be perceived as part of the margin, so set the top margin equal to the bottom margin when you use one. A white-space rule of thumb: if your only reason for putting it in is to prove that you can afford it, leave it out. This rule is also good for multi-color printing, screened photographs, gilded titles, etc. If you need to prove that you have plenty of money, use bigger type, or pay more for your content. Reverse lettering  .K:-Reverse lettering Blocks of reverse lettering are cruel and inhuman punishment to inflict on a reader _ I hesitated to mention that it was possible for an amateur to letter white on black, when professionals so often get carried away _ but reverse headlines are slap-in-the- face emphatic. They are particularly useful for tags in the upper left-hand corner of the page; this clearly marks the beginning of an article even if your 'zine is a busy conglomeration of illustrations and graphs. Reverse lettering is useful when you want a series of headlines of differing length to be visually identical; just put each of them in the same black rectangle, like inscriptions on identical ribbons. It is difficult to get the same effect by putting a normal headline in a box, because we tend to feel that a box ought to be full. Another trick is to put a normal headline between two ribbons that run the full width of a page or column. White-on-black letters are harder to read than black-on-white letters. I'd hazard a guess that for reverse lettering to be as easy to read as normal lettering of the same clarity, it would need to be at least half again as big. The clarity is never equal. In all reproduction methods, the black tends to spread into the white. Often-copied normal type will get "fat", but with decent reproduction it takes many iterations for "bold" to change into "blurry". White type loses detail on the very first pass, and the stems of the letters tend to shrink out of sight. Create reverse lettering by using white transfer letters on block-out film or dark shading film. Put shading film inside a fine line to give it a finished edge. If your hand isn't as steady as you'd like, use a wide line and let the cut edge fall in the middle where it won't show. (You cut the film after laying it over the artwork, and remove the excess.) Don't torture yourself for hours in order to torture your readers: if you want to emphasize more than one short line, type or typeset it normally, put a box around it, and fill the box with a very light shading film. A box or border may do the trick without the shading film. Or surround normal type with white space. Emphatic white space can range from putting a blank line before and after the passage to putting one teeny block of type in the middle of a big, blank page. Colored ink  .K:-Colored ink A dash of color can add real pizzazz to your 'zine. It can also make it look the way something that has been dipped in cheap cologne smells. When you want to look high class, spend first on design, and second on design, and third on design. Compare a black-and- white engraved business card with a four-color comic book from the "golden age", and vow that you'll never introduce a second color without a good reason, and likewise think three times before choosing three or four colors over two. The less precise the register you demand, the cheaper a second color is. If black text is to be printed under a red nameplate, and if you have the nameplate printed on a day when the press is already set up with red ink, two colors won't cost any more than running the paper through twice. If the printer has to fuss and fume to get one red letter properly aligned in a black word, it's going to cost you. And if you want red polka dots on a black halftone, with no overlapping and no hairline of white showing between the red and the gray, it's really going to cost you. A printer will charge less for a standard color than for a custom-mixed color, and he'll charge a whole bunch less if he doesn't have to wash all the ink out of his press before your job and do it again afterward.