At the end of our first year of publication (in 1990), we issued a progress report but have made none since then. We started in January 1990 with *no* subscribers. For that first issue, I compiled a list of 200 or so names, primarily from an alumni newsletter I had recently received from the Bible college I had attended, sent out a mailing, and waited. The main response I received was a lot of copies that were returned marked REFUSED (which some of you ordering back issues are now seeing, since that 1st edition has sold out and been reprinted in loose-leaf format). There were also some angry, please-remove-my-name-from-your-list letters and phone calls.
That has all changed--radically. In our six years of publication, the subscription list has grown from zero to 1700, and new subscription requests arrive daily by regular mail, e-mail, and phone calls. Only rarely do we receive demands to cancel subscriptions, and these usually come from people who were sent the free first-year subscription at the request of friends or relatives.
The first 8 issues of TSR contained 12 pages, but, never having enough space for everything we wanted to publish, we switched to a 16-page format with the first issue of 1992. We still didn't have enough space, but at least we were giving our readers more with no increase in the subscription cost. The first 15 issues were set up on a dot matrix printer, but we switched to a laser printer with the Autumn 1993 edition. That gave us a much more attractive format and made it possible to include almost twice as much material on the 16 pages. We have since upgraded the computer system, bought a better laser printer, and added e-mail and a fax machine.
Each improvement was intended to make my workload easier, but it didn't always work out that way. When I first started TSR, I received letters and requests for information only occasionally, but as the subscription list grew, both of these increased. At first, I was able to answer each letter (and even wish for more to answer), but that changed long ago. By 1994, I was receiving more mail than I could possibly answer and had to publish occasional notices to let subscribers know why some letters were not being answered. E-mail has made this problem even worse. However, it is easier to answer e-mail than ordinary letters, so I urge subscribers who have e-mail to use this medium to contact me. I can respond to these messages by merely typing an answer and clicking onto a "send" icon, and this saves the time of having to print a hard copy, address an envelope, put the letter inside, affix a stamp, and take it to the post office. It is also much cheaper.
The main purpose of this special editorial message, however, is to announce another important change. Beginning in 1996, TSR will be published bimonthly rather than quarterly. Many of you have written or called to say that you wish the paper were published more often, and I have decided to do this. Since I have never been able to publish everything I would like to (including some good articles submitted by subscribers), I decided that my retirement, which began last July, would give me enough time to add two more issues per year. The two additional issues would accommodate your requests for more and would enable us to publish articles that are on our waiting list.
Your help will be needed to make the bimonthly format successful. The first way you can help would be by renewing your subscription. The two additional issues next year will add several hundred dollars to our operational costs. In the past, I personally covered all losses when we were operating in the red, but I may not be able to do that very often on a retirement budget. TSR had just reached a break-even point when I decided to change to a bimonthly format, so we will need to maintain this year's paid-subscription level at the new $6 rate (still $1 per issue) through next year in order to remain solvent.
Most subscriptions (but not all) expire with this issue. If your copy has a renewal notice inserted inside (between pages 10 and 11), this means that your subscription expires with this issue. To renew (and assist us in meeting our goals), just complete the form and mail it back with your $6 renewal check. If no insert is in your copy, your subscription has not yet expired.
Because subscriptions have increased steadily since we began publication, we can reasonably expect this to continue. If so, my workload will also increase, because The Skeptical Review is essentially a one-person operation. In addition to writing many of the articles, I set up all articles submitted from outsiders, keep the subscription list current, package and mail all orders for back issues and other materials, answer as much correspondence as I can, run address labels, affix them to all copies, and complete the forms for bulk mailings. Needless to say, all of these tasks make heavy demands on my time.
If you want to submit articles, I would encourage you to do so. Some of our best articles have been written by our subscribers. However, you can help lighten our load here if you will send ASCII copies of your articles along with your hard copies. With only a hard copy of an article, I must type it and then set it up in our publishing format. Depending on the length of an article, this could take up to two or three hours, but with an ASCII copy, I can have it formatted within a few minutes. Of course, if you have no computer (and few writers don't these days), we will still consider typed or even handwritten articles. We would never let a little work keep us from publishing a deserving article.
For those who do want to submit articles, we ask you to remember that our publishing focus is Bible inerrancy. We have received many articles on religious subjects not related to the inerrancy issue, political subjects, and even works of fiction, but we cannot consider these for publication.
Finally, we would urge our inerrantist readers to
take advantage of our offer to publish responses to any of our articles
and to publish competently written defenses of the inerrancy doctrine
simultaneously with our responses. This policy gives our readers
the opportunity to hear both sides of the issue and gives
inerrantists an audience of skeptics they would not likely find in
their own publications.
