The reason the magazine is free is because it’s a large enough
package we can include a good number of ads and there’s still
plenty of content. Having articles that don’t interest you in a
monthly publication that also includes ads is the price of free.
Then there’s the question of publishing a weekly model rail-
roading magazine.
While we could potentially split an issue up into 2-3 articles per
week with ads, there’s still a certain amount of fixed overhead
to rolling out an issue regardeless of its size. This fixed issue
rollout overhead takes a couple of days to complete, and so
that would be multiplied by 4 (or 5 on some months).
If you do the math, that’s 8-10 working days per month now
just devoted to rolling out issues taken away from our 20-some
days of production time. In short, that cuts our issue produc-
tion time almost in half, which is not good.
Then there’s how to split up ads across weekly issues. All-in-all,
monthly is a great balance between frequency and production
effort for us, and the hobby vendors are used to a monthly ad
routine with all the general model railroading magazines. If
we’re the one odd-man-out publication with a non-standard
release cycle, hobby vendors could very well find we’d be more
of a pain for them as a weekly.
To sum it all up, monthly works very well for our production pro-
cess, and all the hobby vendors follow a monthly process in ad
placement, so monthly it is!
The MRH website is your answer
If you need a model railroading information fix more frequently
than monthly, then the MRH website is your answer.
MRH staff notes - 2
MRH-Jul 2013
