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Fun read, thanks Simon. One complaint: I've been a subscriber to Randy's list for so long that I had a vague recollection of the fact that This is True was NOT the original name of the newsletter. I kept waiting for that part of the story, if for no other reason than to be reminded what it was. I understand you deciding not to spend a bunch of words detailing the switch from This Just In to This is True, but it's clearly part of the interesting history of Randy's pioneering publication. As a journalist, you should have mentioned it 🤗

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I don’t wanna be too much of a niggler. 3,000 books sold for net $10 would’ve meant a $20 book. A 32-page newsletter cost us $1.00 a copy to print and 70 cents to mail when Randy was starting up. A book would cost a lot more. Great model if you’ve got $15,000 in cash to risk. The printer gets paid first. It’s a great peek at how print readers jump started online audiences. Thanks for taking us small publishers down the memory lane of the 90s, though. Love your newsletter!

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I hate to niggle with a writer coach, but seriously, you think I was paying $10/copy for books to sell!? In 1995 when printing several thousand books (160 acid-free pages, color laminated cover, perfect bind), they were just over a dollar each, for a "risk" of barely over $3,000, not $15,000. The cover price was $11, from which I got the author royalty, the publisher's cut, and (the vast majority sold direct) the distributor's cut. Not a great risk, either: the first 3,000 sold out and I had to order another 3,000 just to get me through the first year and a half. (Today, more than a quarter century later, the cover price is $17, soon to be $19.) Book rate shipping was deliciously cheap back then too, so I charged a flat $1 for domestic shipping, which encouraged multi-copy sales.

You may then argue about pre-press costs. They were "typeset" by me using Ventura Publisher, output to my 600 dpi laser printer. The only thing I had to farm out was color separations for the cover, and I knew where to go to get them quite cheaply. Bottom line: I wasn't just scrappy about how to create and publish a newsletter, which was a necessity in those days before ESPs and CMSs, that carried over to the books, too.

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