Randy Cassingham's Blog

I'm getting to a critical juncture in planning for True's future. It mostly involves getting something for the time I put in -- and the time is considerable: it takes many more hours to deal with the online part than to research and write the column in the first place! I need to be paid for my work.

The last time I whined about this, one reader suggested that if I needed money to help pay my rent and buy food and clothes, I should get a full-time "day job" so that people online could still get True for free. Gee, thanks, but I'm trying to cut my work hours back from 70 per week, not add more. I don't want to pull True off the net and then have people say, "why didn't you tell us that there was a problem?!", so I'm telling you: I'm being faced with a choice over how to best spend my time to get the most out of True's distribution; I can continue to give it away over the net for free and hope book sales improve, or I can give up the net and concentrate on bringing in more newspapers to run the column, or I can salt the text with paid ads from people wanting to reach True's huge audience. Each has its pros and cons, but I need to pay my rent!

I propose running up to two ads in each issue, and the response was incredible: see next entry....