This is a milestone. It's not merely Issue No. 3 of Nurturing Potential, it is the last of the promotional on-line issues for which we are making no charge. We have also produced and published two free paper issues.
Another milestone is that we have taken our first annual subscriptions, having chosen the occasion of the ANLP Conference during the weekend of October 26/27 to announce our modest scale of charges, applicable as from the beginning of 2003. These may be found in "The Last Word" section of this issue, or by clicking here.
We believe our charges are very reasonable. It has long been the Editor's view that professional journals cannot be cost-effective on the basis of cover price alone. And by "professional" we mean journals that are produced to a professional standard rather than merely "house-journals" addressed to a specific profession.
That being the case, it would be fallacious reasoning to attempt to make the product pay by increasing its price. Magazines become economically viable only when they attract paid advertising. Advertisers will not pay for publicity in a magazine that has a limited circulation. And therein lies the paradox.
So we will continue to subsidise the production of this periodical, but will hope to achieve some reimbusement via the annual subscription for the post-free supply of three paper issues per annum, and the annual cost of the key (password) that will allow access to most of the material on-line.
If any readers and/or subscribers would like to advertise their services within these pages, we will be happy to accommodate them and negotiate a modest charge for that facility. In due course we will devise a scale of advertising rates but, as stated above, it would be ludicrous to do so until we have established a reasonably large subscriber base.
In the meantime we are delighted that we have started taking subscriptions and we trust that subscribers will continue to recognise they are getting real value for money.