What Happened to the Newsletter?

As many of you know, I have been so busy with all of our projects lately and working to finish up Volume 4: Biu-Tze that our newsletter, AWCA Notes, has not been published for over a year. That is a disappointment, too, because I truly love writing and producing it.

So before we go on, let me say that I have no plans of dropping it. Instead, I will be making it available again starting January 2011. The big question is how it is going to be delivered.

What started out as a simple text-only newsletter eventually grew into a full-featured HTML format with photos and videos. Delivery was a simple sign-up process and then evolved into downloading a newsletter reader (which prevents email services from flagging it as spam and keeping you from missing the issues). I sure do love the newsletter reader for a variety of reasons, but to be honest, I need to consolidate the various programs I use and simplify things so that delivery is consistent and uninterrupted.

After going through the programs and realizing what needed to be done, I have decided to drop the newsletter reader and return to email delivery. While we will have to take our chances with the email services, it really boils down to ensuring the management of content. I thought about moving the newsletter here to our weblog, but I believe that certain areas need to remain exclusive to those that sign up for the newsletter and want to take that extra step in their training.

Our eBook customers also know that delivery of usernames and passwords is a manual process, so I have been working to automate that. As luck would have it, the program being used to automatically deliver access information includes a full-featured newsletter delivery system, so this program will be used to manage both. Not only will everyone be able to receive their access information immediately after purchase, but they will also have a double opt-in function to sign up for AWCA Notes and begin receiving their monthly issues via the same service.

For the moment, you can still download and check out AWCA Notes via the newsletter reader. The issues stop at 2009 and beginning January 2011, the newsletter reader will be replaced with a sign-up section to begin receiving the newsletter via email.

I am hoping that this move will greatly increase productivity and that the email services will be kind to us. Keep your fingers crossed that they will, and look for the newsletter being available again in January. It will be a great feeling to begin producing it again!