Why Subscribe?

A good question, given that you can view it online or download it for free. I can think of two good reasons to subscribe, especially if you live in the region covered by the newsletter. (1) If you subscribe, the newsletter will be sent to you automatically so you won’t have to remember to download it at the right time. (2) Subscribers receive occasional e-mail updates about last-minute changes, cancellations, etc. When applicable I’ll put them on this web site, but again that’s less convenient than receiving them automatically.

About the Newsletter.

The Seacoast Country Dance Newsletter has been published monthly since 1985. I had published an occasional calendar of local dances over the previous couple years under that name, but the inspiration for a monthly newsletter came when the Newmarket Town Hall, where we danced every second and fourth Friday, burned to the ground. That left us without a home for our dances, a situation that lasted to some extent for a couple years as the Newmarket dance went through a few unsatisfactory temporary homes.

To let people know when and where the next dance would be, I started a mailing list, and sent out postcards every month listing the dances along with other dances within a couple hours and a paragraph or so of commentary. The format was directly inspired by the Maine Country Dance Orchestra’s monthly Newsletter, as at the time I was going to the Bowdoinham dance nearly every month and it was one of my two favorite dances (the other being the Francestown dance).

At first the newsletter was a free mailing, funded by the local dances. However, by October 1986 it had grown to about 200 people which was getting too expensive to be funded by the dances. I was also becoming interested in including more commentary, and that was when I got my first computer (a Mac Plus), so everything came together to allow me to expand the newsletter to a letter-sized publication and to manage the subscriptions myself with a database (Helix, which despite being mistreated by its varied owners, remains an excellent database to this date). I continued putting out newsletters free at dances so new dancers could pick up a copy; I’m sure some people have picked up free copies for years.

The subscription version grew to 200 subscribers by October 1989. In 1992 I switched to legal sized paper to allow more detail in the dance listings and a bit more commentary. Subscriptions reached a peak of about 250 in 1994 and have gradually decreased since then (a general trend in dance newsletters as I understand). Although it took a while to figure it out, the downward trend appears to be due to more and more dancers getting their information from the web rather than from local dance newsletters.

Editorial interlude: This has had mixed results. It’s much easier to get information now than it used to be, but many people try to list dances all around the country, and accuracy seems, not surprisingly, to be roughly inversely related to distance from the dance. I still get occasional indignant calls from people who go to the 4th Saturday Dover dance because they found out about it on “the contradance web site” and it’s not there. Well, it hasn’t been there for years (it’s in Kingston), but apparently some web sites still list it, and we have to suffer from their inaccuracies. We all make mistakes, but that’s different from mistakes that persist for years. Don’t list dances unless you plan on keeping track of them!

In 2003, with subscriptions at about 150, and with paper and postage costs going up, I started having a separate version to put out at dances (letter size) in addition to the subscription version, which saved some money. In 2004 I added in e-mail subscriptions in PDF format at half the price of postal subscripions. Those were in a slightly modified letter format, under the assumption that most people don’t keep legal-sized paper around if they want to print it.

In August 2006 I started making the newsletter available for downloading in PDF format, although I still couldn’t figure out how to put it on the web site (due to font issues and the use of characters that wouldn’t reproduce on the web). In November 2006 I solved that problem and the newsletter is now on the web in viewable form as well.

So now I have four versions of the newsletter. I started with 17 e-mail subscriptions out of 143; while total subscriptions have continued to decline, e-mail subscriptions increased to about 30 out of the current 100 or so subscribers (plus another 25 or so free ones each month picked up at dances); so they’re roughly a third of total subscribers. My counter reset itself for some reason, but in the first 12 days of March I’ve had about 36 visits to the Newsletter Calendar page, so it’s clearly getting more views than the number I’ve lost in subscribers.

An unanticipated result is that I’ve started adding content to the web site that doesn’t fit in the newsletter. I’ve always had a space problem; now I can just put what doesn’t fit on the web site.

Note: Please report any broken links or give me feedback on this web site through the Feedback Page.

Please note: for now I’m not taking new subscriptions. Hopefully that will change during the summer. You can still download newsletters from this web site or pick them up at the Dover dance.

Since 6/13/07