Newsletter Nuisance

I recently decided it was about time to put out a newsletter. This little idea turned out to be a lot more work than I had anticipated.

I actually like designing and writing so that part of the process wasn't too bad. I still haven't figured out what is the best software for newsletters. I found a Microsoft Word template I could tolerate and went with that. I had fun adding pictures and personalizing it and I decided on one page, in color front and back. I assumed it wouldn't be too expensive to get it printed since people print things in color all the time. I was wrong.

First I went to Kinkos where they were going to charge me $1 per page. Printing 100 newsletters would cost $100! That's outrageous, especially for someone who lives on support. I knew Office Max had a print service and I assumed it would be cheaper than Kinkos. I was wrong again. It was the same price. I decided it would be a better use of my money to buy a printer and print them myself. It would cost roughly the same amount and at least I would get a printer out of the deal. I talked with a salesperson who told me the pros and cons of all the models. I picked one out and with extra ink and paper, it came out to a little over $100.

I took it all home and got started printing. Unfortunately I did not think about ink usage when I designed my newsletter. The primary color on the newsletter is a yellowish cream. This meant that my yellow ink cartridge was out long before my newsletter had finished printing. Whoever wrote on the ink cartridge package that it would print 350 sheets was clearly a bold-faced liar. It was more like 30 sheets. I ended up going back to Office Max for more ink about halfway through the job.

I finally got the newsletters printed...well 67 of them. I couldn't even send them to everyone I had originally intended but the idea of spending more time and more money printing out 33 more did not sound appealing. After I printed them all, I showed them to my parents. My dad seemed genuinely impressed with them and I was feeling pretty good. That is, until my Mom burst my bubble by pointing out a misspelling. Now, I can be a spelling snob and am definitely a grammar snob. My mom, on the other hand, is a self-professed lousy speller and the fact that she was the one who pointed it out, really irked me. And she was right. Spellcheck had failed me! I couldn't bear to have my spelling error sent out for people to mock like Elaine's nip in her Christmas card photo on Seinfeld. I had to fix it and I sure as heck wasn't going to reprint those bad boys. So, I printed out 67 correctly spelled words in the same font and size as the misspelled one. Then I proceeded to use a glue stick to glue the replacement words atop the misspelled words. It doesn't look as polished as before but I prefer that to a misspelling.

I took me a couple hours to address and stuff envelopes but now the newsletters are in the mail. If you are one of the fortunate people to receive one of these, know that a lot of hard work and hard-earned cash went into their production. Don't use them to line the litter box or make paper airplanes with them. I hope you enjoy them and maybe for my next newsletter I will learn how to be more cost-effective and also not use as much yellow in the background.