When I started up this magazine five years ago, it was a case of necessity
instigating action. My website - ahwgallery.com, was booming
with weekly updates and thousands of visitors per day. The consequence of that
popularity was my brutal introduction to the bandwidth beast. My site hosting
fees increased eight-fold, turning my enjoyable hobby into a financial burden.
I had always played around with writing my own female fight stories, even back in
the 70s. I would purchase two or three copies of each new issue of Sports Review
Wrestling magazine, cut out the pictures and tape them to notebook paper. Then
I would re-write the captions first, then the entire story to suit my own vision for
the images.
The notion of publishing my own, original stories, seemed a logical next step in my evolution
as a fan of apartment wrestling. And my thinking was it could help defray the burden of
maintaining the main website without having to turn it into a pay site.
As a theoretically older and more worldly adult, I tried to plan for all contingencies in
advance and launched the 'zine with the intention of having it be a monthly publication. As
you know, that didn't work out at all.
Struggles with outside vendors, personal illness, and a variety of other problems slowed down
the pace of publication. The demise of my payment processor, iBill was devastating.
Not only for the money I never recovered from them, but the inibility to have instantaneous access
for fans has driven away revenue. My current system using PayPal works perfectly, but
slowly, yet many fans have an inexplicable aversion to using PayPal for purchasing.
With the current economic climate, internet payment processing companies do not want to start new accounts
without a guarantee of traffic. It's a chicken or the egg situation. I cannot increase traffic/revenue without
credit card processing, but cannot get that processing without increased revenue. groan
Though I have always felt that the current pricing of the magazine was more than reasonable, I have, nonetheless,
believed I should cram every bit of material in each issue to make them worth your money. That has also
slowed down publication as I have struggled to find just enough of the right content to make the issues
seem worthy of purchase. I never wanted to just slam a bunch of second-rate material into an issue and
throw it out there. I have always tried to give you, the fan, the best that I could do.
Again, the cumulative effect of all this has been to slow publication down to a crawl. Which I hate. I had a specific story
arc planned for the magazine which has to be changed now due to the unavailability of some models. I've had
some other ideas in the works that I have seen appear on other sites in one variation or another. Perhaps a
testament to the fact that I'm not as original as I thought. But frustrating all the same as I had hoped to
broach these scenarios first.
So what to do?
If you are reading this, then you know my solution. I will stop charging for access to all future issues of
AHW Magazine. There will be a link on the table of contents to make a donation
to my PayPal account if you wish, as well as other links at various places on the website. If you
want to donate to help out -- great, if not -- whatever. My hope here is that by freeing myself of the
concerns for loading up each issue, I can relax and just write and publish. I have lots of material in the queue,
so there's plenty more to come.
Don't get me wrong here, I didn't hit the lottery, so it's not like I don't need the money to cover my
costs, it is just that I'm tired of agonizing over it.
So there it is. My bad fortune is your good fortune. Enjoy this issue and the many more to come. Tell your friends
and toss me a couple of bucks if you can and don't hesitate to let me know your thoughts on the 'zine.
DrChin |
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