Advice from our members

[mullyman]

Hey, I'm thinking of starting a little paper here in Japan to send out to the foreign community. One thing I'd like to do each month or bi-monthly would be a "20 Questions" type thing with cue makers. So, as a reader of such a piece, what kind of questions would you like answered?
MULLY

 

[Snapshot9]

I don't

quite understand what you are aiming at. I published a Billiards Newsletter, The Green Felt, for 3-4 years for all of the Wichita Area. I produced it every 2 months with a distribution of 1,500. I sold advertising to recover my operating costs. I did everything to do with it, except I had a friend that took pictures at tournaments that I published. I arranged for a copy of it to be put into league folders by league operators of 3 different leagues.

It was 6 pages long, in color. I wrote all the articles, did all the design work for the advertising, had a 'tip and trick' section, question section, for sale section, and I had a 1 page tournament page that listed all the tournaments in the area, including weekly tournaments, any 3 ball tournaments, special tournaments, league playoff tournaments, etc..

In addition, it was picked up by guys down in Oklahoma, and we arranged to have the tournament page printed on their website, and some of the tournament results for special tournaments.

In the end, I had to give it up, because it cost $270-$300 to produce per issue, and my advertising was dropping off, I could not finance it, it was taking a great deal of time. I printed it on my own wide carriage color printer which took 5 solid days and nights to print a total of 9,000 color pages. I distributed all the copies to league operators and every main Pool room in the city.

I kept a binder with copies of every issue.

1) How many copies are you going to produce?
2) How are you distributing it? costs of doing so.
3) Pick your frequency very carefully.
4) If you can publish it on the internet, that helps.

 

[mullyman]

Well, there is a small community of foreign payers in this country that have ZERO access to any pool related material as far as it relates to Japan. I'm thinking of interviewing some pro players, I know quite a few of them personally, the cue makers questions, info on tournaments around the area etc... Probably toss in a tips section and maybe a trick shot. It's not going to be anything spectacular, I'll pay for it myself and do all the work here at home. I may start with a paper and move to the net at a later date, once people know it's there.

I would just like it if there was something about pool in Japan, in English, that the foreigners could pick up. I'm definitely thinking bi-monthly to begin with. Also, the foreign pool playing community is so small that as a beginning I'm thinking of contacting the bigger rooms and asking them if I could send them a few copies to give to their foreign customers. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if a room doesn't need more than 4 or 5 copies. I've been playing over here for 17 years. Trust me, there aren't many of us over here.

If it seems to work I may even approach the Japanese billiard magazines to see if they'd like to add a few pages in English and then move everything over to there. Even if they thought it was a good idea and totally dropped me out of the picture then at least there would be something for the foreign community.


MULLY