When MAKE ships until 2010, covers and more…

We had a reader email us and ask when they would see each MAKE and what would be on the cover, good questions so we thought we’d share the answer with everyone!

We have on sale dates for newsstands for the rest of this year and into 2010. But we don’t know what will be on the cover until we have all the content for each issue and decide which articles are either the most photogenic or the most interesting.

On sale dates for newsstands are a week or two later than when subscribers actually get their copies. Subscribing is cheaper, you get each issue earlier, and you have access to the online edition.

On sale dates:
MAKE 14 June 3, 2008
MAKE 15 Sept. 9, 2008
MAKE 16 Nov. 25, 2008
MAKE 17 March 10, 2009
MAKE 18 June 2, 2009
MAKE 19 Sept. 1, 2009
MAKE 20 Nov. 24, 2009
MAKE 21 March 9, 2010

The date we mail the issues to subscribers is approximately 18 days before the on-sale dates below. On-sale dates are Tuesdays; subscribers living in the U.S. should have their copies – at the latest – by the Friday of the on-sale week. If they don’t have them by then, we’ll replace the copy. Add 1 week to the US late date for Canada, and 3 weeks for all other countries.

The digital edition is usually up just a few days after the mail date (Make V14 went up today), and subscribers can share it. As for EXACTLY WHAT will be on the cover, the covers get posted here.

And now back to the postal system….
In some cases, subscribers will get their copies in 3 days, in some cases it will be weeks.

This depends primarily on:

1. The distance of the subscriber from our print/mail facility in Wisconsin
2. The concentration of subscribers in each subscriber’s geographic region

We presort our mail down to post-office defined levels:

• Carrier route – the route one postal employee works in a day; pretty much the same 9-digit zip code
• 5-Digit – same 5-digit zip code
• 3-Digit – same first 3 digits of the zip code
• SCF – (Sectional Center Facility) – place that processes multiple 3-digit zip codes, usually by county level
• ADC – (Area Distribution Center) – place that processes mail to the SCFs, usually by state level
• Mixed ADC – mail we can’t sort any deeper, it’s entirely up to the post office to sort it.

All of the mail enters the postal system in Wisconsin and is redirected by the post office depending on the level of sortation. If we get them an entire pallet headed to the same 3-digit zip code, they can leave the pallet intact until it reaches the SCF, which will then break it down and ship it out. This is a much faster process than the mixed bundles get. We have to have at least 24 copies to presort into one of these categories. Since we have a lot of subscribers around NYC and SF, we can often sort the mail down to the carrier route. This means less handling for the post office, so the copies arrive fairly quickly. However, subscribers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, might all get bundled together, requiring more processing for the post office and a much longer time to work their way through the system.