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 New Bugle Feature Starts This Week
by Alice Korach
Those of you who are long-time BeadBugle.com visitors are probably wondering why the Bugle has suddenly started offering two levels of access. As in the past, most of the Bugle is still free, but for complete access to a few of the newer features, subscription is required. You need to be a subscriber to get to the directions for the new projects that we publish every week, and you also need to be a subscriber to participate in the Brag Page and Bead Scene.
As you may have noticed, the BeadBugle has changed a lot since last summer. The biggest change is that a new issue with 10-12 articles is published EVERY week. Each week there’s a new project with lots of how-to photos and drawings, and we’ve added more reviews and new columnists in fashion and style, polymer clay, seed beads, and soon wire. We’re encouraging more participation from you on the Bead Scene, the Brag Page, Tips, and projects. And in the last month, we added software that allows us to create better-looking, printer-friendly PDF layouts for the projects.
We know you’ve been enjoying the improvements we’ve made in frequency, content, and quality because the number of people coming to visit us online has been steadily increasing, and your feedback has been extremely positive. It has been very important to us to keep the BeadBugle the same friendly, open, sharing community that it has always been. We just wanted to make it even more so. We wanted to give you more and clearer information and inspiration (hence the editing and the new features) and to give you an even stronger platform for sharing with fellow beaders around the world.
TA DAH! This week also marks the beginning of our two-project-a-week publication schedule. We’ll continue to have the Alice project, but now we’re adding a project a week bought from many of you, our talented readers! We’re really excited about the diversity and variety that your projects will add.
But there’s one little catch. Isn’t there always? No one at the BeadBugle is independently wealthy. The BeadBugle has always lost money, but the recent improvements – particularly weekly publication and the purchased projects – have made it even more costly to produce. Tonette and Bill thought long and hard about charging a subscription fee, but the alternative was to go back to every-now-and-then publication and an occasional project. Well, you know how hard it is to go backward. Once you’ve seen how good something can be and your brain is teeming with all sorts of new ideas and improvements, the last thing you want is to abandon all those wonderful things.
Actually, the BeadBugle is an incredible buy at $25 a year. There are 10-12 new articles each week. That means that you get 45-50 articles a month or 90-100 in every two-month period. The total per year is an astounding 600+. Count the number of articles in your favorite printed bead magazine, and you might be surprised to discover that you’re getting fewer than half the number you get in the BeadBugle. You are also paying more per year for most of the printed magazines, and you don’t get any of the extras described below.
Subscription benefits
The idea of asking you for money without giving you more than your money’s worth just killed us, so we added benefits that could easily exceed the cost of a subscription.
BeadBugle benefits -- First, a subscription will entitle you to free downloads of 104 or more projects a year. Each is tested and illustrated with step-by-step photography and figures, and all bead interest areas and skill levels will be covered.
We also encourage subscribers to submit pictures of their best work to be published on the Brag Page, and subscribers with internet bead businesses are welcome to send information so we can feature you in Bead Scene. The Bugle also provides free links in our Beady Links section and free bead store links to our premium subscribers.
Free Book as a gift for subscribing – Subscribers will also receive a free download for a book of 20 never-before-published projects by me. It will sell for $14.95 to non-subscribers.
Best of all – Subscribers get an automatic discount of 10% on all purchases on BeadBabe.com. A lot of people (I was one of them until recently) have no idea of how much is available at BeadBabe.com, how good the quality is, and how low the prices are even before any discounts. If you spend more that $250 a year on beads ands supplies (and who doesn’t?!), you’ll recoup your entire subscription fee, plus you’ve gotten a free book and free projects! Of course, all volume purchase discounts will still apply, the BeadBugle subscriber discount is on top of these discounts.
Other benefits are under development, so we can’t tell you about them yet, but watch this space for some really exciting new announcements in the months to come.
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