Subscription refunds and the future

To all subscribers,

This year has proved challenging on many fronts. Hookpoint has always been grateful for its vast array of talented contributors, but at the back end, laying it all out, collating everything, editing all images and text has been one person. 

For a number of years online and then a year in print, this worked, though it was always a heavy workload and inevitably, as we now know, the straw to break the camels back would come along. 

I never expected that it would be a personal/family issue that sapped me of the necessary time to undertake such a large job of laying out a magazine each month. Every minor issue in production becomes a large one when time is at a premium, days quickly become weeks and then months. 

Sucked into a rabbit hole of focusing on the health of one of my children, I looked for stop gap solutions to get the magazine going again, but delegating out work and outsourcing can take even more time in the first instance than simply doing it myself. Even coming out the other side of this, the backlog of catching up is so immense, it creates further challenges.

Rushed solutions for the magazine could naturally lead to further issues presenting themselves in the future. This has already become a reality with a recently printed issue, with further minor issues becoming more significant because of drains on my time. 

It has left me questioning what steps to take next, but the first priority is the subscribers.

Refunds

All subscribers will receive an email in the next 48 hours to process a refund for their unfulfilled subscriptions. Personal payment details are not retained at point of order so I’m afraid we can’t just automate this, and will have to work through each one manually. 

Once we resolve the distribution with the latest copy of the magazine, subscribers will receive this free of charge. 

Thereafter, the printed magazine will pause until the new year, to give proper time to establish a failsafe process in the end to end production and distribution that doesn’t have any bottlenecks or single points of failure to put it at risk. 

Subscriptions will not be available again until several seamless months have passed with the new process in place. 

So what does the future look like?

Our website will be changing, rather considerably. There will be a more substantive update on that to come ahead of the new year. 

Once the pause on the print magazine ends, the copies will be sold on an individual basis, but will also include distribution via the magazine stands in supermarkets and other stores. Viability of subscriptions will only be assessed once several months pass by without a hitch, and when the process has been reviewed with others and it has agreement on its sustainability over time. 

What if I don’t want a refund?

On an individual basis, a number of subscribers have indicated a preference to just wait it out. I need to be very clear here, whilst every effort will be made to establish a sustainable model ahead of re-launch, it cannot be guaranteed. This is not an easy environment to produce and distribute a magazine in anymore. If you do decide to wait it out, we will offer the refund again monthly until re-launch. The number of issues in your subscription will also be doubled, assuming the solution is found to fulfil it. 

Thank you

Thank you for everyone’s understanding whilst I process this. It’s always been so rewarding to read the glowing reviews on the magazine when I was able to have them regularly produced. A way to get back to this regularity will be found, without compromising the quality of the magazine. The challenge is time, nothing more, nothing less. We won’t come back with a quarterly offering, we won’t come back with newspaper thin pages. The same great product will return but with assurances of reliability.

For any other questions, please contact grantjones@hookpoint.co.,uk