Our budgets are now in and Ray Wright and his team have the job of making everything fit. This 1978/79 budget shows the largest single yearly increase ever in our Publishing Production budget. This has been caused mainly by the rise in postage, paper and printing costs. We hope to do more this year inspite of inflation taking its toll.
You will see from Brian Knowles comments that the PT is now to have a fourth signature of 16 pages containing more religious material. Even though it does mean extra work and coordination with our printers both here and overseas, we are eager to start working with Brian's department on this. As Brian mentioned, we intend to design four (4) self-contained signatures so that we can assemble from these 16-page sections a magazine which will suit the different areas of readership. For example: The newsstand magazine which is two signatures, 32 pages, has to be put together remembering that these people are first time readers — we don't want to hit them with strong meat straight off. We obviously would not give them a religious section. The new section will also grove to be very helpful to quite a large section of our regular PT list who nay request more religious material than in the regular Plain Truth. These readers can now be progressed so Richard Rice's area can pick up with their subscriber mailings. Things are looking good for the Plain Truth content. We should be seeing an increase in reader involvement and growth over the months to come.
We are preparing to start production of the new 16-page section with the October/November edition, but a lot will depend on the availability of paper. We may have to use a totally different type of paper, a fiber or pulp stock. Something like the Potential section of Quest.