This is the story of the CPC Computing Cover Tape that never was... I had finally, after months of planning, begging and cajoling got the management to agree that to compete against the competition we needed to do something spectacular. We had seen the results of putting free discs on other magazines, so why not a free cassette on CPC Computing?
   Well, the main problem was that recorded cassettes were much more expensive to buy in than duplicated media. But eventually I got the green light and went ahead putting together several deals with suppliers to put demos of their products on in return for free merchandise for us to sell as reader offers.
   You see, the cost was so high we had to offset it somehow, and we felt pretty confident we had achieved that, well I felt confident anyway. So, I went ahead and wrote the articles, had special offers and artwork arranged and we commissioned a special front cover for the magazine and... right at the last minute it was decided that we would require readers to mail in for the tape instead.
   It would be a freepost address so it would still be free, but the powers that be felt that less than 20% of readers would be likely to bother sending off for it, yet we would receive the same sales impact as if we actually had placed a tape on the cover - at least, that's what they said.
   So I had to do a lot of backtracking with the companies that thought their product would be featured on a cover-mounted tape. It took some smoothing over I can tell you. And you know what? As far as I recollect, the actual cost of processing all the freepost cards and mailing out the tapes in jiffy bags ended up higher than if we'd just put the tapes on the front cover anyway.
   And in the end magazine sales didn't increase as much as I had hoped. I believe they would have gone a lot higher had there been an actual tape on the cover - and that we'd have retained a significant number of this increased readership.
   Oh, there's one aside to this story. I had written an Asteroids type game in my spare time called Amstroids - it even had digitised speech and music but I hadn't yet sold it - then Europress said they needed another fully-working game for this tape - so I got a nice bonus that month.