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As a freelancer PC Plus was the first magazine to really listen to my ideas and take them on board. For example, I felt that hiding the Cover Disk pages away at the back of the magazine hurt sales. I suggested moving at least some of them to the front where a potential buyer browsing the magazine would easily find them and might be more likely to buy the magazine.
They also agreed with my belief that readers' letters are like the vital signs of a magazine and we needed them for the Cover Disks. When readers write in it means the magazine has spurred them into doing something - so it's working. Because of this I ended up with sometimes up to 30 pages an issue that were written by me. I can tell you it was a very busy time!
But I loved every minute working with the staff and the readers too. When the magazine size and distribution wars were on, with 300 page plus issues, it's not surprising that PC Plus won out a lot of the time. And I like to think I helped them.
One thing I started at PC Plus, and would develop further with other publications, was sourcing full copies of older products to give away in their entirety - products like Sidekick or Lotus Symphony. Not only that, but as I got more comfortable talking with marketers of large companies, I began requiring them to help pay towards doing this (with either cash or free copies of software to sell as reader offers - or sometimes both). This meant we could sometimes put extra disks on the cover at no cost to the magazine - a major coup in the magazine readership wars.
As well as producing the Cover Disks I also wrote a lot of articles for PC Plus, including the huge Help Screen Section and several specials.
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