The calendar file

The “add to your calendar” button on the Sponsorship screen downloads a calendar file of what you have committed to: one all-day event per sold date and per date somebody currently has on hold. Available inventory is left out.

The button appears only once there is something to put in it. An empty calendar file is worse than no calendar file, so a newsletter that has sold nothing yet is not offered one.

What is in an event

Each event sits on the issue date it belongs to, as an all-day entry marked as free rather than busy, so it labels the day without blocking it.

The title names the slot type and then either the sponsor, for a sold date, or “on hold” for a held one. The body of the event carries your newsletter’s name, the price on that date, the sponsor’s destination link if you captured one, and the note you wrote on the cell in the date grid. A sold date is marked as a confirmed event and a held one as tentative, which most calendar applications show greyed or hatched, so the difference is visible without reading anything.

Why hold expiry dates are in there

A held date’s event says when the hold expires, to the hour.

That is the actionable part of a hold. After that moment the date goes back on sale on its own, so the deadline is the thing you would otherwise be keeping in your head while you wait for a sponsor to come back to you. Confirm or decline the enquiry and the entry changes the next time you download the file: a confirmed booking becomes a solid event with the sponsor’s name on it, and a declined one disappears.

Why available dates are left out

The file is a record of commitments, not a copy of your inventory.

All 26 projected dates sitting in your own calendar saying “nothing sold yet” would be unreadable within a week, and the dates you can still sell are better looked at in the grid, where you can price and edit them. What belongs in a personal calendar is the banner you owe somebody on the fourteenth and the hold that expires on Friday.

It is a download, not a subscription

Issue Mint does not publish a calendar feed you can subscribe to, and that is a deliberate decision rather than a gap.

A subscribable feed URL is a permanent credential that cannot be withdrawn, pointing at a list of who is paying you and how much. Instead, the file is a plain download behind your own login, which means it is a snapshot of the moment you took it. Download it again after anything changes. Every event carries a stable identity, so re-importing an updated file corrects the entries you already have rather than leaving two of everything side by side.

What to do with the file

Open the downloaded file and your calendar application offers to add its events, which is the same route any .ics invitation takes.

The file is named after your newsletter, and the calendar inside it is named after your newsletter too, so a calendar application that supports separate calendars can keep sponsorship in its own colour away from the rest of your week. On a shared calendar, remember what the events say: prices and sponsor names are in there, which is the point of the file and also the reason to think about where it lands.

What it is not for

The calendar file is a convenience, not the record. Your bookings, your prices and your enquiries live in Issue Mint, and deleting an event from your calendar changes nothing about what you have sold.

What the file is good for is the week ahead: knowing on Monday that Thursday’s issue owes somebody a banner. What Issue Mint’s sponsorship tools are good for is everything either side of that, and neither one replaces the other.