Dates, and pricing them one at a time

The date grid is one row per upcoming issue date, one column per slot type, and one price and status in every cell. Issue Mint projects 26 dates ahead from the publishing schedule you already set, so a weekly newsletter has half a year of inventory to sell without anybody typing a date.

Where the dates come from

The dates come from your newsletter’s schedule, not from a separate sponsorship calendar you have to keep up.

A weekly newsletter gets a date every seven days, a fortnightly one every fourteen, and a monthly one gets the same weekday four weeks on rather than the same calendar date, because a Thursday newsletter drifting onto a Saturday would be a fault rather than a feature. Counting starts at your next send day on or after tomorrow. Today is left out deliberately: today’s issue is already being written, and a slot in it is not something you can promise. Changing the schedule changes what gets projected from then on.

A newsletter with no fixed schedule has nothing to project from, so the grid stays empty until you add dates yourself.

How the grid stays topped up

Issue Mint refreshes the grid every Monday morning and again every time you open the Sponsorship screen, so the horizon rolls forward a week at a time.

Refreshing only ever fills in gaps. It never touches a slot that already exists, which is what makes the grid safe to edit: a price you changed, a date a sponsor has on hold, a date somebody has bought and a date you removed all survive every refresh. Adding or re-enabling a slot type triggers the same fill straight away, rather than leaving a new column empty until Monday.

Changing the price on one date

Click the price in any cell, type a new one in whole units, and save it. That date is now priced differently from the rest, and nothing you do to the slot type will overwrite it.

This is the part of sponsorship management that a spreadsheet handles badly. A year-in-review issue, the one before a conference your readers all attend, or a week you know will be short are all worth pricing on their own, and the grid is where you do it. Each cell also takes a note of up to 1,000 characters, which no sponsor ever sees. Notes are for you, and they travel into the calendar file.

Adding a date by hand

The “add a one-off date” field at the top of the grid builds a row for a date your schedule would not have produced.

It creates one cell per active slot type, each at that type’s default price, and the date has to be in the future in your newsletter’s own timezone rather than in ours. Use it for a one-off special, a mid-week extra, or for every date on a newsletter with no fixed schedule. If you have no active slot types, Issue Mint says so rather than building a row with nothing in it to sell.

Taking a date off sale

The cross at the end of a row removes that date: the cells go, and the date stops being offered on your sponsor page.

Issue Mint refuses if anything on the date is booked, and says to decline or cancel the booking first. That is deliberate. A curator who deletes a date out from under a paying sponsor has a phone call to make, and an accidental click should not be able to cause it. A date with holds on it can be removed, so check the row before you remove it if an enquiry is open.

Why a removed date does not come back

A removed date is recorded as excluded, permanently, so the weekly refresh does not put it straight back.

Without that record, removing a date would mean removing it until Monday, which is the sort of behaviour that costs somebody a booking they thought they had cancelled. Excluded dates are not shown to you as a list, so the way to bring one back is to add it again by hand. Adding a date you previously removed cancels the exclusion at the same time, and the schedule takes over that date again from then on.

What else a row tells you

A row shows the issue already scheduled for that date, when there is one, by number and status.

That is the line worth scanning before you sell anything: it tells you which bookings are about to go out and which dates are still only a plan. Each cell carries its own status underneath the price, with the sponsor’s name once a booking is confirmed, so a full date and an empty one are distinguishable at a glance.