Mar

9

feedback on prisoner requests

Filed Under publishing | 2 Comments

We recently received the following note from a prisoner:

I have sent off and requested a large number of zines from people who stated ‘ftp’ [free to prisoners] and haven’t received many. Do people lose interest or are times so bad that they become way too busy with just surviving? With each and every request, I have included postage on average of $1.26 (3 $.42 stamps). What am I doing wrong? Please advise me when you can get to it, what am I doing wrong and how can I improve my odds of receiving zines?

We’ve gotten a few other notes like this recently. We ask publishers who send in their zines for review to tell us whether they will send their zine to prisoners for free. If they are willing, we include the notation ‘ftp’ in the review. If a publisher says s/he won’t send their zine for free, we put ‘not ftp.’ And if a publisher says s/he won’t take prisoner orders at all (paid or free), we put ‘no prisoners.’ Unfortunately, many publishers do not indicate their preference.

So we’d like to ask you, our faithful readers, for feedback on dealing with prisoner requests.  What can this prisoner do to improve his chances of a reply? What can we at ZW do to help the situation?


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2 Comments so far

  1. Andrew Culture | CornDog Zine Distro on March 10, 2009 9:13 am

    I’ve always said Beat Motel is in theory free to prisoners, it’s just that no prisoners have ever request a copy!

  2. Rick Bradford on March 22, 2009 1:05 pm

    Perhaps there are publishers who don’t feel comfortable stating “no prisoners” on the review form. Or some publishers may feel that it’s a case-by-case kind of thing so they don’t indicate one way or another.

    Rather than a “no prisoners” notation, what about some sort of “prisoners okay” notation? That way the prisoner knows explicitly that it should be worth the effort to send postage or a letter. And if those orders then go unanswered the problem is probably not prisoner-related.