Category: Giveaway

The carbon fiber bow was claimed this week. Finally!

To speed things up, and conclude the sweepstakes a little more quickly, I lumped the 3rd, 4th, and 5th prize winners into one announcement. But not in any particular order! It will be first come, first served. As usual, prizes must be claimed by Thursday, October 25th, at 11:59 p.m.

I have a new subscriber recruitment premium, which I detail in today’s issue of the newsletter.  If you have not yet signed up for the newsletter, you can sign up here.

I managed to get over to the mail drop today to get the violin packed and ready for shipping. The shipping rates have gone up considerable since the last time I was in that business! Ouch!

Any rate, Mark should have his new violin by mid-week.

Which means that the 2nd prize will be the carbon-fiber bow. I’ve already pulled the name of the winner, and I will announce the name in tomorrow’s newsletter.

One of my subscribers asked if it was possible to win more than one prize, and at the time I responded to that, I did not know the answer. Well, I looked down the list of winners, and there are some duplicate names — however, whether anyone gets more than one prize will depend on how things work out with winners claiming the prizes in time. I ran a list a bit longer than the number of prizes, since I already know it’s possible that some of the winners will not be paying attention, and will forfeit.

I also noticed something else about the mailing list. Some of the subscribers have had “hard bounces” on their email, meaning that they did not get the newsletter, and they have been removed by my newsletter email service from the list permanently. I sent a separate email to the folks that are affected by that, but there isn’t a lot I can do about it, unless they are willing to go to the hassle of creating another email address to use for signing up to the newsletter. While I’ve had some trouble with Gmail routing the newsletter to the spam folder, they don’t appear to be giving me “hard bounces,” so I’m recommending that anyone having trouble with the Musical Notes Newsletter subscription get a Gmail account (they are free) and just forward the newsletter to their regular email account.

Tonight at midnight, the Rafflecopter form is set to turn off. Sometime tomorrow, I will change the blog header back to the original, and generate the list of winners. Given my experience with newsletter bonuses, I will approach the awarding of the prizes in this way:

• I will announce the 1st place winner first, and give the winner 3 days to claim the prize. The 1st-prize winner will have the choice of the 1st or 2nd prize.
• If the 1st-place winner does not respond in time, I will move the 2nd-place winner up to 1st place, and repeat.
• After I have given away whichever prize the 1st-place winner chooses, I will then publish the rest of the winners. The rest of the winners will have 3 days to claim their prizes.
• Any prizes not claimed in time will be awarded by random drawings from the current subscriber list, and the winners will have 3 days to claim their prizes. I will repeat this process until all prizes are awarded.

For the next two weeks, the newsletters will be short, and probably won’t follow a set schedule, due to the fact that I will be travelling. Once I get back from vacation, I will ship all of the prizes that have been awarded, and resume the regular schedule of sending the newsletter out on Sunday evenings. Sorry about the delay in shipping, but this trip got planned a bit late in the game.

I will, from time to time, be giving away bonus prizes to subscribers, generally worth anywhere from $5 to $35. If I make it a full year, I will have an anniversary celebration with another major giveaway sweepstakes. I have learned a lot about holding a sweepstakes, so I will be changing my approach substantially next time.

P.S. In case you are wondering, I have decided to go ahead with the project I described in my newsletter a few issues back.

P.P.S. The newsletters are archived, with a one-week delay (and with some details omitted) at MusicalNotesNewsletter.com.