Category: Newsletter

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.

Issue #9 of the Musical Notes Newsletter went out Sunday evening. When I started the newsletter, I wasn’t sure how long I could keep it up, but I have found that it’s enough fun that I plan to keep at it indefinitely. I archive Musical Notes Newsletter one week delayed at my companion site. I think I have most of the kinks worked out now, since I’ve gotten some suggestions for improvement from friends and subscribers. I welcome any suggestions you might have — if you are a newsletter subscriber already, you can earn additional entries in the upcoming Violin GiveAway Sweepstakes by using the RaffleCopter form at the end of this post (or any other post on this blog) to leave your suggestions in the form of a blog comment.

I am also planning to include another bonus prize for subscribers with Issue #10, which I plan to send out next Sunday. I have a few things in mind, but again, if you have suggestions, use the RaffleCopter form to leave them in the comments below. I don’t guarantee that I will take your suggestion, but I do read every comment, and reply to as many as I can.

Note: You can leave a comment without using the RaffleCopter form by just scrolling down to the comment section. But if you do that, you won’t get any extra entries in the Violin GiveAway Sweepstakes. [note: the Violin GiveAway is now closed]

If you are not already a Musical Notes Newsletter subscriber, be sure to sign up today. All prizewinners in the sweepstakes will be announced only in the newsletter, so if you aren’t a subscriber, you can’t win. Also, if you don’t read the newsletter, you won’t win! Interesting, I picked 5 different subscriber names for my first bonus prize before I got a winner who actually read her name and claimed the prize in time. Don’t let that happen to you in the drawing at the end of the month!

Also, if I run into any really good deals that would be of interest to violin or viola students, their teachers, or their parents, I will inform my newsletter readers first.

Please leave a comment on any of the following:

• What you would like to see for a bonus prize for newsletter subscribers.
• What topics you would like to see covered in the newsletter.
• What topics you would like to see covered here in this blog.