Dear Linux Pro Reader,

We don't really know what sells a magazine on the newsstand. Big publishing companies have whole teams of marketing analysts studying trends and performing Big Data maneuvers on the sales data. Our ragtag group can only treat it as something of an art form: We throw an issue together, and sometime later, we find out if we guessed right when choosing what to put in it.

When I say sometime later, I mean a long time later. In the UK, it takes around 6 months to get final data on sales, and it can take up to a year to find out how we did in the USA and rest of world. Not that sales data is really so interesting as an editorial topic. The main reason I look at old sales records is to compare our magazine against itself – to see which issues sold best and try to understand why. Every time you reach for a magazine at the newsstand and buy it, you are voting for something in it. If an issue sells well, we ask, "What did they like about it?" The articles? The cover image? The cover headline? Or was it the illusive DVD?

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