Our staff has been extremely busy since the first of the year and you will be seeing the fruits of their labor beginning next week.

They have been working on the Fountain Hills Dining & Event Guide, The Fountain Hills Residential & Business Directory, Play Ball and seven issues of The Times if you include this week’s edition.

Their efforts will bring benefits through advertising placed in each publication that will hopefully attract new customers to the businesses.

We understand when business owners feel we are coming at them with too many options at the same time, but the winter months are when Fountain Hills is most populated. And our publications are exposed to the most eyes.

The difference is the street sales. These are the copies that are sold in the stores. For example, the June 20 edition of The TImes, the top selling business (Bashas’), there were 138 copies sold. Compare that to the Feb. 1 edition when 238 copies were sold. Similar numbers were recorded at Safeway (110 and 200, Fry’s (67 and 75) and Walgreens (52 and 90).

We attempt to identify subjects that would be of interest to our readers. The Play Ball issue is a case in point. Our community is advancing in age. The retired segment of our community has the time to go see Spring Training games. So, we offer a schedule of the games, their times and locations. The majority of the stories are written by nationally recognized baseball writer Charlie Vascellaro. The idea for a Play Ball edition originated in the March edition of Let’s Go. He writes for various publications now and he worked at The Times while he was attending ASU.

When Let’s Go became an on-line publication, it was felt we still needed a print publication to best show the baseball information.

We added the high school boys baseball and girls softball school team season previews as well as information for the kids playing little league.

Businesses found good results from the issue because its readers covered all age brackets.

The dining guide has been changed to the Fountain Hills Dining & Event Guide. It will contain a listing of special events to be held in the community through the end of the year. The publication continues to list all of the dinning and snack shops in the Northeast Valley.

The publication with the most changes is the phone book.

This is our 40th anniversary edition. That’s right, we have been producing the phone book for 40 years. The white pages will be printed on a quality un-coated paper stock.

The yellow pages, which we are calling The Fountain HiIls Business Directory, will be printed on glossy paper stock. This will give the photographs a brighter and clearer look. One major change is the Rio Verde numbers have been dropped from the book at their request.

We will still distribute the books in The Verdes since most of the residents use Fountain Hills businesses for their goods and services.

We will be distributing the phone book and the Dining and Event Guide (They will be packaged together.) beginning the first weekend in March.

The Play Ball issue will be in next week’s edition of The Times, It also be mailed to every household.