One Year Anniversary

By Thomas K. Remington

It’s been a remarkable year this past one. It is strange how some things come about and many times we never have another thought about events in our lives. I suppose that as we age we tend to look at things from a different perspective than when we were young, invincible and had our entire lives ahead of us.

 

The birth of “Maine Hunting Today” is still a bit of a blur in my mind but I do know that it was really my son, Steven’s idea. He is a “creator”. He loves to get his creative juices flowing and brainstorm out ideas and to see the enthusiasm on his face when this event is occurring is something to behold.

 

It all began because we wrote a book together. We had no big aspirations to become world famous authors or the like and we entered into the publishing world blind and totally ignorant. This was a good thing really because had we known what was ahead, I’m not sure we would have written it. Part of our discoveries after the book was published was the difficulty in getting it into the hands of readers. Thus began our quest to market the book and ourselves.

I had my own ideas and Steven had his and as we set out to develop ways to promote the book, it became apparent that it would not be easy. Over time we both reached a consensus that one huge obstacle standing in our way was the fact that the world did not know Tom and Steven Remington – don’t get too excited because they still don’t know us. We had to do something about that.

One day as I was diligently pounding on the keyboard of my computer believing that I was ready to write the next best selling book, that magical sounding “zing” interrupted me. It was an instant message from Steve. The message had only three words to it – “Maine Hunting Today”. Of course I was puzzled and inquired as to what that meant. He quickly informed me that the domain name was available and he thought we should begin an online magazine for several reasons. One, to develop a presence on the world wide web; two, to have a place to sell our book; three, to improve our skills as writers; and four, with any luck a handful of people would get to know us and want to buy our book.

With a lot of hesitation, at least on my part, we stumbled forward again nearly totally ignorant of what lay ahead for us. The rest is history so it says but I do want to take some time to talk about some of the highlights of the past year with “Maine Hunting Today”.

First and foremost, I believe it is important to attempt to put our success into some numbers that may or may not mean something to you. We don’t have precise statistics for the first 6 months so the figures I have are estimations as best as I could determine. I made every attempt to be conservative with my estimation during that first 6 months. In our first year we had approximately 30,000 visitors who viewed over 100,000 pages of stories and information.

We both believed right from the onset that publishing stories from our readers needed to be the backbone of the magazine. What a tremendous success that turned out to be but I can say that I did and have spent many hours editing the most of those stories. There is good in everything and by doing the editing, I got to read all of these stories firsthand. There were funny stories, some full of drama, some that made no sense to me, and some very touching – most being the stories of someone’s first deer or turkey.

We went looking for some seasoned and professional writers to contribute articles as well. Denny L. Vasquez of Houston, Texas has blessed us with several of his stories, pictures and articles. His writing is superb and his stories are filled with adventure. A. Sayward Lamb, who has a notebook bigger than the New England Patriots playbook full of his hunting and fishing escapades over years of his life, tells his stories in a manner that relates well to old-timers, Mainers and those seasoned veterans of the woods.

One of the biggest and most pleasant surprises for us was getting Chef Brian Burkley on board. He teased us with his recipes for all the game we catch. By far the most searched out topics on the Internet is people looking for recipes. I know a lot of people have sat down to a meal of Brian’s brainchild.

When you have a magazine, whether a print copy or on the World Wide Web, you need a photographer. Many editors would pay big money to have someone as talented as our own Milt Inman. Not only are his works professional and of high quality but he has traveled the world and has one of the largest collections photos around.

A couple months ago, after some encouragement and prodding on my part, I got Joe Perham to contribute some of his stories and writings. Many, many times I go to his section of the magazine and read and reread his material. Of course we all know Joe for his “Maine Humor” fame but for myself, I find his writings saying so much with so few words.

I could go on and on about all the things that have happened over the past year with “Maine Hunting Today” but of all those related to our success the one thing that stands out as the most rewarding is knowing that we are reaching a lot of people. We are not all things to all people but we are some things to a lot of people and they return often to our site looking for “something”. Words can’t describe the feeling you get when you hear from total strangers the good they get from what we do. That is invaluable!

In closing, I would like to thank everyone who has put any amount of time into this magazine. I know deep inside that “Maine Hunting Today” was created for a reason and that we will be around for a long, long time.