Omnibus finished at Mixam
over 2 years ago – Thu, Jul 29, 2021 at 02:30:00 PM

I just received an update from the printer that they are shipping the omnibus books today. They should arrive at my house in a few days. There are only 100 of these, so the 50 that aren’t going out are a bit of a limited edition.

Mixam informed me that due to large order volume, the rest of the books are expected to arrive August 4. As soon as those books are here, I shall begin the process of fulfillment.

International Shipping Update: Mostly Bad News
over 2 years ago – Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 12:28:28 AM

As mentioned, there was a possibility that I could save everyone money by printing books locally and then shipping them from within the printing country rather than suffering through international shipping.

I've done some crunching, and the answers are mostly bad.

Canada

There are only four backers with physical orders from Canada, which almost is disqualifying right there - in fact, it basically is, since I'd have to reprint every book that I have in quantities ranging from 1 to 4, which is prohibitive.

These four orders will ship from the USA by anything-but-UPS...which means the USPS.

AUS/New Zealand

Kind of the same deal, but with more people.

There are 12 backers from the AUS/New Zealand region, of whom eight or nine bought all five of the main core books...and then there are the one-offs of some of my thickest materials: Forest's End, Dragons of Rosgarth, Hall of Judgment, and Nordvorn. Printing one of Nordvorn is actually twice the retail value of the book. Even without those one-off extras, the relatively low number of books means the startup costs add up fast. 

So again, I'll ship these from my existing inventory in the USA.

United Kingdom

This is where it gets interesting, but in the end, there's not much I can do here as well.

There are 16 folks in the UK who want to get physical copies...and I already have some number of all my other books at Kixto, my fulfillment partner there. So I don't have to reprint those. I can print out the right number of each of the five new books, truck them down to Crediton (which usually costs about £10 or so it seems), and have Kixto send the rest by Royal Mail. Almost all of those orders are the same type, too.

The good news is that I might be able to save myself a little money printing the core Kickstarter books locally.

The bad news in terms of shipping refunds: The price of shipping has already moved up past the point where I've exceeded the collected shipping costs. 

Here's three examples:

• Backer 1: Core KS books plus omnibus. Collected $21, est 1.5kg. From USA: $45. Print and ship from UK: $42. 
• Backer 2: Nordlond Conqueror. Collected $40. Est 3 kg. From USA: $55-80. Print/ship from UK: $30
• Backer 3: PDFs but added NF, HoA, and Omnibus. Est 0.7 kg. Collected $23. From USA: $25-40. Print/ship from UK: $23.

In almost all cases, the shipping collected is less than what I'll have to spend no matter what route I take.  I collected $390 in shipping on these orders that go to the UK. Printing and shipping them in the UK will cost me $570-600, and shipping them from the USA will cost me $735. So I'll probably take that route, but once again the projected costs (which I used an actual postage calculator to estimate) vastly are exceeded by the actual costs for international shipping at the time these books will go out.

Takeaway

I really wish I had better news, but I don't. I was hoping to find a way to get this done that would save us all money, but even doing an individual, backer-by-backer tally, it's not going to be feasible.

Sorry.

Where are my files?
over 2 years ago – Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 11:35:31 PM

Just in case. :-)

Where can I find my PDF files?

• Your files are not, and will never be, in Warehouse 23 unless you bought something of mine directly from them. Gaming Ballistic is not SJGames, and I have no access to that system. 
• Your files are currently in Backerkit. I use it to conveniently send out PDFs, and delete old versions and replace them with new ones as I make adjustments in the files, usually due to error correction.
• This week, I will go through each PDF file, ensure the latest version is on DriveThruRPG, and send out a single mailing of a complimentary copy for each file to the email address you have on record with Backerkit. This does mean if you ordered 10 PDFs you're going to get 10 emails. Sorry.

After that, any future updates to files are going to happen through DriveThru.

Check your files (especially Nordlondr Folk)
almost 3 years ago – Sun, Jul 25, 2021 at 05:20:52 PM

I just got a ping from a backer saying (I'm paraphrasing) "Where's my Nordlondr Folk PDF?"

Turns out that the Nordlond Map was assigned to the Nordlondr Folk PDF if you got it as an add-on during the Kickstarter. I just corrected that and refreshed the segment. Nine emails went out.

So...at this point, everyone should be able to access all your PDF files. If you did NOT get all the PDFs you think you should have, ping me, because I'm operating under the assumption that I'm done with that phase of the project. If you didn't get something you bought, it means there's an error similar to the one described above.

And then there were four...
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 06:30:46 AM

There are only four surveys that require attention. I just went through and personally processed through all of those who (a) had a zero balance and (b) only ordered PDFs.

So we're down to less than 1% outstanding surveys.

It'll be a week or two before the materials I ordered get to my house. Tomorrow I'll be sitting down to look hard at the international shipping mix (mess? mix.) and see if there is a way to make that a win/win. I'll report back.

Today? I went into my workshop and made some sword blanks. Four of them (one is for a paying client, no less). I make training swords of various styles, weighted so that they're closer in balance and pivot to steel, but not costing $500-1,500. It's how I relax.