Ian's taking a break this month, so your friendly neighborhood ops manager is taking over.
Let's start with the cool part! Earlier this month Chris Pramas received a sample sprue from Wargames Atlantic for the Ships miniatures! Just look at that crisp detail!
Sadly this month's update is not all good news. The situation with Diamond has not resolved as quickly as we had hoped, and we're in a tough spot for printing games based on literary IPs that really need access to bookstores to do well. Here's an excerpt from Chris' update to the Fifth Season campaign earlier this morning.
The Diamond bankruptcy continues to cause us grief. We had hoped this was all going to get sorted out last week because the judge was supposed to issue a ruling. Instead, he told Diamond it had to get serious about resolving the situation and pushed the ruling back to October 3.
Getting our books is one problem but also at issue is our contract with Diamond Book Distributor. It gave them the exclusive right to distribute our products into the book trade, which is distinct from the hobby trade that serves game stores. Diamond Book Distributors has functionally ceased to exist, so obviously none of our stuff is getting into the book trade at the moment. At the same time, the contract is still in force and there would be a risk if we violated it. One of the things our lawyer is trying to do is get Diamond to reject the old contract (since they can’t possibly assume it), which would free us to get new representation. As you can imagine, we do not want to wait until October for this to happen. Hopefully, our lawyer can get our contract rejected before then.
Unfortunately, this means we are pushing back when we had planned to go to print with the books, so we can try and get an accurate estimate of how many we will need for potential book trade sales. While this isn't the best news, we are going to re-open late pledges in the meantime, so people who missed the campaign have another opportunity to take advantage of the special crowdfunder pricing and bundles. So be sure to tell your friends, family, gaming group, etc. that they have one more chance!
And finally, to wrap up with some good news, it looks like the PDFs should be ready to distribute to backers in September! The core book is currently in layout, and while we didn't have any sample pages to show off in time for this update, the production team (Hal) assures us it will be ready next month. This will probably be a "preview" edition for backers only, which gives us a chance to gather feedback on any typos or errors our proofreading pass missed, followed by the final version a few weeks later.
Thanks everybody! Ian will be back for next month's update. And as usual, if you have any concerns or questions about your pledge, please reach out to me at [email protected]. We don't get regular notifications of comments here, so it's not a very efficient way to get in touch with us.
