Last night I received emails regarding all of my refund requests from Royal Mail confirming that I will be getting the money back and that it should arrive in my account on the 17th of September (i.e. tomorrow). This means that when it arrives I'll be able to get the last batch of parcels that are still outstanding sent out, at which point fulfilment will once again be complete!
I hope that I'll be able to get them all out in one go, but the absolute worst case scenario will be that I take a couple of days to get through them and they all go out by the end of this week. As always I'll update you on that progress and let you know where I'm up to.
A few of you have emailed me about your packages and I haven't had a chance to respond to you yet, but I'll try my best to get back to you today.
Just a quick update to let you know where I'm up to with getting packages re-sent after having to collect them again last week.
Royal Mail now have their new system in place and I've been able to send parcels to the US for the best part of the last week. All tariffs etc. are handled when I purchase the postage labels, so you shouldn't have any problems when you receive the package (especially as, as far as Royal Mail are concerned, books are still tariff-free).
I haven't yet got every package back into the post (and that includes a handful of parcels bound for places other than the USA). The main reason for this is financial. I had to request refunds for the postage labels that I originally bought, and I'm still waiting for Royal Mail to process those requests. I've sent out as many packages as I can afford to pay for at the moment, but having to buy postage twice wasn't something I accounted for! In my experience I should get those refunds fairly soon, though, which will mean I can finish sending out the remaining parcels as soon as I have that money back in my account. At last count I have around 50 packages that still need to be sent back out, so we're very close to being done again.
Thanks for your patience and understanding with this process, I really appreciate it.
Another update re: the shipping situation to the USA. This is a fairly long post but please do read it all. I'm not happy about the current situation, and I'm doing the best I can to navigate it. Rather than explain all the new rules etc., I'll instead link you to this thread by Maz from Rowan, Rook, and Decard, who is much better informed on the matter than I am. Go and read that, and then come back here. It's important context for anybody who doesn't know what's going on.
Done it? Great.
This morning I went to the post office, where I discovered that the final batch of parcels I dropped off last week hasn't yet been collected. It likely would have been collected today, but for reasons I'm about to explain I've chosen to bring them home with me.
Over the weekend Royal Mail announced that they are no longer accepting exports to the USA as of today. This is a temporary measure as they set up a new system to handle the new rules. The new system should be live on August 29th. The gap is to allow them to process packages that are already in transit and get them across the border before the new rules come into place.
In theory, that should include the parcels I dropped off last week. And in theory, I probably could have left them to go today and had it all be fine. There are a couple of reasons why I decided not to risk it.
The first is to do with the HS codes on my customs forms. All of mine are listed as 4901990000 (the code for printed books), and should theoretically be fine to get through US customs without incurring charges. But I'd prefer that the labels also contain the second code that Maz talks about, code 9903.01.31 (informational materials), just to increase the odds that no tariffs are levied on these shipments - especially because it looks like I'll be the one who has to pay said tariffs (which we'll get to later in this update).
The upshot of this is that physical fulfillment of Blood In The Margins is no longer complete. Today I'm going to attempt to get refunds for all of the shipping labels I purchased. When the new system goes live on the 29th I'm going to try and figure out how to get all the right information in the right place. And then I'll need to repurchase shipping labels, relabel the packages, and take them to the post office again.
The batch of orders that I've come home with doesn't just contain orders going to the USA, so this unfortuantely does impact some UK and rest of the world customers as well. I'll get your orders back in the post to you as soon as physically possible. It's likely that only the UK customers will actually notice the delay here, since your parcels should be with you already whereas a couple of days isn't really noticeable when shipping to Europe/New Zealand/etc.
(As an aside, please don't ask me to check through the batch to see if your order is contained in it. The last thing I want to do while trying to deal with all of this shit is to go sifting through boxes looking for individual orders.)
As for what happens if I do all the right things and the parcels into the USA still get hit with tariffs? Royal Mail has this to say:
Royal Mail’s PDDP service will calculate and invoice you for the correct duties on your items, but we are recommending customers familiarise themselves with the country tariffs which will apply to the goods they send. Royal Mail will make available simple tools/resources to help with this in the coming days.
I read that as meaning that I'm the one who's going to be responsible for paying any tariffs or duties levied against my parcels. And, frankly, I can't afford that. If I get hit with charges of $80 per item that I've sent into the USA I don't know how I'll pay them, and it will effectively destroy my business. So let's hope it doesn't come to that. And if you're in the USA, please write to your representatives and let them know how much you oppose this nonsense.
I said last week that there would be no more updates but, of course, the shipping situation to the USA is in constant flux and so I thought I should address it.
Royal Mail have today said that they are suspending deliveries to the USA until they have proper systems in place to deal with the new rules, but that they hope to have these systems in place by tomorrow. They also say that cards and letters can be continued to sent as normal, which I read as meaning this only impacts parcels (for those who don't know, "parcel" and "letter" are terms that refer to specific sizes of shipments).
All of my packages are sent as Large Letters, and they all went out on Friday, so I'm hoping that none of this will affect us. That said, it's been a bank holiday weekend and my local delivery office has been suffering with huge staff shortages for the past year - I only receive post to my house once a week if I'm lucky at the moment, rather than daily as it used to be - so despite me handing the packages over to the post office on Friday I don't actually know whether they're properly in the system and en route yet.
With all this in mind, I'd ask that those of you in the USA please allow a little extra time for delivery. Thankfully it appears that books are still exempt from tariffs unless they're printed in China, and all of my books are printed locally in the UK, so although they might be slower getting to you you shouldn't get hit with any additional charges.
If anything changes I'll let you know about it as soon as I know about it.
I'm very happy to report that physical fulfillment for Blood In The Margins is now complete! With the exception of the small handful of people who still haven't filled out surveys yet, all orders have now been processed and are on their way.
It's been a few years since I've handled a fulfillment of this size and I'd forgotten how much work it can be on your own. I'd also forgotten how unintuitive I find Backerkit's pledge manager behind the scenes. There's a reason I've handled the majority of my crowdfunding fulfillment through Loot The Room in the past rather than using a pledge manager, and I think next time I'll be going back to doing it that way. (I also think that had I done it through Loot The Room we would have been finished several weeks ago, because we wouldn't have had to wait for everyone to fill out surveys and for Backerkit to charge cards, but that's a lesson learned.)
Speaking of next time...
It's coming up on five years since The Wretched was on Kickstarter, and as well as spending that time figuring out how to improve on the Wretched & Alone system I've also done a lot of thinking about how to write a sequel to that game. I've been quietly working on it in the background for the past few months, and I'm happy to announce that I'll be bringing The Haunting Of The Wretched to Backerkit in late September/early October.
This isn't another Wretched & Alone game - it's something new, and I'm very excited about it. I'll be sharing more details over on the campaign as I get closer to launch, but today I wanted to simply let you know that it exists and also share the cover art for the game!
A digital mockup of an A5 zine. The cover shows a lone cosmonaut standing amongst the wreckage of a space ship.
If you want to follow that campaign then you can find the pre-launch page here. I'd love to see some familiar faces over there!
With fulfillment complete, this will be the last update I write here. If you'd like to stay in touch, I've love it if you considered signing up for my newsletter. At most I send one email a month, but it's often less frequent than that, and they always include cat pictures. You can check out the most recent one here if you want to see the sort of things I send! (That's a Substack link, but as of this month I no longer use Substack for my newsletters.)
Thanks again for all your support on this campaign. I'm really proud of Blood In The Margins and I hope you enjoy it once you have it in your hands!
