Hi everyone!

We hope you had a great Thanksgiving holiday (for those of you in the US)! It seems like we've been addressing a lot of, let's call them "very excited" questions lately about the status of shipping, and understandably so. We did admittedly report 15 days ago that packing was to begin last week, but being a short holiday week, we were told by the warehouse that didn't happen as planned, and that due to some staffing shortages, they are a bit behind on projects ahead of us in the queue. As much as we can push them with eagerness to get these out the door, we are frankly at their scheduling mercy... believe me, we want these in your hands as much as you do! 😊

As of our call with them yesterday, we have been informed that the "assembly line" for packing is being prepared now, and they sincerely expect shipments should start leaving their dock by the end of next week. That is their estimate, however, so please take that with a grain of understanding of the processes involved. We have no insight into their staffing or layout requirements -- they are in a completely different state from us -- and we have to trust they are doing everything they can to get these turned around as quickly and efficiently as possible. They've been doing this for several decades, and successfully fulfilled our last three campaigns, so we trust they are doing their best in this busy holiday season.

A few of you have also commented on the apparent availability of the books on a particular website, as well as availability of the .cbr on some pirate sites. To address the latter first: there is nothing we can do to prevent pirates from posting our titles. Our best defense is to not make our titles available digitally at all, but they'll just scan the pages themselves eventually. Or -- as we currently do -- we can make sure that they are made available to backers FIRST. You all were the first and only people to receive digital copies of these titles two months ago, so you can rest assured you had the privilege of reading these books before ANYONE else. (We hope you have enjoyed them!) Frankly, while we haven't seen them ourselves, it is quite possible that the pirated file(s) traveling the net originated from a backer's copy, as they are the only digital copies we ever created or released. (We haven't even put them on Kindle yet...)

As for the physical availability of the books through online sites, we have been discussing this with our retail distributor. We had requested they be held until early December (after fulfillment) so that they are available before the holiday crush. That date is usually set 6-10 months in advance, but can be slightly adjusted 6 weeks in advance. Once the books have reached our warehouse, it takes 2 weeks for the Purchase Order to be drafted and shipped. They then require two weeks to receive and check the books into their system before they can ship the titles, and then the books can appear on sites/shelves at any date up to two more weeks from when they have left the distributor. Neither they nor we have any control over those specific retailers' sale date -- synchronizing a channel-wide release date is reserved for big titles by big publishers (Harry Potters, etc). While most comic shops will put books out the (Wednes)day they receive them, most big-box stores (B&N, Amazon, etc) have their own lengthy stocking process that can take two seeks. All we can do is request a ship date and hope that the distributor gets it right. (And there have been many times when they haven't, releasing titles sometimes a month or more prematurely...) So we apologize that our fulfillment warehouse hasn't been able to beat that retail timeline in this case. It is rare, but it does happen.

It is precisely because of that occasional uncertainty, however, that we intentionally design our campaigns to be filled with exclusive items that will NOT be available at retail -- slipcase editions, stretch goal bonuses, etc. We make no secret that the "vanilla" version of our books will eventually be sold at retail, so our campaigns are always meant to showcase the exclusive reasons to support us during the campaign. We are a very small operation, so your support during the campaign is literally 250% more valuable to us than purchasing our books at retail. Without your direct support, we could not continue to bring even half as many awesome titles to the table. 😊

We understand that this may sound like "excuses" to some of you (and we appreciate the excitement underlying that understandable frustration), but we can only do our best to assure you that the delay in getting these to you have not been for lack of trying to get them out sooner. The first delay was the extra time the books and slipcases needed to print (with the extra curing time required for the sweet foil gilding) -- out of our control, and the product of a stretch goal achievement.  The next delay was waiting for the coins to arrive -- also out of our control, also the result of a stretch goal, but they turned out really nice! At that point, it was a matter of getting in the warehouse's queue for assembly, and it turns out they had a lot of catching up to do ahead of us, much more than expected. We are now on deck, with packing in preparation there. They understand the urgency (as much as we can instill in them), and are committed to having these out the door as quickly as possible. Having these in your hands as far ahead of Christmas is everyone's goal. We hoped that would have been at least a month ahead of Christmas, but... the aforementioned complications.

While this was our first campaign on Backerkit, we want to assure everyone that we have run and successfully fulfilled over 30 campaigns over the last 10 years, and we do take this seriously. Those of you who have backed previous campaigns of ours can hopefully attest to our efforts and the ultimate quality of goods once the items have arrived. We aren't a fly-by-night con operation. 😉 If you are familiar with crowdfunding campaigns, you probably know from experience that very few campaigns ship on time -- of the 237 campaigns we have personally backed, NONE of them have ever arrived in the month promised. Zero. NONE. Most ship months (sometimes years) after their initially stated delivery date. While we have had some unfortunately long delays on some of our campaigns in the past (longer than this current delay), we pride ourselves on having one of the best track records on the platform with some of the shortest delivery delays on Kickstarter. We are far from perfect, but we do our best to improve our estimations and get as close as we can with each campaign improvement! 😊 As with everything in Life, the unexpected can always occur, however... Man plans, God laughs...