Hi everyone!

Hoping you all had a great weekend :) We have some great news (at least we feel like it is very rad) on the variant cover front. You probably all remember that due to dropped pledges past the end of the campaign (I swear I always learn new things at every campaign and trust me, I will be more careful with how I factor in stretch goals in the future), we technically haven't unlocked Tula's variant cover. BUT we had announced a variant cover, and it's always fun to give choices to backers especially those who supported us during a campaign so we were trying to find a solution to still offer a nice variant cover to you guys.

And we found it!

Natasha Alterici has agreed to draw an exclusive variant cover for the backers of Back To Earth! It is offered to all backers who pledged for a physical reward as of right now in the survey.

Natasha is working on the cover as we speak, and a preview of it will be made available through an update as well as uploaded in the surveys as soon as its finished :)

We thank you for your understanding through all of this, and hope you are as excited as us because Natasha's covers never fail to be stunning.

In other news, stickers and prints have arrived! They look fantastic in person, pics don't do them justice (prints have either a soft-touch or satiny finish and the colours are vibrant), but we still wanted to share them with you.

Things are taking shape!

Wishing you all a good week.
Until next time.

Cheers,
MH

Hi everyone!

More than 50% of you have already filed out their surveys! Yay! Thank you so much :)

I wanted to touch base on a few inquiries that were brought to my attention in the last day and are now fixed so that everyone is aware:

1- The ones who backed during the first 48h at a digital tier were still assigned a bookmark—since it was our early bird incentive—and asked for shipping. I removed the weight from the bookmark so this issue doesn't present itself anymore!

2- We explained it before, but basically I didn't put a preview of both covers to chose from for physical paperback backers because due to a high number of failed pledges we are technically not meeting the threshold to unlock Tula Lotay's variant cover—which also means she hasn't started drawing it yet so no preview available. Yes, we know that's a big bummer, and we are trying to see what we can do about offering a variant cover to you all. In the meantime, we still put the option to pick your cover in the survey and we will keep you all updated about developments on this front. We thank you for your understanding on this matter💖

3- People who pledged at the 'Vegetative Offering' tier were previously charged shipping and asked for an address when filling out their surveys even if their paperback copies are being taken care of by us to deliver to an org. This was because it was considered to be a physical paperback so in need to collect shipping for it, but has been fixed and no shipping nor address is now required for those backers. I apologize for the confusion.

4- I know that shipping costs suck, and I'm really sorry about that even if it's out of my control. I have to say that there was a slight problem in the weight units of the books themselves that I have now fixed. Basically, now the shipping should be *slightly* cheaper for all of you! But sadly this is what it costs for us to ship internationally because both UPS (which we like because it's faster and they offer a better service overall for intl packages) and USPS increased their prices in the last month for all intl packages. So the $30USD ($43 CAD) we listed on the campaign page for Europe and Australia is now $40USD ($55 CAD) for the same package. As another example, at the time, we listed $18USD for Canada, and that's now $26USD. Ugh. Usually when it fluctuates it's by a few dollars but I've rarely seen that big of a jump in one go. I know it's annoying, and I am truly sorry for any trouble this may cause.

That's all for now. 
If you encounter any issue, don't hesitate to contact me. I'll reply as soon as possible :)

Wishing you all a great day!

Cheers,
MH

tldr: Surveys are being sent

Hi everyone,

Quick update to let you know that the surveys will be going out starting today! Please make sure to check your inboxes for it and to answer as soon as possible. Even if we won't lock them in just now, having people confirm their orders is very useful to us!

Also, if you missed the campaign, our pre-order store is open for you to grab a copy if you want:

https://back-to-earth-a-sapphic-post-apocalyptic-tale.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Until next time (hopefully with pics of some merch 👀)

Cheers,
MH

tldr: pre-order store is live + surveys being sent out

Hi everyone :)

Big news! If you missed the campaign, you can now pre-order your copy in our live pre-order store:

https://back-to-earth-a-sapphic-post-apocalyptic-tale.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

The campaign exclusives are obviously not available, but you can still get copies of the graphic novel and mini art book (limited quantities of the bookmark are also available) until we send everything to print in September. This is your chance!

Also, I finally set up the Pledge Manager (surveys) and it got greenlit so a small number of you can expect to get their survey in the coming days! That's what they call a 'smoke test' around here which serves to assess if everything runs smoothly with the surveys. If you encounter any problems while filing it, let me know!

Surveys are going to lock in September so until then you can update your shipping address as well as add items if you want to. I will obviously send reminders as the lock-in date approaches so everyone is aware.

Full disclosure about a specific issue: we will track pre-orders closely because as we explained before, we are—still to this day—$2k short in failed pledges because of wrong card or CVC numbers, bank authorization needing more verification since this is crowdfunding, etc. Which means that we are technically not meeting the threshold to unlock Tula Lotay's variant cover. Yes, we know that's a bummer, and we are trying to see what we can do about it. In the meantime, we still put the option to pick your cover in the survey and we will keep you all updated about developments on this front. We thank you for your understanding on this matter💖

In more fun news, the bookmarks, sticker sheets, and prints have been ordered and I'm excited to share pics as soon as they arrive! 

Until next time.

Cheers,
MH

tldr: unprocessed pledges and deadline looming

Hi everyone!

We hope all of you are doing well. We are hard at work managing everything to get the rewards into your hands (ordering prints and stickers and etc + working on pages). You can expect fun updates throughout the Summer! We're stoked to show you sneak peeks as it comes to life! ✨

This is just a small update to say that Backerkit will try one last time to charge cards this upcoming Thursday (May 29th) and if it still fails, unprocessed pledges will be momentarily cancelled. We want to make sure everyone gets the exact items they wanted and don't have their pledges cancelled!

There will possibly be an option to reactivate them in pledge manager later on from what I understood, but our pledge manager will only be going live toward September, and then it makes us run into another challenge: reactivating the pledges in a few months will be a little late for this project to deliver all the rewards on time with the timeline we detailed on the campaign page.

Why?

Because the thing is we are still short of 2k in uncollected pledges, and these funds are directly for the stretch goals (Tula's cover and Laur's illustration) so we'd appreciate getting this sorted out so they both can get drawing :) We sadly didn't surpass the stretch goal by enough to be able to cover for them without those pledges so we thank you for looking into it if you ran into any issue processing your pledge. 

Please make sure that your info is accurate, and that your card didn't flag the previous attempt (apparently it happens with crowdfunding projects and banks need a confirmation/authorization in some cases). 

Thanks a lot 💖

Talk soon!

Cheers,
MH, Kej & Ines