Wednesday, July 7, 2010

A Note About Pre-Orders

Everything left for the box is going to the printer on Monday... whether it's ready or not.

That sounds ominous, but all it means is that I might have to draw a couple of the small maps on Weird New World myself late Sunday night and play with the layouts on a couple pages here and there to eliminate layout holes.

I expect to have them back and have the first boxes assembled on Wednesday or Thursday of next week, and would begin taking pre-orders within hours of that.

Read this post about the problems with the Dresden Files pre-orders.

If I have more than a couple dozen pre-orders (or that many orders in a short period of time after release), I will have these problems. My wife packs the orders, because she's good at that sort of thing, and she only has so much time to do this because she works a full-time job. Filling out the customs forms for exporting goods like the game box will take a bit of time for every order, and I'm the only one to do that and then the stuff has to be mailed.

Here is going to be the timeline:

July 14 or 15: Expected date of receiving the last of the box components, pre-orders begin. I will be keeping a public tally of pre-orders received (40 vendor pre-orders thus far!).

July 23 - 25: Ropecon. LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing debuts and is available for sale to Ropecon attendees.

July 26: Shipping begins.

This is the priority for shipping:

  1. European orders. These require no customs forms to ship, so getting them out the door is a matter of walking to the local post office.
  2. Distributor and vendor orders: These will then be shipped Economy class.
  3. Out-of-Europe Priority Mail orders. If people pay for the quicker shipping, they move in front of the people who don't.
  4. Out-of-Europe Economy Mail orders.

Those last three requires me to fill out a form online for each package and then go down to the local customs office with the packages before being able to mail them.

I estimate being able to ship 20 - 25 packages a day, which probably means I actually will be able to manage 10 - 15. Whatever the number is, I will work full-time, tirelessly, to get everything out the door, and email each person when their package ships.

So that's the plan. Any suggestions would be appreciated, but shipping before Ropecon isn't realistic... putting over 600 boxes together will likely take so long that nothing else will be happening between completion of printing and the convention.

5 comments:

  1. Will LotFP: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Version 0.07 be the final version, or is there one more update coming?

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  2. That's not the final version. The next update will be 1.0, the release version, but I won't get to that until after shipping out orders... then I'll turn to getting the PDFs ready.

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  3. My concern is less making sure I have it first than I have it period.

    I don't consider your priority system bad as long as people jumping ahead of me paying for priority don't stop me getting the two copies I plan on buying (one for me, one for a friend's daughter in a few years).

    I'm one of the people Fred talked about whose FLGS got copies (well, my NFGS, no local one really) before I got mine (UPS says they're out today) and I'm not mad because:

    1. I knew that I'd get it without having to rush down to the store.
    2. I got the PDFs when I ordered.

    So from my POV the thing is not getting an email that says "we sold out before we shipped yours" before anything else.

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  4. It's first come, first served for boxes as far as ordering.

    I don't expect a flash sellout though.

    As far as the PDF thing, Finnish tax law makes that sort of thing really dicey. If I sell someone outside the EU a box, there's not VAT. If I sell someone a PDF direct outside the EU, that's a 23% tax. It's why I only sell PDFs through third party vendors.

    So offering Box + PDF means a 23% tax hit.

    Technically I could do that offer for Europeans since there is that 23% VAT anyway, but I'm not about to offer some customers an added free perk and not others.

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  5. I am pretty god damned stoked about this. Hope all goes smooth.

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