Hi folks, I apologize that we are behind on shipments and correspondence. Between the holidays and some health issues, I've been struggling to keep up with shipping demands while also balancing that with editing demands and now the backlog of both of those things has caused me to build up a backlog of email queries that need responding to. So, all of this has begun to avalanche together.
And to top all that off, raging ADHD plus my doctor going out of town just before I needed to refill my meds that can only be refilled via a paper script in person really knocked me for a loop this past few weeks, making it so I've had about three hours a day, if I'm lucky, where I'm actually able to focus and get ANYTHING done. Today I was finally able to get my meds and so hopefully starting tomorrow I'll be able to make a lot more progress on getting caught up. Please hold any queries until the end of the month unless they're an emergency as our inbox is so full right now that I can't even tell one email from another lately.
Just to try and cover some of the questions that have come my way in the midst of all the craziness that has been the end of last year and the little bit of this year so far, here's a list of updates on various projects etc:
- Secret Gateways is not yet ready for production. I have been struggling to juggle editing and formatting duties with shipping duties. I'm hoping to have editing finished any day now so long as I can get enough time away from scrambling to ship books and reply to emails to be able to focus enough on them.
- As such, The Latham-Fielding Liaison is also not ready for production as it's a major component of what I still need to finish going over in Secret Gateways.
- I apologize to anybody who pre-ordered The Latham-Fielding Liaison on Amazon for the pre-order getting canceled. On Christmas day it was all too obvious the book wasn't going to be ready in time so I set it up in Kindle Direct Publishing to push it back with ample time according to Amazon's rules and my changes showed as successful within the book's info but when I went out to the list of titles it still showed as scheduled for the original December release. I made the stupid mistake of assuming it was fine since I see these kinds of quirks all the time with KDP. Next thing I know we get an email saying we didn't upload the final manuscript in time and they were canceling the pre-order. I contacted them and they agreed to not penalize us for it since we had set it up but they informed us that once they've canceled a pre-order, they cannot uncancel it. So, we would have to relist the book and frankly with everything else on my plate right now, I'm a lot more concerned with getting the book ready than I am with getting a pre-order page on Amazon considering I've already done that once. When the book is ready, we'll publish it.
- With those two titles accounted for, color copies of Nox Pareidolia have been going out very slowly but we're picking up speed now. We should be able to get our shipping backlog of currently available titles caught up by the end of the month.
- If you ordered a book in mid December from outside of the United States with the expectation of receiving it by Christmas from a small press, I think you might just be allowing Amazon's shipping and fulfillment paradigm to skew your understanding of the resources that independent businesses have at their disposal. I would like to wish we had the resources to match Amazon's level of fulfillment service if it weren't for the fact that that very paradigm requires the consistent indecent treatment of human beings who they employ. I know because I was once one of them.
- Due to miscalculations of shipping costs and a number of other unexpected factors with our previous Kickstarter, if you ordered a bundle or an item that has extra items bundled with it from us via Kickstarter, from here on, all backer items in each individual order will be shipped together when they are all ready in order to save on extra shipping costs. I apologize for any inconvenience this will cause for folks but it's simply far too expensive to ship things separately as I had originally planned to. It has also managed to slow me down to an incredible degree trying to ship things individually and trying to keep track of what has and hasn't been shipped individually.
- Unfortunately, the multi-anthology Kickstarter we had planned to launch in February to cover the costs of Endless, Nox Pareidolia II, and The Bleeding Rainbow is being temporarily postponed. We put a lot of thought into it and we refuse to do another Nightscape Kickstarter until we have all of our previous Kickstarter obligations caught up. The hope is that we'll be able to launch the KS in March.
- As such, between this delay of our original plans and my overall backlog of tasks, we have decided to push back the release of The Bleeding Rainbow to later this year. We'll update you all with more details when we pin down a more definitive release date.
- Speaking of, unless I or another editor on one of these anthologies has invited you to submit a story, please do not query any of us via social media about submission guidelines. If you have a query, please send it to us via email. I get that that means it will obviously result in a delayed response but I personally am getting to the point where I'm going to start blocking people who unnecessarily query me about submissions via social media. If I stay on social media much longer. The fact that the recent events in DC even had to happen to get social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to finally do something about the very huge and awful problem that caused them to happen in the first place is more than a little disconcerting to me and I'm finding myself more and more unable to stomach the idea of continuing to contribute to the lining of their pockets.
- If you are one of the 200+ people who have queried me about your submission for Nox Pareidolia II, I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. If you would rather not wait any longer, please withdraw your story via Moksha and, if you sell it before we get a chance to consider it, do please consider sending us another story when we open to submissions again for the anthology.
- And finally, and this is not something I like having to say but I value our customers greatly. I've met some wonderful human beings through this company and some of my best friends right now are people who I met because of this past three years of our business. But please, folks, if you do not receive a response to your query, please, please, if you do not know us personally, aren't friends with us in real life or don't interact with us regularly on social media, please don't query us via private message to our personal social media accounts. You wouldn't track down the CEO of Comcast and send him a Facebook message if your cable guy was unexpectedly late, would you? We do this out of love for the books that we publish. We do it because we love weird and horror fiction. And frankly, some of the emails and messages I've received this past month have caused me to lose more than just a little bit of that fire. Please consider your actions and correspondence toward us before you send them. We are human beings too.
Hi Robert,
ReplyDeleteI very much appreciate the update here on the various projects (I eagerly await my copy of Secret Gateways!), but I would rather receive a book late that was made with love and by folks who aren't stressing than the opposite of that. I wish folks who aren't inside the book industry or who understand the vast pressures put on medium to small presses by Amazon could get a glimpse to see we're all doing the best we can. I work for an independent bookstore and Amazon has truly warped people's perceptions of mailing and processing time. Two day shipping at that scale is only possible if you control an unhealthy amount of infrastructure. We have spent the entirety of our busiest season, Christmas, in lockdown, and have spent countless minutes explaining to folks that we are not a fulfilment centre, we are not a warehouse, we are a bookstore and as such we aren't built for the volume of online orders that Christmas brings. This is just to say that I completely appreciate where you are coming from and that I'm happy to wait if it means everybody's mental health is protected and/or improved!
-Matthew
Thanks for the update. Health first, I know you'll get everything fulfilled. So far the 20s have been mondo crazy for everyone and everything. We can be patient. Be well.
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