To those intending to buy merchandise from our store, the following dates may be useful:
Africa & South America: Today is the last day you can order an expect packages to arrive before Christmas.
International: Order by Monday Dec 7 to receive your package by Christmas.
Canada/Mexico: Order by Friday Dec 11 to insure pre-Christmas delivery.
United States: Order by Tuesday Dec 15 to insure pre-Christmas delivery.
I have received word that our two pallets of books have arrived. Tracy, Curtis, and Howard have all arrived. Everything is good to go. This means that I will no longer be plagued with nightmares of plane delays and mis-shipped goods. I don’t expect to hear much from Howard over the next few days. He’s going to be too busy to tweet let alone call. What I hear from him is rather like telegraph messages.
Call 1 “The cash register isn’t working, so we’re going to have to take money by hand.”
Call 2 “Which credit cards do we accept?”
Call 3 “We’re ready to go. The doors are about to open.”
Call 4 (in a harried voice) “Did you send those orange shopping bags?”
Since I’ve helped run a booth before, I have a very clear picture in my mind of all the frantic preparation and scrambling to get everything into place. I wish I could be there to help out, but it sounds like the space behind the booth is already pretty cramped. I’ll know how things went at around 5 PM my time when the dealer room is closed and they’ve had time to count inventory.
Until then I’ll have to console myself with reading this lovely review.
Howard’s full GenCon schedule is here.
Nine pallets of XDM arrived at the Tayler House today. You can’t have yours yet, though, because Tracy and Curtis won’t be back in town to sign pre-orders until next week.
In order to only stock for immediate demand we needed to shift six of these pallets off to our warehousing facility. This meant getting on the Schlock Hotline and calling Jon Krupp, who generously donates a forklift and a truck every time big things need to be moved.
In the spirit of X-treme Dungeon Mastery he brought an X-treme truck. I had never seen one of these before, and I had my doubts.
Here’s a link to the full photo-stream of XDM X-treme Pallet Shifting, including several shots of that lifting operation in progress. I confess… I’m far more nervous around this kind of heavy machinery than I am around firearms. Somebody needs to point a firearm at you to kill you with it, but heavy machinery has a mind of its own.
I’m pretty sure there’s a comic gestating at the end of that last paragraph somewhere.
Speaking of comics, here’s one last freebie from within the covers of XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery. It’s in a chapter about describing the effects of magic…
If you didn’t laugh, that’s okay. You probably lack the reference frame.
If you did laugh, you really need to buy the book.
The folks at Star Pirates have been itching to get me to design ads for them for over a year now. Unfortunately for them I’ve been too busy to pay much attention to advertising — which is kind of strange, because you’d expect a good mercenary like me to be taking to that particular revenue stream like a fish takes to water, but I digress — so they had to go stand in line for slots via Project Wonderful.
By way of thanks to them for their persistence (and apology to them for not being able to follow through) here is linkage: Go play Star Pirates! There’s a “Tagon Toughs” fleet out there for you to join, even. Their imagined future is a bit darker than mine, but the game is still a thematic fit with Schlock Mercenary. That’s why I’m letting them use some of my stuff in their ads.
While we’re on the subject of me not being able to follow through… Sandra’s sister Nancy has invented the salvation of short speculative fiction. I promised her some artwork, but have yet to deliver.
So what is this miracle project? It is Anthology Builder, and it lets you assemble a print collection of short fiction, selecting stories from among hundreds of reprints from popular magazines. Then you pick cover art, drop coin, and your customized anthology is printed on-demand and sent to you in the mail.
How will this save short fiction? Let’s describe the problem, first: Most short fiction is published in magazines with a very limited circulation and shelf-life. Once published, those stories rarely see reprints in anthologies because the market is a too small to support more than a few runs of mass-market paperbacks. The result is that authors have little incentive to write short stories, so they don’t. The art form stagnates.
Enter Anthology Builder: Print-on-demand (POD) technology makes it possible for extremely small print runs to turn a profit, in turn making it possible for these short stories to be marketed to the niche that loves them. This means that authors get residual royalties for work that is technically out-of-print, and that incents them to create similar work. The art form again blooms.
(On an only-slightly nepotistic note: Anthology Builder now has three Sandra Tayler stories in it.)
Anyway, Nancy asked me if I’d like to contribute cover art for Anthology Builder, and even though this is something I’d get paid for I still haven’t managed to submit something. Too busy making comics, I guess.
One of the hardest lessons to learn in any business is when to do something yourself, and when to subcontract it, or outsource it, or otherwise partner with someone else in order to finish the job.
There are two object lessons in this blog post. The first and most obvious one is that I am a much better cartoonist than I am a handy-man, so Sandra and I made the wise decision to hire some folks from 3 Day Kitchen and Bath to remodel my office for us.
The second, less-obvious one is that while I’m a reasonably adept blogger and photo-poster, I don’t do it very often. Why not? Because my own processes really aren’t optimized for that kind of thing. But Flickr does it quite well, so I’m experimenting with using Flickr’s tools for this instead of my own.
All this comes back to a fundamental business principle: Just because you CAN do something yourself doesn’t mean you SHOULD. The trick, of course, lies in knowing where to draw the line.
So, with the overly long and somewhat preachy explanation out of the way, here is Howard’s very first Flickr set. And just to demonstrate the value in having somebody else manage the photos, here it is as a slide-show.
This is the pair of work days during which a horde of minions volunteers show up to help package and send out 1300 packages full of Schlock books. We always schedule two days, but for the past three shipping events the workers have been so amazing that there was nothing left to do on the second day.
Who: Any Schlock fan who is either local to Utah, or willing to travel at their own expense.
Where: At Dragon’s Keep 260 N University Ave in Provo
When: Starting at 9 AM running until 4 PM on June 8. If there is work left to do, we’ll start again at 9 AM on June 9.
What: The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance Shipping Event. Most of the work will be putting books and slipcases into boxes and sticking labels onto the top. There will be laughter and free food. Volunteers will also get to pick through our scratch and dent box to take something home with them. We do need a couple of volunteers with trucks who are willing to show up at our house at 8 AM on June 8 to help us haul massive piles of stuff down to Dragon’s keep.
Why: Because putting all those books in boxes all by myself would take a really, really long time.
If you are interested in volunteering for this event, please email schlockmercenary at gmail.com with the word “volunteer” in the subject line. It would be helpful if the body of the email lists when you’re likely to be coming. Some of you have already emailed me to volunteer. I’m pretty sure I’ve got you listed, but it would be a good idea to email again to make sure you’re on the mailing list. If you don’t want to email, but still want to come, feel free to show up on the 8th. If you only have an hour or two, that is fine just stop by. I don’t recommend showing up on the 9th unless you’ve read an announcement that there is still work to be done.
Have any questions? email schlockmercenary at gmail.com and I’ll clarify. Thanks everyone!
Orem cartoonist rising figure in webcomics world
Oh yeah, I’m a RISING FIGURE. See that figure there, that one that’s RISING? Totally me. And I’m RISING, baby.
Also: the article has a spoiler. You get to see the last panel of March 2nd’s strip if you click on the thumbnail picture.
If you’ve been waiting until the last minute to do your Christmas shopping, the last minute is here… assuming you’re doing your Christmas shopping at the Schlock Mercenary Bookstore. If we can get it in the mail early on December 20th, the United States Postal Service assures us they can get it to you on or before Christmas Eve.
For this to work, you need to place your order by about 9am Mountain time on the 19th. That’s 11am Eastern. Choose “Priority Mail” for your shipping, and you’re all set.
We’re still offering free Priority Mail shipping for orders over $100, including international orders (though international orders won’t arrive in time for Christmas.) All four books and a set of magnets (Back in stock! Woo-hoo!) come to exactly that, but there are shirts, mousemats, pins, podcast CDs, posters, and Sandra’s children’s book also available for filling up your cart. I should point out that if you’re buying gifts for others, Hold On To Your Horses, pictured there to the right, is an excellent choice if there are picture-book-aged children on the list.
The local weather forecast for Friday the 19th says “lots of snow,” which is just lovely because the roads are already covered with lots of snow from today’s storm. But we will brave those roads for you! We will! Just be sure to get your order in early. Multiple trips to the post office are just not going to happen in that weather — not even if you tell us we’re ruining Christmas.
Four times now I’ve released a book using the “open pre-orders, then ship ‘em all out at once” method. Credit for the system actually working goes to my wife, Sandra.
This time around she blogged each phase of the process. The process isn’t perfect, but it’s getting fairly refined. For Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars we packed and shipped over 1000 packages between 9:00am and 3:00pm on a Thursday, and that included some pretty complex orders – two books (one sketch, one regular), some magnets, and a t-shirt, for example.
The blog entries are here for your enjoyment and potential edification.
Phase 1: Collecting orders
Phase 2: Sorting
Phase 3: Inventory preparation
Phase 4: Printing Postage
Phase 5: Packaging and Mailing
(A note for Webcomics Weekly fans: we’re using Stamps.com instead of Endicia because we’ve been using Stamps.com for two years now, and the Endicia promotion began while Sandra was printing postage. We might look into Endicia, but we’re both reluctant to mess with a system that appears to be working.)
We made record time on Thursday. I blame Sandra. She’s a super-competent, incredibly organized slave-driver. Of course some of the blame needs to rest squarely on the burdened, whip-scarred shoulders of her loyal minions. Most of the folks who showed up had helped us with mailings before, and knew the drill.
In the past we’ve started with the big blocks of “easy stuff”: single book, domestic postage. As the day progresses and more volunteers arrive we plow through all of that, and then hit a speed-bump. “Special Handling” orders and more complex orders (two books, one t-shirt, a magnet set) are passed around, and Sandra can’t pass them around fast enough to keep everybody busy.
This time we started with the special orders and the complex stuff. By the time we had our full cadre of shippers-and-handlers (whom we fed and swagged out of the S&H portion of your purchase price) we were just getting to the big stacks of easy stuff, and things just FLEW.
By 3:30 pm on Thursday all orders were in the back of a postal truck. It was a different postman this time. He stopped by at 10:00am to see what he was going to be picking up, and didn’t believe me when I said “about 1200 packages.” He was a believer by his first pickup at 12:45pm.
Speaking of believers, thank you everybody for believing in us enough to send us money months in advance for a product you’ve only seen pictures of. I’m already hearing from people whose orders have arrived (and which have been received with joy.)
I’ve also heard from some folks whose orders were received with a mixture of joy and confusion. Missing magnets, a defective book… that sort of thing. We’ll shoulder full responsibility for making things right if your order does not arrive to your liking. Just email schlockmercenary@gmail.com with your order number and a description of the problem.
Note: It might take a day or two before you hear from us. A rhinoceros rhinovirus is currently trampling the cottage that houses our little cottage industry, and Sandra may be under the proverbial weather for another couple of days. I’m on the rebound… I think. A good night’s sleep (aided by a mixture of acetaminophen and diphenhydramine citrate) will out the truth.