Status Report: Targets of Opportunity and Bigger Bads

[Shane Ivey]

We’ve been trying and trying to deliver two long-overdue books, DELTA GREEN: TARGETS OF OPPORTUNITY and the new Monsters and Other Childish Things supplement BIGGER BADS. They’re coming soon, but it seems like everything that COULD delay them DID delay them.

First, both of them took longer to print than the printer had anticipated. That’s not terribly unusual, and by itself it’s not cause for consternation, but that wasn’t where it stopped.

While we were waiting for the books to ship from the printer, we set up a new warehousing and fulfillment service. We’re working with Cubicle 7 Entertainment, who publish a number of our new books into the retail market, so they can also sell some of our older titles into retail as well -- books that we have in large quantities and that are just languishing on the warehouse racks at the moment. If we have just about everything in the same warehouse, sold in the same catalog, packing and shipping together, that’s got to make things more efficient.

That’s all well and good, but Cubicle 7 was in the process of setting up with a new warehousing service themselves. They’re using a large company that handles a lot of hobby game publishers, from small-timers like us to the biggest in the business. Nobody anticipated any trouble.

But the new warehouse underestimated the volume that Cubicle 7 and its client companies (such as Arc Dream Publishing) would need to move.

What does a warehouse do when it has too much stuff to ship? It ships it very slowly.

And that’s why we’ve been stuck at “The warehouse plans to ship this week” for the past few weeks now.

Now, there is good news. The fact that this is a major warehousing company means they can boost their staff and systems and what-not to accomodate the larger volume. So they say things should be moving normally as soon as next week. But in the meantime, things have been crawling.

We have large lists of shipments to be made for Bigger Bads and Targets of Opportunity. We have slightly smaller lists of products to ship from day-to-day online sales. It will be a few days more before we hear the good news that everything is caught up.

For now, I can only thank all our customers for their patience and good will, and apologize again for the delays. They have been hitting us like clockwork, one after the other. And I should emphasize that we offer 100% refunds, no questions asked and no hard feelings, if you decide to cancel an order rather than waiting any longer.

Thank you!

Shane Ivey
Arc Dream Publishing