What's Been Going On.
over 2 years ago – Thu, May 19, 2022 at 04:22:11 AM

Hey everyone, I'm sure you all are wondering what's the hold up, so here is everything that has been happening. 

We sent in the spreadsheet at the same time we posted our last update.  After a week without word back from the fulfillment company we sent them a follow-up email. It is around this time where my mom, who's handling this became extremely busy with a very tight deadline for Farilane, figured that they would respond soon to the emails and awaited a response through that. After about a week and a half with no response and with work slowing down we attempted to contact them through phone. We're told the person handling our order was out for a week and a half.  Since the start of last week we have been calling each day trying to get any information we can. My mom trying to be nice and not get our contact's superiors involved is left with on choice which is our next step.

I am sorry for the silence but I did not want to make an update without having any new information as we are still just waiting to hear back from the fulfillment company. There's not much we can do to speed up the process at this point. It's been out of our hands since we gave them the spreadsheet.

We will be continuing to call and email them in order to get a status update for you all.

Once again I am sorry for the silence but we are unfortunately still in the same spot as the last update.

Spreadsheet sent!
over 2 years ago – Tue, Apr 05, 2022 at 05:21:11 AM

After a bit of a longer delay than I anticipated, the spreadsheet has been sent to the fulfillment company and we are awaiting their response. We will update as soon as we get word from the them as to the expected dates for deliveries.

I once again want to express my deepest apologies for this long wait. I have tried my very hardest to expedite the process and I'm very glad to say that things are moving. Thank you all for your unbelievable patience.

3/15 - Overseas Shipping Update
over 2 years ago – Thu, Mar 17, 2022 at 05:44:20 AM

Hey all.  Just wanted to let you know where we stand.  I've combed through all the old emails from multiple accounts and have boiled all the orders down to:

• 3.12% who needed addresses fixed - and they are now
• 1.92% refunded
• 1.44% that we are working through emails some because we are confused about how to parse what we got for addresses.  For instance what  "data" goes in what fields as far as things like city, region, postal code etc.  
• 74.58% - that are marked "GTG" (Good to go) which means we have heard from people
• 18.94% - where we have no data at all regarding their current address/refund/etc status

So I sent an email out using Mailchimp to those 19% of people with the following information:

• From: [email protected]
• Subject: IMPORTANT: Please Verify Your Shipping Address For Your Kickstarter Rewards
• Sent: Mon, Mar 14, 2022 9:46 pm

I have about 70 responses to that email and I'm starting to go through them now.  The email included the current data we have so hopefully most of them are a simple GTG.  

In a day or two, I should have those processed and that will leave a few still "unreported" but we'll just go with the data we have now and keep on fingers crossed. I'm not sure what else we can except maybe not ship those people and wait for them to reach out.  We'll see how many fall into that category after I  go through these 70 emails and hopefully some more will come in over the next two days.

So, that's where we are now.  I'll keep keeping you posted!

3/9 Overseas Shipping Update
over 2 years ago – Thu, Mar 10, 2022 at 03:56:18 PM

Hey, all James again. It's been one week since I came onto this project and I wanted to make sure I keep you all up to date.

We've made TREMENDOUS progress.  Here's what's been going on:

• My mom and I have had several long sessions where she educates me on the software involved (BackerKit for the Age of Empyre project and Pledge Box for the Slipcase).
• I've also had to "come up to speed" on what each project has as far as physical products - and mom had to do some research as well as it's been so long. All told there are 25 different "items" - Originally I thought it was just 7 (the slipcase and six books), but that's not the case.
• We have exported from both systems and set up columns for each of the products to be delivered. As I mentioned, I was surprised to find out it's not just books and slipcases, there are also posters, 3 different tote bags, and t-shirts of various sizes.  
• We've created (actually re-created as my mom as gone through this part of the project several times) the master spreadsheet where there is a row for each person and columns indicating the quantity of each item to be shipped.  This was not easy because the two systems report on products differently. I think it really helped to have two people working on this side by side because it's really easy to make a mistake. Mom did most of the work while I watched and there were some mistakes I saw her doing that were corrected. Then we switched places and she watched while I did the others. 
• The next step was to "combine" people with pledges in both systems so that the shipping company only has to send out one package rather than two. Again, a pretty tedious process but after Mom showed me how to do the combines, I took that over.
• I'm now checking those combines (comparing the two "original files" to make sure I didn't screw anything up.  And then we can move on to the last step.
• Requests for address changes have been coming into me and for the last week, I 'set them aside" while I get the master sheet together, now that the master is set (or will be after a few more hours of double-checking), I'm going to start working on those. Basically for each "row" I'm marking each record as "good to go", "refunded" or in address updated.  
• Another thing we did during last night's sessions was educated me on how to do refunds. Again, it's not straightforward because it depends on "how" money came in.  Both Kickstarters have the ability to do "manual adds" and some people bought "add-ons" through the various pledge managers, so you have to do a bit of investigation work to make sure how many sources of money came in and from where. For $s that were paid on the Pledge Managers - we can do the refund through their original credit card.  For money that came in through Kickstarter, we've been issuing refunds via Paypal. So far I've not come across anyone who can't be refunded in one of those two ways.  When we do, we'll might have to reach to find if we can send a check or use some other money transfer like Venmo or something. We can't refund through Kickstarter as we lose access to all Kickstarter data after a certain amount of time.
• At the end of our session, mom got me access to the gmail account where all of you have been posting to from a prior update Mom made. I'm sorry to say that those have just been "sitting there" - My mom is only sleeping a few hours a night and hasn't been able to get to those - but now that I found them, I have what I think is the last piece of the puzzle. So, I'm starting to feel more confident about what is involved.

I have a really busy work schedule today (yeah, I have a day job and some days are more demanding than others), but my plan is to get a good amount of work done on Thursday. I can't promise I'll have all 253 emails from that email account processed on that day, but I can promise to give you updates as to how many are outstanding as I go through them.

So, that's it for now. I appreciate your continued patience as I work through this. I can see now why it was so daunting for my mom, but I'm confident I can slay this beast.

An introduction and an update
almost 3 years ago – Wed, Mar 02, 2022 at 05:25:24 AM

Hey all, my name is James, and if you are a backer on the Farilane project, you probably already know who  I am.  But for those who don't, I'm the son of Michael and Robin.  As some of you may know, my mom is having a tough time, and it's been especially challenging as of late.  Since the last update, her condition has worsened and she's trying to "hang in there" but it's tough. I won't go into all of the details as to what's been happening but some of the stuff she has been dealing with include moving my sister into her new house, my mom's laptop breaking, a family trip to Florida (which was booked two years ago), coming back from vacation and being completely overwhelmed (because dad refused to let her get near work), and next to no sleep.

But the good news is we have been working together every day and I'm coming up to speed quickly.  Today is the day for her to teach me what has to be done for the "dreaded" spreadsheets - given the long silences in the past I'll make sure I come and post at frequently.

Contact Information

From here on out all emails related to ANY Kickstarter should go to me at [email protected].  And since I'm going to be managing multiple projects, if you could mention the name of the Kickstarter you are reaching out to me about, that would be helpful.  Please don't try to email mom or dad, as they are likely to be lost or not read.  Their email account is a disaster - but that's a project for another day.

Refunds

My mom was under the impression that she issued all the refunds.  And we did find at least one case where she did issue it but for some reason, the refund was "canceled" by Stripe so it didn't go through.  So if you requested in the past (or want to do so now) a refund and have not received it. Please send me an email - and if you have a Paypal account that would be the easiest/fastest way to get money to you.

Address changes

Based on our preliminary training session I think I know where all the changes of addresses are, but if you are worried about yours being updated - shoot me an email (yeah, I hate to have you do it twice) but it's better to be safe rather than sorry.

Farilane Kickstarter ends at 7:00 on Friady

You probably already know about the Kickstarter for the second book in the series. But like my mom always says never assume anything.  So, I might as well mention it. It's the second Kickstarter I've run (the first one being David Este's Fatemarked Book), and so far it's going well.  We are just $4,138 away from our last stretch goal ($169,728). And if reached, we will leapfrog Nolyn and continue our trend of each novel's Kickstarter surpassing the ones that came before.

NOTE: For overseas people - just like the Nolyn project we will be shipping books directly from here, so the problem we are having with the "mass shipment distributed by others" won't be an issue.

Well, I think that's all I got for now - you have my email, so if you need to find me, you'll know where I am.  Thanks all for the support, and I hope you'll check out Farilane!