Ready-to-play individual personalities for The Fantasy Trip.
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I didn't know this until it was too late. UPS apparently charges HUGE dollars on the delivery end in "brokerage fees" that are not visible or reversible on my end.
If you are one of the half-dozen or so Canadian backers and you are currently seething with outrage, I seethe with you. I will use USPS in the future.
But please do let me know via PM how much you were dinged for such, so I can keep track and also plan for the future. Shipping is bad and expensive enough without hidden BS on top of it.
Short version: I found a good (well, less bad) pathway to get the international orders out, and so now I have two boxes filled with 37.2kg of books (kg because they're international) that will be picked up by DHL on Monday, between 10am and 2pm.
From there, they go to Greece, and hopefully there will be no issues with customs. Most of the stuff is duty-free, and my CE Mark paperwork is in order.
Not sure what the timing is; I'll ask my reshipper about that when it comes in. Realistically, there are maybe 28 orders total. 22 from Character Collections, and something like six reships for More Perilous Journeys. That's just not a lot of packaging and repackaging, so with luck they'll be on their way shortly after arrival.
Just for fun I checked the original schedule from the campaign:
PDF distribution was initiated by the end of March. Print books happened by mid-April. Stuff started going out in early May. Final domestic and Canadian distribution completed early June. I’m hopeful that now that we’re in international land, that we’ll be all delivered by the end of August.
What it says. All are picked, packed, and labeled. I found time to get all UPS orders in the mail. Maybe 5 go to USPS in the morning.
Now it’s 22 international orders and some reships from More Perilous Journeys. More on that tomorrow or the day after.
Just a quick update.
I have everything I need to start moving things out.
The extra copies of Dragon Hunt! arrived in good order. I have all the replacement tiles from the damaged and missing boxes. I even secured an international fulfillment pathway. It's still going to be expensive, but not so much more so, unless there are hidden fees, than I thought.
I have some things to do this morning, but all afternoon I shall be boxing up domestic and Canadian packages (I decided to send those myself after all). Then I'll set aside the international orders, and arrange for a DHL pickup to my new contact in Greece, of all places.
Hope to have everything that can be done by me out by this weekend (ideally, by day's end tomorrow).
If you're also on the More Perilous Journeys "my international order didn't arrive" list (fewer than 10, but that represents a 15-20% delivery fail rate!), I will be sending out replacement packages along with the Character Collections stuff.
I learned my lesson: I will never send un-tracked packages again.