Journal

Well… orders have been brisk

94 Comments

Several thoughts are competing right now for “first in the day’s Journaling.” I’m going to lead with the one that I think deserves to be first:

1) My readers are wonderful. They’re the best comic readers in the WHOLE WORLD. If it wasn’t for them being willing to buy stuff, I wouldn’t be able to do this full-time, and if the first hour of pre-orders are any indication, they’re willing to buy stuff.

2) Pre-orders are open, and you can get a sketch edition for the next 22.75 hours. Head over to store.schlockmercenary.com before it’s too late.( Yeah, you probably already knew this, but this thought was clamoring loudly to be #1, and I had to really WORK to push it to #2)

3) If you want to play “how many books has Howard sold,” the first order number of the day was #1203. Feel free to report your order number here, and marvel over the enthusiasm and good will of Schlock readers (see #1 above).

4) I need to do something today besides clicking “refresh” on the store’s administration page. I’m really anxious to hit the break-even point. It may look like I’m rolling in dough, but until I’ve sold oh, about 571 books the print run won’t have paid for itself. Only then will I relax, knowing that the next few months’ of cartoonist salary are being socked away. (If your order number is 1774, your order and every one thereafter is in the “paying the salary” category.)

94 thoughts on “Well… orders have been brisk”

    1. Repost because of my darned default Icon being non-normal person friendly
      Considering something like 152 orders in a tad bit over an hour, I think you’ll hit Order #1774 before lunch, if not then it’ll have come and gone when you finish lunch…

      I assume you’ll be tossing up the current order number, so we can play along?

      And many orders will have multiple books I wager, so 571 books won’t take 571 orders…

      Toss in the 10 bucks for the sketch editions, and we’ll be keeping you in toner and markers for a long time, I think…

  8. 1410 – and Shlock, Tagon and Breya now grace my computer screen 🙂

    i got the sketch edition this time and am kicking myself for not getting it last time.

    i can’t wait to see it!!

  11. What’s going on with shipping this time?

    Being one of those Limey types, it was quite handy to do the pairs-of-books-in-parcels thing with fellow students and save on the P&P (and do general transport overhead reduction goodness). Unfortunately, the store’s “show me shipping choices” button doesn’t work until I’ve filled in the form, and I don’t want to fill in the form until I’ve rounded up n students, where n depends on the shipping.

      2. Re: What’s going on with shipping this time?

        Right…cats herded; I’ve mailed the GMail address the store gives, because we’re awkward and are trying to cram several people’s sketch editions through a smaller number of orders. 😉

  15. 1361. I *knew* there was a reason I read my comics right after I finish shoveling through the nightly systems e-mail! 🙂 (and obviously I read the comics before LJ 🙂 )

  16. 1239

    Made my order within 4 minutes of it opening, and 36 people still got in ahead of me. I’m sure you’re going to make profit on this.

    I hope it comes in soon. Stupid military postal service takes forever.

  17. Order 1477. Just a normal edition, I’m afraid. Apparently they want us to buy coursebooks for our final year at Uni… crazy people!

    Thank you so much, Howard, for going to all this effort to give us another helping Schlock goodness in the form of a book. =) (Oh, and my monitor says thank you for the great desktop!)

  18. 1482, and a sketch edition. I decided to go ahead and order it online this time instead of heading to the Keep. (I don’t even know if that option’s available with this book.) Let us know when the shipping is so we can help. Last time was a blast! 🙂

      1. the 18th is the party at the keep? EEK!!!

        *dashes to the airline sites for fairs*

        This time, no crashing at friends that live over an hours away, and aren’t fans (they are nuts I tell you). Staying much closer if I can help it… I will be there longer, by golly…

  19. 1500 even, here! =)

    Any interest in a nice, shiny pre-order of some new literary/genre fiction, poetry, etc? 10% off cover price, though we don’t have any of your nifty sketches. We do have a few artists in it, though =) Humor, horror, intrigue, travel!

    http://gudmagazine.com/subs/subscribe.php

    Ah, figured it couldn’t hurt _too_ much to ask. I know all about the clickreload syndrome, though we don’t have five+ years of history to drive things. Yet. 🙂

    1. Re: In other news

      We’ve sold more than half of the 5000 copies in the original print run. I’m not sure of the exact count of what’s left — we may be below 2000 copies remaining.

  24. Whoohoo. #1555.

    I wore my Rule 27 t-shirt yesterday and introduced the manager at the sandwich place to Schlock. (She liked the quote, I shared rules 1 and 13 with her, and then gave her the URL.) I’m proud to be advertising.

          1. My goodness, that brings back memories! I used to love Danger Mouse, but for some reason, almost no one else remembers what I’m talking about anymore! 🙁

  33. I was # 1218. But I was up at 0600 Mountain time because that’s when my Puppy, the fetus and my husband all wake up. I think my order officially ‘transacted’ about 0803, so there were 14 other people who were quicker on the clicker than me 😀

    Also, I made a spelling mistake on my order in the credit card portion, and quickly emailed about it to ensure everything would be okay – Sandra rocks – she emailed me back within minutes. That Tayler Corporation. They sure have awesome employees 😉

    1. They certainly do… Both of them should be shown to every corp. body as how to run a customer-friendly business… Last book, when there were issues with books damaged in ways they had ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL OVER, they sent a replacement… for free…

      If only everyone were that intent to make it a good experiance for the customer…

      And I wager Both Sandra and Howard were virtually glued to their chair all day, making sure things worked right with the store and such. I’d love to see the opening server numbers… 🙂

  36. Not sure where to report this, but your website is not very kind to my city name. It also wasn’t very helpful about what exactly was wrong, so I had to make some guesses.

    It appears the address (and other boxes?) cannot contain letters such as åäöüß and the like, but flags those as !”#¤%& and the like – without saying which box contains them, or what actual characters are wrong. First I thought the problem was with the phone number, since it required a + for international, but that wasn’t it. Then, after furious head scratching, I replaced the å and ä with a, and that worked.

    Of course, all this was hardly much of a chore since it ended in me being able to place an order for Schlock book #2! Thanks for making it!

    1. What was the order number on that? I may have to contact Volusion support about different encoding options for extended character sets, and if I can provide them with some examples that would be helpful.

      1. CustomerID# 578, order number 1686.

        The actual name of my town is Västerås, in the state of Västmanland. I put N/A in for state, as we do not use that for mail, so no need to change that.

        I’ll get the package anyway, if the zip code is there and the spelling somewhat correct it usually works. You wouldn’t believe what marvellous spellings Chinese people taking orders over the phone can invent.

        A useful change if character encoding is impractical would be to indicate the boxes which have characters that are rejected, and add a note that foreign letters may trigger that error. That would have led me right past the problem, and for most western nations that’s “good enough”. Of course, allowing at least full ISO8859-1 (or if that’s painful, CP1251) would be the best. Can I dream of full UTF-8 support while I’m at it? And yes, I am now showing off that I work with this kind of stuff daily. Sorry.

        1. I worked with UTF8 all the time, too. I think Blogunder Schlock is UTF8 (might not be — I forget).

          Regardless, now that I know what to ask, I can go ahead and ask.

          –Howard

  37. #1691

    …so I’m #488. Sketch version, of course.

    A little shameless self-promotion: Ever wonder who’d win if Ennesby fought Schlock or Tagon fought Breya? Play Schlock Attack and find out! It’s a free print-and-play checkers variant. Pick one of 10 different Schlock Mercenary characters to play as and use his or her special abilities to beat your opponent.

  40. #1764 – Sketch edition

    Shipping to the middle of The Bush in Australia added another US$10, plus the exchange rate will make it cost about AU$47.00 I’ve paid nearly that much for just a sketch, and this time I get a whole book! WOO HOO!

  42. 1250

    I was clicking refresh every few seconds starting at 5 minutes ’til and still got that far down the line! The order setup was kind of messy. Wish I could have registered and set everything up beforehand. I ended up only ordering a sketch book because eveyrthing was coming up so slow. If shipping was reduced for multiple purchases, I’d add another one easily.

    Good job folks. If you ever needed to feel like you have a solid fanbase, I’d say that today was proof.

    1. Re: 1250

      The server running slow? I can’t begin to imagine why that might be… 🙂

      And since 1203 was the first order of the day, I think you did pretty good…

  43. 1782

    I was #1782, so you have already broken even in your first day of preorders! So glad to see that happen. I admire you for putting everything on the line to do what you love, and to be with your family.

  45. Are you able to ship to APO addresses? I am working down in Antarctica for the next several months (and possibly a full year), and I would love to have a sketch edition sent down here instead of having to wait until I get back home to the States.

    1. Okay, here’s the deal. I DO ship to APOs, and I will cheerfully send you extra books (for you to share with your compatriots down there). The one caveat is that the price for the extra books is you need to send me a photo of you holding the book while standing in front of some recognizable Antarctic thingy.

      (It can be a McMurdo station sign. I don’t need pictures of you on the edge of the Ross Shelf or anything spectacular.)

      Place your order, and then email me with the order number. We’ll take it from there…

  49. Thank you for placing your order. Your order number is 1836.

    to be fair, its a multi book order, as i needed some non sketch editions ot loan out so i can get other folks hooked on schlock.

      1. For some reason, as I saw each person posting their order number with joy, I couldn’t help but think of poor Charlie Brown, looking in his bag, and discovering his crappy order number.

        Emily enjoyed a little bit of Starcraft the other day. Man, she sucks, though.

  51. Much cheaper this time

    Alas I missed the pre-ordering for sketch editions of the last book, and had to spend a few grand getting down to Utah to request a sketch in person. With luck this order will be processed in time.

    Nice arches though.

  53. I am late to the party! I picked a bad time to fall behind on my friends list, I see. Still, I get the satisfaction of seeing you decidedly in the black by the time my order hit. Yay for Schlock! 🙂

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