The World of Warcraft Diary

My Campaign to Reprint The WoW Diary is Live
almost 2 years ago – Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 08:16:04 AM

For everyone who orders The WoW Diary's first edition and wants more, I created a reward featuring The Post-Mortem Booklet with almost a quarter the words of The WoW Diary. The booklet contains articles from the original companion booklet and over ten thousand words of new material. It includes an exclusive desk matt painted by my distribution partner, Nolan Nasser, one of the biggest Blizzard fans I know.  Check it out!

The World of Warcraft Diary Reprint is Coming
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 12:52:43 PM

A lot has happened since you funded the first print of The WoW Diary 4 years ago. I’ve been busy writing novels and prototyping board games. The reason for this update is The WoW Diary is selling out on Amazon—the only books left are expensive signed copies.

I’m updating my backers to give you a peek at my upcoming campaign. Since you already have my book, I’m offering a 70-page booklet of essays about the hurdles the dev team cleared after launching the game. The Post-Mortem Booklet includes the original four articles about WoW’s post-launch:

• Bones to Pick: Scholomance
• Of Axes and Arrows: Making Warsong
• Pushing Polys: My Vanilla WoW Dungeons
• Four Developers: How The WoW Diary Happened

The Post-Mortem Booklet includes four new essays that answer common questions about game development and cover the pursuit of success in the entertainment industry—from getting your first job to directing a development studio in the right direction. Here are the titles:

• Your North Star: The Importance of Self-Publishing
• Blizzard’s Secret Sauce: Success in Entertainment
• Gaining XP: Advice for New Devs
• The Art of Losing Control: The Pitfalls of Prosperity

Besides cleaning up the grammar and a few typos, nothing about The WoW Diary has changed, so I’m offering a $29 reward tier for The Post-Mortem Booklet.

I’m partnering with a distributor, Nolan Nasser of Source Point Games. His expertise in printing and fulfillment will be a huge help, and he's a fanatic about WoW. Nolan has worked on many crowdfunding campaigns and will get these books in your hands sooner than I can. He painted a Warcraft-inspired desk mat which we include with every purchase.

I would love to get your feedback and if you think you'd want to show support, then signing up early is a big help. Check out our landing page for more details about upcoming rewards 

Every Gear has Teeth
over 5 years ago – Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 01:56:03 AM

We are finally inside the Amazon machine. I've been busy with their customer service and parsing their Sellers Marketplace Interface. 

The short story: We are waiting for amazon to fully "receive" the inventory that arrived in May. When it becomes available, then I can upload the list of addresses for replacement Kickstarter rewards.

The long story:  I suspect one of the factors in delaying availability is because Kickstarter rewards aren't sold on Amazon, that I'm using a service called multi-channel fulfillment. Of course, none of Amazon's operators know for sure if this is true, they all say it's usually supposed to take 5 days (I've spent as many as 6 hours a day on the phone, trying figure this out). 

Amazon is so vast, there's just no simple way to understand how the seller marketplace works. Some of the functionality isn't apparent until you're actually using it, and only then do limitations and persnickety particulars surface. Several pages aren't even reachable through their normal UI! For instance, the only link to the webpage for uploading bulk orders is embedded in Amazon's help manual. Unreal, right? 

By fulfilling orders for my post-campaign store thewowdiary.com, Amazon automatically listed for sale The WoW Diary without my knowledge. My book appeared last week without any fanfare. Talk about a soft-launch, I didn't even know about it! De-listing it didn't work, it just appeared again.  

Oddly enough, I need to activate a Kindle seller account to sell the eBook or PDF. I'm waiting for them to approve of my new account before figuring out if I can sell a PDF on Amazon. For some reason they're fussy about PDFs. 

And wouldn't you just know it, Amazon will not deliver a bulk order of books to Canada. It's the darnedest thing. I don't even know if Canadians pay extra for import fees. If you see extra delivery charges (or unavailability) to the Amazon listing of The WoW Diary, please let me know in the comments below. I'll see what I can do to reduce the price by creating other Amazon accounts and shipping books to their overseas fulfillment centers.

Delivery Breakthroughs
over 5 years ago – Thu, May 09, 2019 at 03:09:02 AM

After another month of ups and downs I'm finally comfortable with my delivery dates. I'm fulfilling two shipments. 

Overseas Fulfillment

The first is replacing missing Kickstarter copies abroad and delivering presale orders (purchased between November through May). I could go into great detail about Amazon's crazy specificity, but I'm sick of thinking about all the hoops I've jumped through these past two months. My printer is currently putting my self-contained packages inside of larger cartons. In 10 business days everything will be packaged and labeled. 

From there, we need to weight each pallet before ordering a bill of lading! Once I have a bill of lading, a truck will pick up the shipment and delivery them to the nearest Amazon fulfillment center. I'm hoping this only takes a few days, I've zero experience with this. From there, Amazon claims it takes two weeks to propagate inventory overseas. THEN you'll get emails for tracking and enjoy Amazon's the normal delivery service. June is looking solid. 

 US Fulfillment

I'm cutting some corners with customers in the States. I unpacked book cartons and wrapped them individually in my living room. It took 5 days and 18 rolls of packing tape to prepare domestic deliveries. It wasn't exciting work, so I binged-watched the best seasons of Survivor on Hulu while I did so. 

"When will US deliveries happen?" you may ask.

The short answer: US deliveries should be arriving within two weeks. I'm delivering books tomorrow to a local mailing house. The trade-off in eschewing Amazon was losing tracking, but I figure it's worth it.

The long answer: You'd think arranging a pickup for a bulk order through the US postal service would be smooth sailing, at least compared to the persnickety rigors of Amazon. Unfortunately, post offices and UPS stores limit their labeling to batches of 20 items/day. Labels are important because there's a different cost per address. Since my only hurdle was labeling, I turned to the USPS online apps to do everything myself. I created a business profile and began processing a bulk order. All was well until their app rejected my csv file with the address data. I went into debug mode. I once had the distinction of having fixed more bugs than anyone in Blizzard's history (I doubt I still hold this record), so when I get my debug mode on, you better keep your hands and fingers clear. After many phone calls, the United States Postal Service admitted I discovered a fundamental hiccup with their website's import functionality for batch jobs! That's right, csv files were being rejected nation-wide and the US post office didn't know about it (or so they said) until I got their lead support personnel to reproduce the error on their end! It's hard to believe that I'm the guy who was tenacious enough to wade through their phone menus and support staff to actually find such a glaring breakdown in our national post. I wouldn't believe it, if I hadn't been on the calls myself. 

Since there was no fix on the horizon, I installed software on my PC that would let me print labels at home...only to discover that the software in question didn't process "bound printed matter" mail rates. After a few more calls to the USPS, someone suggested using a local mailing house that could label bulk orders. They are more expensive than the post office, but I couldn't stand anymore delays. I received a couple quotes today, and tonight I'm finally loading up my vehicle for a trip to the mailing house. I just gotta remember to life with my legs.

Ah, the literary life! 

Beware of the Letter M
over 5 years ago – Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 07:14:04 PM

With about 100 people on my "missing packages list," I took a poll a few weeks ago. I emailed all 40 of my Polish backers to see what they thought about waiting longer or getting replacements. Surprisingly, the majority said to give their original packages a longer wait to reach their doorstep. So I waited. In the past month, I've had 3 Slovenian backers report of their deliveries (Poland and Slovenia had the most missing deliveries)...so there's a modicum of hope still for our friends in Western Europe. But still, it's been over three months and too many people haven't received their rewards. 

I decided to move forward and replace the "lost" packages anyway. To do so, I needed protective packaging for 100+ more books and so ordered a short print run of packages that will hopefully protect our wares from Amazon's toothsome fulfillment process. So I placed an order to my printer.

What I didn't know is that the "m" key mutes gmail conversations (who knew?!) and it prevented me from seeing further messages from my printer. They sent me a couple questions and I didn't see their emails. They waited and sent more emails, again unbeknownst to me. Weeks passed after I discovered their messages saying they weren't moving forward with my packaging order until I got back to them. 

This email debacle untangled only last week. I answered the printer's questions and now they can move forward. In about 7 business days I'll have new packages wrapped around our replacement rewards. Then I can order labels from Amazon to apply to the packages. Once the labels are applied, we can order a truck to deliver them to Amazon. From there it takes a few weeks for Amazon to send the packages to where they are supposed to be, which means the missing books will arrive in May.

Presale Deliveries 

I've been holding back deliveries of Amazon editions (out of respect to the 1% of Kickstarter with missing packages), but I can't hold off anymore. The reason why is I'm bombarded with confused presale customers who bought the book in December who are wondering where there purchases went. It's confusing things on my end (separating Kickstarter and presale fulfillment). So some Kickstarter backers might get their reward at the same time standard edition customers get theirs. It's the nature of international delivery. The good news from this decision is that everyone will receive emails from Amazon that allows them to track their shipment. 

That's the newest news!