These things are going out!  Rock! 

I have mailers!  I’ve got postage!  I’ve got mail-merged address labels!  And, most importantly, I’ve got three boxes full of pre-orders ready to take to the post office as soon as I get off work this afternoon, and more to come.

So now I need to scour the site for the phrase “pre-order” and get rid of that “pre-” part.

Yay!

Short version:

Due to an Office Depot snafu, I don’t have my padded mailers.  I’m working a different route, and should have mailers by this time next week if not sooner, to commence shipping ASAP.  Thanksgiving Weekend will probably affect this a bit, alas.

Long version:

So I was hoping—expecting, really—to start stamping and addressing and mailing out CDs this last weekend, but I ran into a problem: my padded envelopes didn’t arrive on Friday as they were supposed to.

Turns out that when their webpage described the shipment as “Delivered”, what they meant was “crap, we’re out of stock.”  I’m not sure how exactly that came about, but here we are.

So I’m going to check out a couple of other options.  The wife may be able to swing something via some powerful shipping demigods with whom she is conversant, and I may be able to find a verifiable, tell-me-you-have-them-in-your-hands vendor locally.  (I could buy these things right now by the twelve-pack, but I hate to waste the money—that increases the unit cost by 50-75%.)

One way or another, though, these things are shipping by next week.

Random aside: I just tripped across this comment on Ask Metafilter, from mefi-thesis-writing mefite Quartermass in October, 2005:

We need someone to curate a Metafilter compilation, as there are a number of people making great independent music here.

Capital notion!

No, no. Don’t talk. Just sit back. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Mmm hmm!

Of course, that’s the finished product. The after. There was also a before, ere we had such nice finished products. There was a final mastered mix CD from turtlegirl, an order form from the good folks at CDman, and a certified check for $1510:

I was just tremendously excited about my Wednesday discovery of the ahead-of-schedule appearance of the CDs. “Ooh,” I thought, “I can start shipping these things this weekend! Before Thanksgiving! Wow!”

And then I thought, wait—I haven’t ordered padded mailers yet! I’d better get on that, and pronto! I checked with my local Office Depot store, because it’s within walking distance, but all they had was 12-packs, at about $0.70 a unit. I can, I thought, do better.

So I went to their website. Lo! 250-count boxes, at about $0.40 a unit! Yay! And free next day delivery! Woo! Yeah!

Everything was coming up puppies. I placed an order for one of those 250-counts, with guaranteed delivery the next day (Friday) no later than 5:30.

But 5:30 rolled by on Friday…and there was no package from OD. So I checked the site. “Delivered”, it said. I checked the UPS tracking number. “No information,” it said. And definitely no package.

According to OD, “delivered” means “delivered to UPS”, not actually delivered. According to UPS, they never saw the package, because that tracking number provided by OD doesn’t even exist. And according to a customer service rep from OD, there’s nothing they can do except “escalate” and/or “regress” it. Bah, ye bloody frackin’ so-and-so.

Right! So no envelopes yet. Which makes mailing things this weekend a bit tricky. I may attempt to leverage some Customer Dissatisfaction today with the local retail store, but I’m not exactly a pit bull by default. It may just be I wait till Monday before anything happens.

They’re here! I’m going to bed! Stories tomorrow!

Wowie!  I thought these things wouldn’t ship until tomorrow, and would take a week or so to get here.  Wrong on both counts:

(screenshot by young Billy Keane)

So they’re en route today!  Right now!  They have departed from Possibly Beautiful Don Mills, Ontario, and are expected to arrive in Portland on Friday!

Friday!  Man, I don’t even have the mailers yet.  Holy cow!  Friday!  I’m taken aback!  It’ll be nice to have a the CDs on hand, even if this does totally collapse my run-up time on the mailing out.

Yow!

Hooah!

Just a quick glance back in time—we had a meetup in Portland that happened not long after the meficomp track submission period.  I had received excellent and varied tracks from all sorts of mefites, and made my painful final decisions, and alerted artists.  But, a month later, chosen tracks or not, I was still listening to this stuff.  Constantly. 

At some point during the meetup, I snapped a couple of pictures of my ipod (to which, let us presume, I was not actually listening during the meetup).  Behold:

That’s a pretty healthy collection of contenders, actually—everything in this screenshot made the album, with the exception of “Just Like the B-Movies”, which is in fact an excellent and clever (but, damningly, very long) track from Paul “goodnewsfortheinsane” Hunt.  Sorry, Paul. 

Lesson learned, there: next time around, one should be explicit about a “shorter is better” guideline.  Many of the tracks I had to cut were cut as much as anything for time—a six minute song, or two three minute songs?  Balls!  This Editor stuff is plain mercenary.

So I’m continuing to get things organized for when the discs arrive in Portland (hoping for late next week), and one of those things that should really be organized is an up-to-date mailmerge-ready index of every single person I need to send one of these out to.

Consequently, I’m spelunking through CSV data from Paypal and coordinating it with various notes and emailed updates—this person paid with a check, that person has moved—and, as a result, I’m seeing all sorts of interesting numbers.

For example: we have no less than 140 pre-orders at the moment.  (That number is probably slightly low—I need to reconcile a few extra orders with Jessamyn yet.)  Most of those orders came in during a stunning week in late April when pre-orders were originally announced.  In the interim, it’s been understandably quiet; but with my recent chatter on Metatalk, orders have picked up a little again, with another dozen in the last few days.  And I expect that rate to tick upwards considerably when Matt goes live with the proposed Metafilter pimping.

Also, my rough estimate of our funds is about $1650.  We’ve spent about $1550 so far, but I need to spend a bit more this week on a couple gross of mailer envelopes.  And then, of course, somewhere (I hope considerably) upwards of 130 first class stamps worth of postage, and a solid dozen out-of-US orders.  Your shipping and handling surcharges in action!  So we’re not quite running in the black yet.  But!

That $1650 is straight post-Paypal-commission pre-order money—it isn’t counting a few donations made early on by avid supporters.  Once everything has arrived and gotten back out into the mail to fulfill orders and further orders put us into the black, those donations’ll go back to their generous (and initially admirably speculative) profferers. 

I rather expect we’ll easily net enough orders in the next couple weeks to land very firmly in Profitville.  Then we’ll fire back those donations, watch the money roll in, and start cutting checks to charity, baby.

Matt Haughey, the man behind Metafilter, has been offering a bit of space on MeFi to promote the album, and so I’ve knocked together a few 125*125 images.  Getting a yet more mileage out of interrobang’s awesome work, too boot!

I may work these into the site design as well, but in the mean time, for your peeking pleasure…

It goes without saying, of course, that, should you wish to promote the album yourself, you could use these images for just such a purpose.