Ventrexian Facts | Joel 🦁 ⚣

Happy Final Space Friday! 🚀 Making lots of solid progress on shipping, so here’s where we’re at! Canada: We brought on two export/import consultants, Marco and Maria (THANK YOU!), and it turns out that if you bulk all your Canada orders onto one truck, you pay ONE duty fee for the entire truck. Which is insane, and I’m not sure how normal humans are supposed to know that, but now I do. So we’re batching all the Canada orders together, which means about 1,457 orders moving throughout next week. By the end of next week and a bit of the following week, Canada will be shipped and wrapped up! 🔥🚀 I went to France last weekend. I’m back now, but it was so cool to hand fans the pre-order book and close their order out right there, and it sparked an idea! UK: You’re our Godzilla. You’ve got the most. We’re still shipping to you every day, but here’s the crazy idea: what if I pay to get the 5 pallets to get across the ocean and do a bunch of book signings where you can come pick up your copy? Might it honestly be the faster way? It’s a whole new set of costs on me I have nothing figured out yet but we’re getting quotes, getting this done is my priority. We’re trying to get creative to finish all of this. Australia: Same idea. I’ve had more return-to-senders from those two than anywhere else. I need to visit anyway for a few projects I’m writing, so maybe I bring the books, do signings in a few cities, you pick yours up, and we take some pictures and whatnot. We’re still shipping in the meantime. It’s just so slow getting there, and I’m tired of books getting lost, so I may have to do this one personally. Not many left here either it’s maybe on Pallet, and it’s done. ✅ Done: Japan, Peru, India, Romania, and Taiwan! Book ordering is closing for those countries now. By next week, only 22 countries will be left. 📦 We’re also still processing reshipments, major damages, and lost packages. We did about 123 of those this week. Overall, we got another 600 out the door. Once we get through the big four, this will be a breeze. Thank you for hanging in there with me. Holy crap kind starting to see a little light at the end of this tunnel. We’re getting through it. 💛

Hey Team Squad, I have a bunch of updates. We’re making solid progress in Canada, the UK, and Ireland, with about 200 books out in each of those countries. In total got out around 700 from Nashville, that includes a bunch of re-ships. The Ireland re-ships through UPS went really well. We watched about 300 orders make it into the country. That said, I still don’t fully trust UPS. Dealing with them has been a constant headache. I’ve seen every genre of tracking data, from comedy to horror to pure suspense. We’ve closed out 36 countries, including all of Central America, Mexico, Argentina, and many more. (Honestly, I have no idea how some of them were even able to watch the show.) Something new: closing countries in the store Starting now, every time we close out a country, the book will no longer be available to order there. It’s been on sale for over three years, and the main reason for this change is simple: I want the number of remaining orders to keep getting smaller. So if your country isn’t on the closed list yet, order now before it closes. I want to wrap this project up. That’s my sole driving force. All the countries listed below are now closed for NOVELS on the site: Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, Israel, Colombia, Chile, Kenya, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Georgia, Jordan, Kuwait, Guatemala, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Paraguay, Moldova, Bahrain, Côte d’Ivoire, Namibia, Maldives, Barbados, Bermuda, Trinidad & Tobago, Liechtenstein, Gibraltar, Aruba, Tajikistan, Brunei, Réunion, Faroe Islands, Falkland Islands Coming next week Another 34 countries will start closing next week, including China, Finland, Iceland, Japan, South Africa, Romania, and more. Once that’s done, only 23 countries will remain. That includes the big five: Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, and France. The show was REALLY popular in those countries, so there are simply many more orders to get through. We’re attacking it from every angle possible. This has been by far the most difficult project I’ve ever taken on, and I’ve learned a ton. My in-laws have come up to help, and my dad has been packing books. It’s all hands on deck. We’ve now shipped over 48,000 books, which is over 26 million printed pages. More than 10,000 of those went out from Nashville alone. If I hadn’t worked out the loophole deal with the Macmillan team, we’d probably be somewhere around 15,000. Warner set this up for me to fail. They did not want it to succeed. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t share the bad along with the good. Shopify has put a hold on my sales again. Yes, again. When I launched the pre-order back in 2023, they held my funds for an entire year because they didn’t allow pre-orders at the time. (They do now. That’s also why I don’t use PayPal Business anymore, since they don’t support pre-orders either. They canceled my account.) Now Shopify has placed another percentage hold on sales for another 120 days because they say I’m not shipping fast enough. It just means were in Act 3 of a great story, the dark night of the soul part and that the end is close.... Macmillan has also hit their busy season, so Final Space isn’t at the top of their priority list right now. Big authors are releasing books left and right, so as we plan which books to send out through Macmillan, things have slowed down a bit, for understandable reasons. (Raises fist like angry old man) Curse those successful authors with actual publishing deals. This is still VERY much a priority for me, I’m still fighting, every single day. It feels like fighting a massive monster in the dark. Every swipe takes a chunk out of it making him smaller and smaller. On the other side is the light of the tunnel. The crazy part is that after the third Warner merger, I don’t think anyone involved in the original Final Space deal is even there anymore. So maybe it’s time to get a little creative and say screw the deal I'm going to do what I need to do to finish this. Thank you. Those of you who have sent me words of encouragement throughout all this, I’m telling you it means so much. I’ll say it until the end of time: thank you for your patience. On October weekend of 17th and 18th, I’ll be in France for a pretty cool festival and then I’ll be right back. Here’s the website: yllustratown.fr

No all good, I updated the PDF on the code. Can't wait for you to read it, it's lots of fun

Hey Team Squad, Olan here. I'm making a full video next week, I’ve just haven’t had time to sit down, but I wanted to get you another shipping update. USA: 100% done. Every US order has shipped, up through this Wednesday. That's about 20,000 orders. All my focus is on international now. Lately it's been about half re-ships for lost packages from UPS and half pushing out the last pre-orders. Our focus is closing out one country at a time. UK: Got about 200 orders this week for UK. Ireland: UPS confirmed they lost this batch, waiting on a re-credit from them. Every lost Irish order will be re-shipped. We re-ship a solid 100 from Nashville waiting on that re-credit. Canada & Australia: Each is down to its last ~1,000 orders. Austria, Czechia & others: Some UPS packages were shipped but never arrived. The problem is UPS is Macmillan's only carrier they use. And that's the only partner I got right now. So now the rest of the international is on me in Nashville using DHL and Global Post. We switched to Global Post and DHL here and have seen LOTS of success with both, so that's what we're using going forward. Only problem with that were just slower. We pack every book in multiple layers of protection, which takes a lot longer than the industry standard of tossing a book in a box. If your tracking stopped with UPS updating or your package never showed up, just contact us [DM / email] and we'll put you on the re-ship list. Every day the number of remaining orders gets smaller. I'll say it again and again: thank you for your patience. I've seen other creators releasing books hit the same issues, but I can tell you none of them have been shipping their own books for months on end. I will be here until the very end, however long it takes. I will get every last book out. I will see this dang thing through to the very end. Back to shipping. Olan