New storefront!

As a few of you may have noticed, The Tinker’s Packs got a facelift! Head over there and take a look! It’s been a few months coming, since what you see is, as always, the tip of the ice berg.

While Maria, Brett, Amanda, and the volunteers worked on IndieGoGo fulfillment, Nicole and Adam (and again, Amanda) tackled the massive task of cleaning up and standardizing our item descriptions and inventory, learning the new store software, tweaking spreadsheets, troubleshooting shipping and placing thousands of dollars of fake orders while working out the bugs. Brett went through and polished up the colors and graphics, and now it’s out in the world! We’re kind of proud of ourselves.

Of course, lest you all be dazzled by how professional the store looks, have a look at what happens behind the scenes:

We had an awesome photographer for a while, and he really set the precedent for the store photos. He had all the right equipment and worked very hard on producing clean, clear photos of our products. But of course, when he left, he took his equipment with him. So, as we tend to do around here, we improvised. We found a cheap, used Nikon D3000, and when the sun comes out, Brett takes store photos. Hopefully we’ll have a couple flashes and a tripod before the snow flies.

And speaking of IndieGoGo (we did!), the Karen Hallion calendars are away (a few of you have yours already!) and the international perks will be picked up this afternoon. Big thanks and hugs to Jessie for spending a few days entering almost 500 packages into our UPS software and consolidating them into 20 huge boxes.

The stacks of international shipments were taller than her!

Finally, we need to shout out to a couple of our friends. Peter V. Brett has been awesome to us here at Worldbuilders, donating signed books, shaving Myke Cole’s head, and generally being awesome. Strangely enough, he also happens to be a brilliant author. His new book and novella are currently available for preorder at Subterranean Press (another of our friends–Sub Press has supported Worldbuilders from the beginning!). So if you like Peat’s stuff (and we know you will), head over to Subterranean Press’s website and preorder a signed copy of The Skull Throne, signed by Peat, or the Sub Press exclusive novella, Messenger’s Legacy. We firmly believe that Sub Press can’t make an ugly book if they try, and Peat’s writing deserves the Cadillac treatment.

That’s it for now. The sun’s out again, so it’s time to kick Brett outside for more photos.