How Our Books Are Made!

Please note that we have never and will never guarantee that an order will be shipped by a certain date or within a certain timeframe.  These are our best estimates.

Hand-Crafted

All of our products are hand-crafted by certified geeks and gamers.

We started out as just a pair of nerds making books one-at-a-time by hand on our dining room table, but we’ve come a long way since then. We traded our dining table for a proper workshop, brought on an amazing team of geeks and gamers, and we’ve leveled up every tool we use several times over.

The one thing that we haven’t changed, however, is making our books by hand.

Whether you buy one of our ready-to-ship Essential Diaries or design your own custom made-to-order Campaign Planner, your book was lovingly crafted by the hands of a skilled artisan.

While that means that the custom made-to-order Planner may take a little while to get to you, it also means that we guarantee it will be worth the wait!

Ready-to-Ship

Handcrafted to the same exacting standards and exceptional quality as all our products.

We offer a large selection of READY TO SHIP products throughout our site.  These are handcrafted items that are already made, packaged, and in stock, and can readily be identified by the GREEN banner that appears on either the product’s thumbnail or on the product’s page.

Although this means that they cannot be customized in any way, it also means that they are ready ship out as quickly as the next business day.

Made-To-Order

This is our standard workflow that orders containing made-to-order items will go through.

In addition to your order confirmation email after you place your order, you can expect to receive weekly progress updates, which typically go out on Thursday evenings, until your order is ready to ship!

  1. Checkout
    • You customize your items and place your order (that’s the easy part)
  2. Payment Pending
    • If you paid for your order directly from your bank account via PayPal, it may take anywhere from a few hours to a few days for your payment to clear.
    • If you paid with a credit card or using one of PayPal’s other options (PayPal Credit or Pay-in-4), your order will probably spend less than a second in this status.
  3. Made-to-Order Queue
    • Your order is now officially in line.
    • Fair warning, your order will spend the overwhelming majority of its time in the Made-to-Order Queue.
    • The length of the queue depends entirely on how many people are ahead of you in line. Over the years this has been anywhere from 1-2 weeks to 16+ weeks, but the average is usually around 4-8 weeks.  That being said, the exact amount of time that an order spends in queue is impossible to predict, so we’ll always describe the line as several weeks long.
    • Since it comes up rather frequently, “Several” is generally and helpfully defined as “more than a few and less than many,” which roughly translates to somewhere between 4 and 20.
    • While your order is in the Made-to-Order Queue, you will receive a weekly status update via email to let you know where your order is in line.
  4. In Production
    • Approximately 1-2 weeks before your order is expected to ship, it will be officially marked as “In Production”
    • When this happens, you’ll receive a notification email.
    • This is your last chance to make any changes to your order, including changing the shipping address.
  5. Preparing For Shipment
    • Once all of the items in your order have been crafted, we’ll move it over to our packaging desk.
    • We’ll give your order a final QA pass, then package your order for shipment.
    • At this point it is too late to make any changes to your order.
  6. Shipped!
    • Once packed, your order will head to our shipping desk.
    • There, your box is sealed, your mailing label is printed and affixed, and you will receive a notification email with your tracking number!
    • Your package will be in the hands of our USPS driver either the same day or the next business day. Even if it takes USPS several days or more to update the tracking link, fear not, it’s making its way to you.
  7. Mischief & Misadventure
    • We’re pretty sure you can figure this one out 🙂

Other Statuses

Your order may end up in a different status altogether. Here’s what they are and what they mean.

  • Returned to Shipper – we mailed your package and it came back to us as undeliverable. If this happens, you’ll automatically get a notification email describing your options.
  • In Production (Waiting for Materials) – we are ready to craft your order, but we are missing some key component. This is expected to be a temporary delay and most commonly occurs when one of our deliveries of supplies is delayed, wrong, or short.
  • Delayed – we are not able to craft your order for some reason, and we expect it to take more than a few days to resolve.  This may be a broken machine, a supplier that’s gone out of business, materials that have been discontinued by our supplier, or some other unforeseen issue. If this happens, we’ll not only send you a notification about the delay, but we’ll also post detail on our Production Notices page.  In many cases, we will be able to offer you an alternative option that we can ship more quickly.
  • Backordered – you ordered a product that was listed as “Backordered” at the time you placed your order.  While your order has made it through the production queue, the backordered item is not yet available.  As soon as it becomes available, your order will ship.
  • Cloak and Shroud Production Queue – You preordered one of our leather items, either by backing our Far Traveler’s Kickstarter or directly through our website.  Despite literal years of shortages and delays plaguing our leather production, we have been slowly and steadily crafting and shipping these items out in the order in which they were backed or ordered.  We are working on a more clear progress indicator and notification system that is similar to the one we released for our standard Production Queue in January 2021.

Estimates?

We get asked this so many times, we’re providing a more in-depth explainer right here.

Why do we give such vague estimates (like “Several Weeks”) for how long an order will take to craft and ship?

This is easier to explain by example.  To illustrate, let’s reduce everything down to some small, round numbers:

Let’s say that our workshop is able to make and ship exactly 1 book per day, and for this example, let’s say that yours is the 10th order in line.

If every order ahead of yours has only one book in it, it would take us 10 days to complete the 10th order (your order).

But, if only one order ahead of yours has 10 books in it (not as uncommon as you might think), it would take 10 days to complete that 1 order plus 9 more days to complete the other 9 for a total of 19 days before the 10th order (your order) is completed.

Even if your order only contains 1 book, if the 9 orders ahead of yours contain 1-4 books each, that means that it could take us anywhere from 10 to 37 days to complete the 10th order (your order).

To make things even less predictable, during those 10-37 days customers can change their orders (add books, remove books, cancel their order entirely, etc), meaning that your order could take as little as a day (if everyone in front of you cancels) or more than 91 days (if everyone in front of you adds books until they each have ordered 10)

Now, obviously the queue is longer than 10 orders and we craft and ship more than 1 book per day, so imagine this example multiplied by dozens, hundreds, or thousands, and you’ll have a decent picture of how much things can fluctuate.  And, that fluctuation doesn’t even take into account any of the different possible delays that we mention on this page.

All of that is to say that the % progress of your order through the queue should not be used to predict when your order will ship.  Your order could go from 50% to 55% one week, 55% to 58% the next week, and 58% to 73% the week after.

For all these same reasons, we aren’t able to predict when your order will ship either.

There are just too many variables at play, that it is literally impossible to predict when an order will ship until it’s right down near the front of the line.  For example:

  • Your order may only move a few % in a week because the orders we crafted were all very large.
  • Your order may only move a few % in a week because we had unplanned equipment outages.
  • Your order may have only moved a few % because we had a delayed shipment of supplies arrive and we shipped out the three dozen orders in the “Waiting for Materials” queue that we could now process.
  • Your order may have only moved a few % because the person who normally does shipping was out sick, so one of the crafters spent a couple days running the shipping desk instead of making books (and no one else in the company can currently match the pace of the person who normally does shipping)

So, unfortunately, unless your order is around 95%+ and expected to ship out within the next couple of days, if you ask us for an ETA on your order, we will not be able to give you one.

Delays

Sometimes things don’t go according to plan.

Here are some of the common reasons that your order might end up in Waiting for Materials or Delayed.  This list is not exhaustive.

  • Material Delays
    • We rely on regular shipments of supplies and materials.
    • If a shipment is delayed, it may hold up production on any items that require it.
    • Same thing if a shipment arrives defective, incomplete, or incorrect.
    • If one of our suppliers discontinues a material that we rely on (or if the supplier itself closes down), there will be a sizable delay while we either track down another supplier or we track down an alternative material and recalibrate our processes to use it.
  • Equipment Breakdowns / Unexpected Service
    • Our equipment works hard, and sometimes it breaks down
    • Many times, we have the parts, tools, and know-how to be able to service the machine ourselves, so a breakdown may only last an hour or two.
    • Sometimes the breakdown is beyond our ken, and we have to wait hours or days for a service tech to come to our shop to make repairs.
    • Sometimes there aren’t service techs available or the breakdown is too severe to be fixed on-site.  In these cases, we have to ship the equipment away to be serviced, which can take weeks or even months.
    • In many cases, we have workarounds or backup equipment available, but it is nowhere near as effective or efficient, and is guaranteed to slow us down.
    • In some cases, we don’t have a backup available and we simply can’t make certain products until our equipment is repaired
  • Health and Safety
    • We’re a small shop, and while we’re finally large enough that one person being out sick won’t really slow things down too much, we’re not so large that two or three people being out at the same time won’t be disruptive
    • Sometimes we have to make adjustments for public health reasons (such as adapting our workshop and our workflow to comply with the COVID-19 social distancing guidelines).  This definitely slows things down until everyone gets comfortable with the new normal.