6/18/2010

Production & shipping update

All back issues orders received between 2010/03/05 and 2010/06/16 were shipped Wednesday (for Canadian orders) and today (for U.S. and International orders). They should be received within a week (for Canada & USA) or two (for overseas). We're sorry for this exceptionally long delay and will do our best to ship your future orders as quickly as possible.

We would like to remind you that, as stated in our ordering & shipping policy, we generally do not answer order inquiries. All answers to your questions should be found in our detailed “ordering & shipping policy” or the “order inquiries” and “order status” entries of the blog. Also, we do our best to ship orders every month or so—sometimes we can do it every two weeks but it can also takes up to two months (or even more, like it was the case lately). Unfortunately we have quite a small staff and we ship orders whenever we can drive to the closest USPS outlet. Finally, please do not file a dispute with PayPal “resolution center” because it would only cause more delay to your order (since in such cases PayPal is freezing payments and—the money having been withdrawn from our account—we would never ship an order for which we don't have the payment...). Please, just be patient.

Lots of people are wondering what's happening with the magazine and that's understandable. Well, it is still going on, but at a much slower pace. As it was previously announced, the magazine has cut its staff, reduced its frequency and temporarily suspended publication in order to implement production and distribution changes. Unfortunately, this hiatus has been much longer than anticipated because we misjuged the production capability of a reduced staff and encountered several production problems. We are quite sorry for this situation and be assured that our small staff of part-timers and volunteers is doing the best they can. Most of us are professionals (with “day jobs” in the anime or publishing-related industries) and we are working as hard as we can on the magazine, as a service to fellow anime fans, because of our love for anime and manga.

We might have stopped taking new subscriptions, but—don't worry—the magazine will still be available on an issue-by-issue basis, current subscriptions will still be honored and the next issue will come out eventually. Yes, we are way behind schedule and we had to change some of the content, but it is coming out. As Zac recently said in the forum about issue 98's release: “We're closer now than we've ever been. However we have a whopping staff of 2 people working on it and that's part-time. Slow boat, but it'll be done sooner rather than later.” And, just to be sure, we won't announce a street date until the issue is done and being printed. Again, please just be patient. You won't be disappointed...

Stay tuned, we still have many projects to come...