Good morning, baseball school! You have questions about our great and powerful Hail to the Victors 2019 annual football preview and feature magazine. I shall attempt to answer them.

SPONSOR/STATEMENT TIERS END WEDNESDAY: We have just two few days left before you can no longer get your name or a sentence in the back of the book. After that I have just a couple of days to send pages to the printer. If you’re a sentence backer already I’ve reached out to you for it. If you’re a name backer and want your name to be something other than what’s on your Kickstarter account, PLEASE LET ME KNOW ASAP. Whatever names I have on Friday are what’s going in print.

FAQ:

WHY BACK THE KICKSTARTER VERSUS BUYING THE BOOK FROM THE MGOSTORE?

For Kickstarter backers, HomeSure Lending offered to bump you up to a faster level of shipping, so you pay a few bucks less in that and it goes directly from the printer. You also get the digital edition of the book for free, and this is the only way you can get our shirt, which unlike past shirts cannot be made available from our store—this is the only way to get this shirt.

The store might be faster than some. They have to wait for the books to come to Ann Arbor before shipping their orders, and you pay a bit more, but our store operation is much faster than the mail house operation because there are fewer orders, so they'll all go out in a tighter bunch. It's all the same to us. Pre-sale will start when the Kickstarter ends.

CAN I BE WITH YOU WHEN THE KICKSTARTER ENDS TO CELEBRATE?

Uh, sure. We'll be doing an event that night--June 21--with the Shutdown Fullcast at the Ann Arbor District Library. As with all fullcastian events, this will be a high-quality evening of sophistication. Details at the link.

WHAT IS THE ONE THING I CAN DO TO MAKE SURE I GET MY ORDER ON TIME?

Check the email associated with your Kickstarter account. I will send out an update later today to backers. If you don’t see it, check your spam box, or your “Promotions” box if you use gmail. Because our Kickstarter started later this year (thanks Beilein) we’ll be in more of a rush than normal to collect addresses.

WILL THERE BE AN IN-PERSON PICK-UP OPTION/OPTIONS LIKE LAST YEAR?

Yes, at least one. Tentatively we plan to set up at Wolverine Brewing starting at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, July 3, so people going out of town for the long weekend will have it. Matt Demorest of HomeSure Lending is hosting, and buying the first round. This will be an option when we send out the kickstarter surveys. Come prepared to defend our trivia championship.

We are talking to some people about other pickup locations, possibly one in Chicago in early August, and another in the Metro-Detroit area.

WHEN DO I GET YOU MY ADDRESS FOR THE BOOK?

When the Kickstarter ends on June 20 we will send out surveys through Kickstarter to the email associated with your Kickstarter account. The easiest way to track that down is if you go to the Kickstarter and log in. Note: Kickstarter gives you the option of ordering as a guest. I don’t recommend it because it’s the leading cause of people I can’t communicate with to get their stuff.

If you use a burner email for that, make sure your burner email is open on June 20th. You don’t want to miss the first wave of addresses, because they will ship out from the printer first.

WHEN DO I GET YOU MY ADDRESS/SIZE/CHOICE FOR MY SHIRT?

If you are a shirt+ backer, we will also send you a link to an Underground Printing cart with a code to select your shirt and choose an address. If your books are going to the same address, you can skip the Kickstarter survey, but it might behoove you to fill that out so Kickstarter will stop bugging you. If there’s a conflict I’m going with the address from the Kickstarter survey.

DON’T YOU ALREADY HAVE MY ADDRESS?

NO. Every year you back the Kickstarter you have to send your address again. The way Kickstarter works they take your money and don’t share your financial information, so we have no access to your billing address. I do not keep anything more than shipping records from past books because I am the type who gets paranoid about keeping databases of personal information.

I GET TWO BOOKS WITH MY ORDER. CAN THEY BE SHIPPED TO DIFFERENT LOCATIONS?

No, sorry. This was an option in the deep past and I still carry the scars of that logistical nightmare (e.g. I’m not in photos of my kids’ important life events). One workaround is to use multiple Kickstarter accounts. Another is to order the second book from our store (pre-sale begins after the kickstarter ends).

WILL THERE BE A DIGITAL EDITION / A KINDLE EDITION / AN IBOOKS EDITION?

Yes / yes / um… We will have a good-resolution (~20MB) PDF version of the print book for sale on our site for $10, and this will also go out to every Kickstarter backer at the book level or beyond. We do not put DRM on it so one copy can go to all the devices.

I will produce a separate “E-book” designed for Kindles that has fewer photos and some of the text that was removed from various articles to fit—this will be ready in July. I don’t understand the last part but yes Apple slaves I mean to make the book available to your cult after the free world has it. Our problem in the past has been setting up a store.

WHEN DO I SET UP BY THE MAILBOX?

Most should come in early July but they’ll be trickling in all through July, because the orders have to be stuffed in envelopes and shipped from a mail house, and there are only so many orders a fair-sized staff can get through in a day. That’s why we have an in-person pickup option now. Your shirts will come either in July or August depending on when we get your information.

FOR SHIRTS: ARE YOU DOING EXPEDITED/NON-EXPEDITED AGAIN? WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE AND WHY DO YOU DO THAT?

Yes. “Expedited” means you want your size of this year’s “Speed in Space” shirt. Those will go out first. We will have a second cart that stays open for a few more weeks for anyone who chooses a different shirt from our store, plus anyone who was too late for the expedited cart. We don’t order the shirts until the carts close, so the two carts are to ensure the easy orders get their shirts without waiting for all the complicated orders.