So I received almost a hundred emails this weekend, and at least that again in the weeks prior, from Kickstarter backers asking when their books should arrive; obviously we need an update.

Your books are fine, and are shipping on schedule. It’s just that, as we mentioned previously, our schedule this year was backed up four weeks from normal. This had nothing to do with the printer or shipping. It’s because our whole staff had medical issues ranging from serious to life-altering this spring, and then we had a website relaunch. The last article wasn't submitted until after the date we usually have the first shipment of books in hand.

I spoke this morning with our printer to get the latest status of your books and understand how they’re going out. The short of it is most of you should get your books this week or next, and only a very few should have already. The magazines were printed and bound three weeks ago, and since then they’ve been trying to get them mailed out as quickly as possible.

This can’t physically happen all at once. The printer created a pile of books, a pile envelopes, and a pile of addresses that I provided, and each order had to be manually stuffed, which was going on all last week. They go out in batches to a mail house, which takes about a day to process everything before they get into the regular mail, and then it's a few days unless you're unlucky or international.

They expect to finish the pile today. All orders of 2 or more went to the mail house already, the last of them on Friday. That means the first batch probably only hit mailboxes on Saturday, and books will still be tricking into mailboxes in about 2 weeks, unless you got your address to me too late (in which case we've communicated) or you're one of the 21 people who didn't get me an address this year.

By the way I bought a book too—it's a standard 1-book purchase—and I will let you know when mine arrives as a baseline. The signed books should come in a few weeks as well. Right now Brian is in the process of signing them.

Once again I'm really sorry we can't go any faster. Believe me when I tell you I wish there was some way to magically teleport a large stack of books into a large stack of envelopes. I would also like the ability to make exact copies of Jake Long on demand.

If you receive a book that’s damaged please take a photo of it and email me, and we’ll get you a new copy (the photo is necessary for us to get the post office to refund the shipping—we eat the book). Otherwise I thank you deeply for your patience.