#admin: dusky-rambles

Hi everybody,

As we mentioned in our latest post, our books have arrived and nearly all our merch! Woohoo! That means we expect to ship everybody’s books shortly and for that reason, if you haven’t confirmed your address already, we urge you to do so! 

Please email us at [email protected] if you didn’t get an order confirmation form or if you forgot to fill one out and can’t retrieve the corresponding email. Even if you’re positive you filled out your address correctly the first time around when placing your order, we highly recommend doing an order confirmation form anyway, because even a small typo (a letter or number change) could send your package to an entirely different location!

If you’ve already submitted one, thank you so much! We can’t wait to get these books out to you! It’s been a long journey, and we’re so glad you’ve stuck with us!

Always with much love,

Hello everyone! Given our recent update about us opening up a pop-up shop to make available more copies of our anthology, we just wanted to elaborate a little re: why we’re doing this and how we intend to remain transparent and accountable during this process, as well as how this affects the timeline for those of you who ordered a book back in May during our Indiegogo fundraiser.

We know that those of you who supported our initial fundraiser may be a little confused, given that we still haven’t shipped those books out. We totally understand this sentiment and it is something we discussed heavily before coming to this decision. To better clarify why we’re taking the steps that we are, here are three reasons why we felt this pop-up shop was needed:

* To give us a better cushion. When we first obtained a quote for the cost of printing our anthology, it was almost a year ago right before we opened up our fundraiser in March 2020 to begin funding our project. Quotes expire, and over our lengthy struggle with Indiegogo to obtain the money that we had raised, our quote did indeed do just that. Given that this is a new year, we anticipate that our updated quote will be a little higher, making the cost of our project more expensive, and we want to be sure that all those extras we promised back in May are still applicable. 

* To help us achieve our hardcover goal. We talked a lot about hardcovers over the course of our project, as we knew that if we sold enough books, we would be able to upgrade everybody’s paperback copy of the anthology to a hardcover for free. Last we spoke about this, we indicated that we were close to our hardcover stretch goal, but just a tad bit short in all likelihood. If our pop-up does well, we feel that it is feasible to afford hardcovers for all. If we still fall short, there are still benefits! As we promised earlier, leftover money will first and foremost be used to make everybody’s books more beautiful, not to mention possibly allowing us to do things like including extra bonus merch for everybody for free. Any money remaining after that will be donated to a local charity, Wish Vancouver, to help vulnerable women in our community.

* To help our fandom heal. We won’t lie. We were adamant about our fundraiser on Indiegogo being a one-time deal, and though we received numerous requests about opening up shop again, we declined every time citing our commitment to transparency and accountability. While our values have not changed, our negative experience with Indiegogo and our heartbreak after Supernatural’s series finale had us reconsider our earlier stance. Dean, Cas, Sam and all their loved ones deserved a better ending than they got, and knowing that fans always do it better, we felt the best way we could help our corner of fandom heal was to share further the many beautiful works of happiness and good endings that are enclosed within our anthology. For that reason, we felt a limited two-week long pop-up shop was the best way to do this: it gives new and old fans one last chance to get a copy! 

Please read under the cut for more information about our project timeline and how we will ensure accountability and transparency over the course of our project:

Hi anon! Thank you so much for your support, we could not do this project without your love and encouragement! <3 unfortunately, as of now, hardcover still seems a little out of our reach. We're still crunching numbers, and while printing is a definite go-go, we will have to wait for a quote from our printer to decide if we can still do hardcover or not. That, as we announced previously, is not possible through the end of the fundraiser, since quotes take about a 5-day turnaround.

That said, we welcome any and all donations till the end of the fundraiser! Every little bit helps us get to the goal of hardcover, so please donate if you are willing/able to. Please also spread the word, we still will be making a fantastic book that is full of Destiel goodness.

We are very serious about making sure contributors know where their hard-earned money is going. Thus, the interest of transparency, we will not be accepting donations or selling books once the fundraiser ends in 19ish hours.

Hi everyone,

Unfortunately, we have some very sad news. We recently announced that we had achieved our hardcover stretch goal. However, after double-checking our numbers, we realized that we do not have enough money for hardcovers after all (don’t worry, we’re still printing our original softcover books as we had promised!). When we had made our budget, we had assumed that the shipping costs wouldn’t be included in our fundraiser total. That is to say, if someone bought a $35 book, we assumed the total amount raised would only read as $35 and not the combined amount of the book plus shipping (which could range from $50 to $60). This was how Indiegogo used to run campaigns in the past. Today, we discovered that they changed their policy sometime recently; all shipping costs are now added in the fundraiser total, which means that out of all the money we raised, almost half of it was money that came from the shipping backers paid. Ultimately, this has put our spending budget to about $18,500 USD (we originally needed $19,000 to go to print—for softcovers).

In order to go to print, these unexpected developments have also lead to some unexpected adjustments to our original plan. As we always strive to be transparent with our campaign, we wanted to share these changes with you immediately. So without further ado, here it is: as of right now, hardcovers are likely out of our reach, but by changing printing from offset printing to digital printing, we can reduce the production cost by a significant amount which thankfully allows us to print softcovers with our new budget still! Most books are printed in digital, and while artbooks tend to be offset printed, the quality between the two is only slightly different. We unfortunately don't have time to request a new quote from our current printer before the campaign closes. Until we manage to ask our representative at Hemlock for an updated quote, we are tentatively going to go with another Vancouver printer called Friesens.

We would like to apologize to all our contributors and backers for the sudden changes so close to the end of our campaign. We deeply regret our error, and if you wish to refund your contribution, we absolutely understand. There are still 24 hours remaining before the campaign ends, and if you choose not to refund and change your mind later after the fundraiser ends, we can still refund you immediately. Once again, we are deeply, deeply sorry about this hardcover mishap. We were devastated when we found out, and had initially thought we might have to cancel the campaign altogether and issue full refunds to our supporters. However, our incredible contributors rallied around the project and reminded us of all the time and passion that has been poured into making To Hell + Back possible, an effort that has now been going on a year! As a result,  we have been working for the past eight hours trying to figure out a way to make sure we can still deliver on our campaign promise—high quality bricks of beautiful and diverse Destiel fanworks! So, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much for your support and love, and we hope you stay with us! 

Sincerely, 

@dusky-rambles​ has now finished sorting out samples—she’s going cross-eyed at cross-referencing the names and the tables, and officially hates Microsoft Excel enough to salt and burn it, but she loves what she’s doing and everything has been triple-checked and sent off to our first round of reviewers! Check out more about them here. 

We apologize that due to the sheer number of submissions, we won’t be able to send out confirmation emails, but if you submitted your sample via the link we emailed, rest assured that we have received it! It has been anonymized, tagged and officially made part of the roster!