Wednesday, July 16

Working Away From Home

I'm now down in Bristol for a few days, staying initially with my in-laws then heading over to my parents' house for the weekend.

It's a bit strange working at my in-laws house. I'm used to coming down here for a short break - usually just a weekend, which for an Englishman is a long way to travel (250 miles!) for a couple of days. But this is different because I'm working while I'm down here.

Yesterday I spent the morning working through the last of my submissions that I hadn't made a decision on. I had received the rules, but not yet decided whether I wanted a prototype. I went through the rules for these and made a decision one way or the other. I've now got ten prototypes I've played, four I've received but not played, another seven where I'm awaiting a prototype and four where I'm awaiting the rules.

In the afternoon I got some box art sketches from the artist for Carpe Astra and I chased a bunch of distributors I've not heard back from yet. I think my method of contacting them via the generic email address on their website isn't working. I guess they get a lot of spam through this route and the real email tends to fall into their spam trap or get ignored. I might be better off ringing them up and asking for the email address of a specific member of staff.

I'm still waiting for the remaining proofs for It's Alive! and the corrected versions of the ones that I've already received. My manufacturer has promised me them yesterday or today, so all being well they'll turn up in the next couple of hours.

5 comments:

Avantman42 said...

I'd go with ringing the distributors. If you get a named contact, not only is your e-mail more likely to be read, you also have someone to hassle if you need to.

Jackson Pope said...

Yeah,

I've just been putting off phone calls to foreign countries as long as I can. Oh well. I guess it's time to pull out the cheque book.

Cheers,

Jack

Avantman42 said...

Ah, I hadn't considered that it'd be international calls. Have you considered using voice over IP software or Skype to help keep costs down?

Jackson Pope said...

Hiya Russ,

I've used Skype in the past - not recently. Last I heard (I think) you had to pay if you were using it to make calls to landlines.

Cheers,

Jack

Avantman42 said...

Skype calls are only free to other Skype users, but it tends to be cheaper than normal phone calls, especially for international calls.

Calls from Skype to Germany or the USA are 0.12p/min.

From BT, I think it's between 19.67p/min and 24.19p/min for calls to Germany, and between £22.10p/min and 30.24p/min to the USA.

(all prices are ex VAT)

Skype call prices are given here

I got BT prices from here, but it's incredibly confusing, so I may have got them wrong. The cheapest price I could see was about 15p/min, still much higher than Skype.