Hasty

I've spent the last week fighting with my bank.

Mano-a-telephone.

Toe-to-handset.

I lost.

Despite last week's blog about how we would pay royalties that week I'm still in limbo.

Eventually I pulled the money from PayPal, rather than pushed from the bank.

It's left the bank.

And now it's in the ether.

The bank says they have fond memories of it.

PayPal say we await it patiently.

It'll arrive in a week or two.

Where the hell is it?

The ether.

So the royalties are still pending. Until the money is in the warm embrace of my PayPal balance.

Which could be another week or two.

I can only assume someone is carrying it on foot.

In the meantime, I've been working on my third print at home roll and write again.

And the troll game.

And planning 2025.

This weekend we're going to York to spend 'Fauxmas' with Paul and his family.

There will be food and presents and games and playtesting.

And more work on the next FlickFleet campaign.

Royalties

Box of Flicks 2 was largely designed by fans of the game.

A fan contributed to Box of Flicks 1.

There was lots of fan content in the Box of Pirate Flicks too.

We make a big thing about how we credit them and pay them royalties.

Their names on the boxes.

We've been meaning to pay the last lot for a while.

It includes the last year's reprint and this year's Box of Pirate Flicks.

So it's quite a lot of money.

Things started going wrong at the beginning of the year when we ran out of FlickFleet for a few months.

So web sales tanked as we had nothing to sell.

And overheads started eating into the profit from the Pirate Flicks campaign.

Website sales were pretty slow all summer.

The pot dwindled further.

When it came time in August to ship the Pirate Flicks games to the US we had three options.

We choose the fastest.

And most expensive.

Then VAT bit us.

The quotes were excluding VAT. I forgot that.

We had to pay them, and another £1,500 in VAT.

We'd get most of that back. In early December.

We've been almost out of cash for five months.

I've had to lend the company money a couple of times to pay the bills.

We've just got the VAT back!

And had our best ever week of website sales. And another really good one.

It's time to pay the royalties!

A weight off my mind. I hate owning people money.

I've spent most of the weekend trying to sort it out. 

The transfer to PayPal was blocked by the bank as a suspect transaction.

I'm hoping I'll have the money available to pay out this evening...