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Just as an added bonus (and unabashedly to buy us another 30 days or so to finish testing the new stores), here is the July stuff all ready to go. That'll give us a wee bit of breathing room, I hope! Enjoy! (and order early and often!)

As if you didn't notice, the old storefront is still up and running.

Before getting into the nuts and bolts, just a quick reminder that because of the circumstances, there is a very, very short window for ordering available on the Previews store this month, so please make your orders as soon as possible, just to make sure everything works correctly.

So what happened?

We thought we had a new interface nailed down and operational, when we realized that quite sim,ply put, it was not dependable and needed extensive reworking. That, and a misunderstanding about what a "framework" is contributed to some mass confusion, and that's why there hasn't even been a post here since the middle of February. We though we'd have debuted this spiffy new interface, but it was not to be, at least not for this month, and maybe for the next as well.

Apologies are of course in order, but rest assured that we are hard at work making this work properly, so that you will have a new experience that beats any other such experience you can find anywhere on the net. That's a tall goal to make, but we are adamant at doing it, and in fact we WILL do it.

I'll try to make more frequent posts to keep you abreast of developments. Meantime, enjoy the great Spring weather, and wtahc this space.

Here is a move that's going to make some people take notice:

At the date and time of this writing, WE HAVE PUT THE MARCH SOLICITATIONS FOR MAY, 2010 RELEASE ONTO THE STORE SYSTEM NOW.....instead of waiting the normal extra few weeks to make sure that the Previews catalogue reaches you!

This almost scoops everyone out there!
The items will be up there, and we have included the Previews as an item so you can at least see what the front cover will look like, even though you won't receive your copies until a couple of weeks from now.
Orders can be placed any time up to and including March 27, 2010.
This is even more reason to join the comic service if you're not currently a member. And yes, this is in preparation for the e-commerce changeover, so we won't be trying to put new items into a store system that's in transition.

Have fun ordering!

As this is being written, 1730 items for April release are being uploaded to the servers. The graphics will follow shortly. Then we might get enough time to mess with the index page and actually update some of the graphics and feature items. Now if you take the "guaranteed" from the other day literally, then we missed it by about 10 minutes. However, it's still technically Friday for another almost 2 hours on the west coast. So that qualifies as promises kept. Kinda. ...All in the name of new e-commerce.....

So much for the idea of having the new listings for April up early this month, right?
We have not been idle. We got so engrossed with the e-commerce development that the new list got put further and further and further back, until....well, here we are. It'll be up by Friday, the 12th at the latest, guaranteed. Thanks for your patience.
Meantime the new system will, when implemented in the next few weeks, offer a whole plethora of innovations previously unavailable on our site, and possibly unavailable anywhere.
Incidentally, on a slightly unrelated topic: If you were one of the lucky ones to get a new publications list in the mail, and you have not yet returned it or e-mailed us an update on your list, would you please do so asap. We want to have everyone as current as possible.
Meantime, the snow continues to fall, but not here. This winter has been really weird, because places that should be snow-free, like Washington and Baltimore, have been inundated, while here we've been fairly lucky....so far. Having said that, I probably just messed things up for the next 39 days until spring. Yes, we are counting. It can't come too soon.

Someone asked, so we're going to answer about why there wasn't a mid-month shipment for bi-weekly members of the comic service. It's really very simple:

Both Christmas and New Years days fell out this season on Fridays. Logistically that creates a big headache from the standpoint of getting books to their destinations, because it means long weekend delays, extra holiday days, and a whole mess of other slowdowns. Because of this everyone got together and collectively decided that it would be better to engineer a "skip week" for the last week of December. OK, nothing too complicated there, right?

So for the purposes of retail accounts, a whole two books were released that week: Blackest Night #6 and one of the versions of Fall Of The Hulks....I think it was a variant version of Alpha or something like that...whatever.

Normally that week would have contained the current issue of Previews. But since everything was put off for the skip week, that issue of Previews (currently for March releases) did not arrive until the first week of January, which triggered a full monthly shipping for everyone. Still with us? Good.

It would not have made sense to do a bi-weekly shipment on the second week of the month (the normal schedule) because only one more week of books would have arrived after the monthly shipment. So it was decided to wait for the third week. But then it became obvious that the next Previews would ship the last week of the month, again triggering a full monthly shipping. Therefore, it would have made no sense to do the bi-weekly that week either followed by a single week's worth of books with Previews, and thus everyone is getting the full monthly shipping treatment.

The result is that we skipped a bi-weekly for everyone, but also saved everyone the shipping charges, and the schedule will return to normal for February.

And you guys thought that running a comic service was easy? Sheesh!