Message from the Chief Operating Officer at FPG/Ark Press
A Message from Daniel Lisi, Chief Operating Officer at Foundation Publishing Group
Hello esteemed American Paladin Kickstarter Backers,
I am Daniel Lisi, Chief Operating Officer at Foundation Publishing Group, the parent company of Ark Press.
I am very sorry to those who have experienced delays receiving their Dust Sacrifice copies in advance on Christmas. We are taking measures today to make sure that any straggling orders are properly filled. What happened?
We are one of the first use cases of Kickstarter’s new Pledge Manager tool native to their platform. Generally, we would export out all customer data to a service like Backer Kit, which then automatically communicates with our shipping processor.
The long story short is that Pledge Manager has some technical issues. We’re in communication with Kickstarter regarding these issues. They are as follows:
Pledge Manager currently does not automatically interact with any shipping processor besides one of their partner applications, “EZ-Ship.” We use ShipStation. This required us to manually export user data for ShipStation.
Kickstarter’s Pledge Manager offers exports for specific platforms, such as ShipStation. However, any export that was not a default and platform-agnostic “export all” option did not populate SKU’s. This is a huge problem, as no customer data was aligned with what they purchased.
We tried to pivot to EZ-Ship to solve this problem, but the same SKU migration was broken, exports to EZ-Ship would populate customer data but with no record of what they actually purchased. It forced the same manual solution we had to eventually implement.
This in tandem with the unique nature of us filling this campaign in two waves caused problems. Not only did we have to export all of the customer data and append it to ShipStation’s upload style, we had to figure out a way to bifurcate these customer records so that we could A) fill Dust Sacrifice now and B) maintain a customer record so we can fill the remainder of the pledge promises come Spring 2026.
All of this said, the fulfillment process became a deeply involved manual process to make sure we could achieve the above criteria, and required us to repeat this manual process in waves as customers would complete their Pledge Manager surveys at different times.
By today all remaining customers should receive their shipping information and we should be caught up within the next week with readers having their Dust Sacrifice copies in-hand.
We are also auditing any shipping notices that have gone out that have not been updated with tracking. We print and process labels within 1 day of receiving them, and USPS & UPS pick up from our warehouse daily, Monday through Friday. If your tracking has not updated at this point, this is a problem beyond our warehouse and we’ll re-send your package.
We are also aware that a number of customers received two copies. This is due to a batch of labels that were printed twice. If you received double copies, please feel free to keep the book or gift it to a readerly colleague.
My priority is the reader and we take delivery promises very seriously. I want nothing more than our fulfillment processes to go smoothly. Thank you for your patience with us as we hit the learning curve and nuances of Pledge Manager in real time.
A silver lining here is that all customers are now integrated into our system with their appropriate SKUs, and so come the second wave fulfillment process in Spring 2026, this sequence will go much smoother.
Any other issues can be addressed to support@passage.press.
Thank you for your readership. We’re very proud of how this edition ofAmerican Paladin: Dust Sacrifice turned out.
Daniel Lisi, COO
Foundation Publishing Group