[OFFICIAL] Salute, FB2 and stuff......

Well, its all over for another year......  ;-)
The huge Salute show yesterday was amazing, exhausting and, I'm glad to
say, very profitable!
Held for the first time at Olympia rather than the usual Kensington Town
Hall, we thought the show went really well for traders, games and
punters
alike. There was much more room to move both behind and in front of the
tradestands, and having everything in one huge hall was so much better
than
the previous spread out affairs. Kudos and thanks to all from South
London
Warlords for the massive organisational effort which (as far as we could
see anyway) ran amazingly smoothly all day.

Sales were phenomenal - despite bringing all we could get cast, by
mid-afternoon we were running out of many of the FT ships, especially
the
Kra'Vak and the new UN stuff! There was literally no time during the day
when there wasn't at least one solid row of customers across the
frontage
of the GZG stand (and flowing round the ends!), and for most of the time
it
was actually two, three and sometimes even four rows deep with people
trying to buy stuff! Sorry if anyone had to wait too long, and many,
many
thanks and all credit to the stand crew of Tim, Paul, Patrick and Alex
who
worked their butts off all day! I did actually get a cursory look round
the
rest of the tradestands, and there looks to be some interesting new
stuff
coming up here and there.

Now, onto what proved to be the best and worst thing about the day -
Fleet
Book 2......
I collected a couple of boxes of advance copies from the printers on
Friday
afternoon, had a flick through them while loading everything else up and
it
all looked fine - the illustrations in particular have come out very
nicely, and I was just very relieved to actually have copies for the
show!
It wasn't until Saturday morning when we arrived at the show that it was
discovered that the printers had f****d up........ they'd managed to
print
one of the text pages twice, and leave one page out!!!!!!! Everything at
all the proofing stages had been fine, it was simply a mistake made when
they were making the plates for press; because of the rush to get some
copies out of the door, no-one had spotted it at all. The only fortunate
part of it all was that the missing page was the first part of the
Phalon
introductory background bumf, so at least it did not contain anything
vital
to the actual rules, designs or gameplay - it was only the fluff.
After the shouting had died down and the printers (one of whom was with
us
on the day....) had been suitably chastised (at one point I considered
borrowing a large sword from the Fight School stand so he could commit
Seppuku quietly in the corner, but decided that the Olympia security
would
probably bill us for the carpet...), we had to decide what to do to
rescue
the situation.
The only options were to sell copies anyway, or to take orders and
promise
to mail copies on once they were reprinted; in the end, we decided to do
both.
So, we sold the books as normal (as the missing page really didn't
affect
the usefulness of the book for its main function, that of a ship design
and
rule supplement!) and at the same time explained to every purchaser
exactly
what had happened, and took everyone's name and address. Every person
who
bought a copy at Salute will have a second, corrected copy mailed out to
them (entirely at the printers' expense!) as soon as the revised version
is
off the presses, so will actually end up with two copies for the price
of
one (and, of course, the "rare" misprints may well become sought after
gamers' collectables in years to come.... <grin>).
I'm glad to say that this got round the potential disaster very well -
certainly no-one that I served personally had any reservations about
this,
and a I don't think that we lost any sales over it.

We have been promised that the corrected reprint WILL by available for
us
the take up to Triples at Sheffield next weekend, and I'll be mailing
out
all the playetsters' freebies and the pre-ordered (mailorder) copies in
the
following week (obviously, there is no point in sending out the faulty
ones
by mailorder!).

Aside from all this, I must say the book looks very nice (worth all the
effort and pain!), and judging by the amount of KV, SV and Phalon ship
minis we shifted at the show there will be a lot of alien fleets out on
game tables around the country before too long....

So, Salute is over for another year- by next year we'll all have
forgotten
just was a totally knackering day it really is, and we'll all go back
again......  ;-)

Jon (GZG)