Unless you've been living under a rock for the past year, especially the past 6 months, you are already aware that the vinyl manufacturing industry is an absolute mess right now. Though, we experienced some delays prior to the fall of 2020, those delays were usually just a week or two. Starting in October of 2020, those delays started to get longer. When I put the Tiamat and Gathering vinyl into production lead times were 9 weeks. Seemingly overnight, those lead times ballooned to 20-25 weeks. Both of the Tiamat and Gathering records went into production in late Nov/early Dec and it's now late April and we've only received Wildhoney and Nighttime Birds. Looks like Slumber and Mandylion won't be here until late May at the earliest. Had I known that it would take 5-6 months to get these things in, I wouldn't have started the pre-ordering in November/December. But here we are, the reality is 5-6 months is possibly the best turnaround time we'll get for awhile. I'm told that it may get worse before it gets better. I'm seeing that some of the US manufacturing plants are 12 months out!
Long story short, we're no longer doing pre-orders. At least, not until the vinyl manufacturing industry catches up. We can't ask people to wait 6+ months, and for the sake of my sanity I can't sit on thousands of pre-orders and deal with the barrage of "when is _____ going to ship" emails. It's a painful decision to make as it will shut off most of our cash flow for about half a year. But, I just don't see much of a choice at this point. I've had a lot of people asking when pre-orders for Ingested, Black Tongue, Witherscape et al will begin... the answer is, they won't. We're going to put them into production and then we'll wait. In the meantime we'll have to subsist off of the sales of our back catalog and third party titles that we're bringing in. Unfortunately, without the cashflow from pre-orders it's going to be difficult to make new licensing deals. I'll make those deals if/when possible. But I won't be able to keep up a rate of 4-8 titles a month like I'd wanted to. But, we'll make the best of what we can until things get back to normal.
We appreciate everyones patience on the titles that are currently delayed in manufacturing and look forward to finally fulfilling all of them! They are coming, they're just coming at the speed of smell.
PS, if any of you happen to be a wealthy industrialist looking for a way to burn some cash, PLEASE do so by opening some new vinyl plants!!!