FSM New Site, More CDs and Kickstarter News

UPDATE 1:30PM: Our Pledge Manager was approved by Kickstarter so we’ve launched it to begin collecting addresses, shipping and tax for the campaign. Thanks!

Things are moving and a lot to announce!

First, I have quietly added 440 new listings to www.FSMCDs.com. I know I have always given advance warning as to when these would go up. For a bunch of timing reasons, I didn’t have a “runway” to do that this time. So an experiment (and because I need the sales, I’ll explain below), I’ll try it just this once—and if people find it too anxiety-inducing, I won’t do it again.

The new listings are mostly “commons”—there’s a lot of choice stuff in there, just not choice expensive stuff.

Also, this is a little embarrassing: for months I’ve walked past a box of promo CDs and thought, Why haven’t these sold yet? Well, for some clerical reason, the listings never got posted—but they are up now. (Lots of them are prefaced as PROMO: [title].)

Finally, I have added some more FREE items. They are listed at $0 and please, help yourself to as many as you want! If you go to the site and sort by price (click the top of that column), they will all pop up when going lowest --> highest.

Here is a spreadsheet of what’s in stock—but the search engine at www.fsmcds.com itself is much improved, so you can use that to find your favorite composers/labels.

Kickstarter news: The new website has been relaunched, and after a week of a shakedown cruise is starting to resemble what we want. There is a new message board with all of the advanced features (like private messaging) people have requested for years.

Our tech crew is still making tweaks. There is a lot more work to do with FSM Online, for example, and some bug-fixing on the board. But it’s all happening rapidly and by November 1st it should be done. Thank you for making this happen!

Also, Kickstarter donors will soon get their survey to input their shipping address and pay for the postage on the physical items. (The platform used to collect postage at the time of the campaign, but in order to more precisely weigh and measure the items, they now have an option to do it later, which I’ve chosen to do here.)

We have the Ray Ellis CD, collector cards and original logo mugs in stock (i.e. in boxes on my living room floor) and will be mailing those out as soon as we get the survey responses to do so.

We do have extras manufactured of these three items, and once the donors get theirs first, I will sell the overstock through www.fsmcds.com (and other stores that want them).

The Best of FSM book is pretty much edited and now in layout with our designer, Joe Sikoryak (who has also helped design our new site). We will get this printed and shipped later—I think December is realistic. So it will be mailed separately, which actually saves money for U.S. customers because we can use media mail rates.

There are some other digital Kickstarter perks for donors, like the silver, gold and platinum designations for the message board profiles, and the private Zooms—they will be taken care of, I promise!

So, about me needing the CD sales...

The good news is that this Kickstarter worked! Truly grateful to all the donors, and I’m excited to present the new site and all these perks.

The downside is that enough stuff went overbudget that I have to make up the shortfall—and I will, I promise! (The biggest surprise were these collector cards, which ended up costing three times as much as I thought to print—but they look beautiful, so it’s worth it.)

Websites are expensive—they just always are and always will be. You always find that things are more complicated than anybody anticipated...you need to buy more software...improvements require other improvements...and there’s a lot of “mission creep.”

The reality of the new website is that I’m going to have to continue to spend money on it in the months to come, and I’m not budgeted for it.

Now, I have an ace in the hole, fortunately—and that ace is the giant collection of film music CDs in my living room. We have around 4,500 in stock.

So I need to sell CDs. I’ve been overwhelmed by the support for www.fsmcds.com since we launched almost two years ago, and I hope it continues. Please take the time to go through the listings, we have great stuff at amazing prices and our customer service is first-rate, if I say so myself—and I hope you find some goodies!

Also, do you want to sell your CDs? You might be surprised how much money how can make, and how fast. Email me: LukasKendallMV@gmail.com.

Thank you all for everything! And please continue to give your feedback to the new site on the board, we are working to accommodate everybody.