We here at Indie Press Revolution wanted to offer an apology.
We have been hearing from the field that copies of the MouseGuard RPG have been showing up on Comic and FLGS store shelves for just under a week now. That came not only as a surprise for us, but a concern as well since we have yet to receive any copies to send out to you. This is an issue we take seriously, as many of you have entrusted us with your pre-orders. We don't take that lightly. At all. When you pre-order from IPR, you do it in the faith that you book will be shipped to you with immediacy, and with the peace of mind that you will have it when it becomes available. In this case, copies were made available to another channel of distribution before we got your pre-orders in. It's frustrating, and we do appreciate your patience in the matter. We hope to have your books in short order, and will process the orders as soon as we get the books in hand.
We did expect a small delay on this product (and the publisher has planned all along to include a free issue of the Mouse Guard comic as a thank-you for your preorder), but due to customs delays, and now some trouble getting the publisher's primary warehouse to ship copies to us, the delay went from "small" to "large", meaning we had nothing to ship by the originally-anticipated late December timeframe. Right now we're hoping to ship by mid-January, but we still haven't gotten tracking information on our shipment.
To some extent, this is a classic example of another distributor (the primary warehouse) leveraging its corporate-giant position of strength to put the squeeze on the little guy (that's us). The fact that so many of you have so agreeably had our back on this one is truly fantastic.