The first Bestiary and the Gamemastery Guide are likewise as easy to find as rocking horse... droppings in the UK at the moment.
I was finally lucky enough to manage to snap both up this week after a couple of weeks of searching, although the Gamemastery Guide is coming in from the US via a third party Amazon seller (but at £27 including delivery that isn't too bad).
Bestiary Box I got via the Book Depository about two weeks ago, but they're now out :(
Found one for sale here at around £25 including delivery from the US to the UK!
(Still likely to be hit for around a £12 tax+collection bill from the post office when they deliver, but way under the £70 alternative)
i don't know your UK's policy on buying outside of EU (i have only heard rumors).
For reference:
As far as RPG stuff goes, anything that can't be classified as a book/magazine is going to be hit for 20% sales tax as it comes through customs.
That in itself isn't too bad, the nasty bit is that the post office, who are responsible for collecting that from you when they deliver the package, will charge an additional £8 (around $13) on top of that as a collection fee.
There's nothing to pay at all if the package value is less than £15. As far as I can work out, that's total package value, not total value of taxable items inside, so £100 of books plus a £10 map pack will attract 20% tax (plus collection fee) on the £10 map pack (or, if the entire package got mislabelled as "merchandise" on the customs form, as has been known to happen, 20% tax on the whole £110 value - OUCH!)
There's also the chance a higher-value item will slip through customs undetected for whatever reason, but nowadays I'm not sure what the chance is of that.
All of the above goes to explain why I now have to pester people at Paizo before my monthly shipment goes off to make sure anything that isn't a book gets put in its own package :)
I am a EU citezen myself so you don't have to convert to us dollars (although a convertion to euros would be welcome).
Ok it sounds somewhat harsh but in my country it's both better and worse. If the total (including shipping) value is below 25 euros then the package doesn't get taxed, if it's non-merchantise of 80 euros or less then it doesn't get taxed also.
BUT when it does get taxed you get taxed with my country's 23% VAT, you might get taxed with luxury tax (depending on the kind of the item), you get charged a 3 euros for a stamp from the post office and however much the custom officer takes for his job on your item (it changes quite regularly) and worst of all? the custom officer has the right to disregard the price and assign any price he wants on the product and tax you based on his price instead of the senders price.
Now on the plus side the customs officers are very few and otherwise occupied with much grander works so if you are lucky you can pass a 100 or 200 euros package, especially if it's a small package.
Of course none of the above applies to items bought from inside the EU.
All of the above explains why i can't buy directly from Paizo and i have to scour ebay for non-USA sellers.
Ugh, that sounds horrible :(
£1 = 1.18 euros right now, so 9.50 euros tax collection fee atop the 20%. But, only if the package contains something other than just books and is valued over 18 euros.
Hopefully one day Paizo will grow big enough to have a European distribution center that can ship both our stuff direct!
I heard somewhere that only two distributors cover the entire UK, so if true thats probably oneof the reasons these things sell out everywhere all at once.
I had a similar problem with several items in the past (most recently the Robinson Crusoe board game, which i had to go to ebay for)
(The other option is buying the pdf and printing your own, of course. If you use A4 sticky labels and photographers "mount board" its easy and the result is indistinguishable from the "real" thing....But it does require some patience cutting out)
I heard somewhere that only two distributors cover the entire UK, so if true thats probably oneof the reasons these things sell out everywhere all at once.
Pretty much, yeah. When I was running a store it was Esdevium and Hobbygames. I'm not sure what kind of arrangements Amazon UK have though, whether they buy via a UK distributor, direct from Paizo, or get their own stock via Amazon US. My guess would be one of the latter two or I can't see how they manage their prices sometimes.
Why only two?
Isn't the pnp market big enough in UK to warrant more than two distributors?
My guess is it's probably to do with the size of the shipment needed in order to make it cost-effective for a crate to be shipped internationally. The more distributors you have, the less they're all going to want.
Distributors like to be exclusive where possible, to prevent competition at the distribution level to stores. If sales are diluted at the distribution level, you'd probably get distributors refusing to place orders for product on the grounds they may end up with a crate of books they can't sell due to too many other distributors covering the same market.
And yeah, the market here really isn't that big. More and more people are moving to buying online (mostly through Amazon), as stores in general tend to carry very little in the way of RPG stock (often just the core rules and the latest few products in that line). There's also the problem that even finding a store nowadays can be tricky, as they're often focused in cities meaning half the population of the country aren't going to travel 25-50 miles just to buy a book (that's my own position).
So, RPGs in the UK tend to end up as a secondary line thrown together on a small set of shelves in stores that focus on miniatures games. Any big stores with a decent selection are very few and far between. Even the distributors were relegating them to a corner of the flyer hidden under all the CCG and plastic prepainted mini releases, last time I looked a few years ago.
It wouldn't surprise me if very soon the only real choice will be to buy direct from the publisher, via Amazon, or a POD retailer such as DriveThruRPG.
