Okay I'm not as hyped now so I hope this doesn't disappoint- Seriously me, this is practically a reward for dealing with sh*t at work at night ALL WEEK-

This has been TWO months in the making as I promised... all of us (lol) ever since my birthday review of the winter Comiket, more than ONE AND A HALF MONTHS of waiting ever since I confirmed the final list, and I CANNOT WAIT to tell you how much logistics were involved in getting all this altogether!!! Which was *pukes* haha, but this is going to be hype and until we wait for summer to actually appear (which is here already I'm just sweating buckets at this time of year I can't even) let us talk about what else was left of last year (lmao) and what more to expect this year!! Hopefully. *laughs*

Hey no one said this will be infinitely better than the Melonbooks run, and maybe I should spend a little more time on talking about how it ended up to this. *giggles*

As I have always taken my notes to plan for every single one of these like a psychopath (lol), here is what I wrote:

And I think this needs more evaluation. *laughs*

Firstly, the initial thought was to do the same as the BOOTH run (again, I don't have a booth lol) from last year which was THREE (3) books but then the page limit is removed... BUT as I mentioned previously I want to ramp up reviews by giving more artists the recognition, even if BOOTH doesn't have that much resources for me to pick up up to SIX (6) books of the recent Comitia 155 event which happened back in February (which was still right after the event, but I did start a week later) and so the plan was to then fall back to the winter Comiket if I want to make this happen. This is technically fine mainly because I have promised some artists on their works which was hinted in the previous review post *wink* which was technically NOT about this, but you'll get it in a bit. *giggles*

Then, is the timing. And I will say this first instead of the outro, I AM SO SORRY to Shirokuma Shake-sensei (and I can remember their name off my head just because) for they just restocked for order RIGHT AFTER I confirmed the final list I had as I see their book run out of stock (again, as mentioned previously) so that was kind of a thing too, and considering I had to wait THIS LONG (lol) then maybe they should allow me to cancel halfway instead of dealing with this reality that I can't revert- Then again the ones I would want to cancel are the ones which shipped the fastest so that doesn't help much, I guess. *shrugs*

Last but not least, are the rules. With the above, then they are technically similar to the Melonbooks run but we are limited to one order of books instead and I will talk about the limit of 6 books in a bit, but otherwise the books still have to be thin (so not 50-page porno lol) and feature original female characters only (I had to be careful with this tbh) since I am still within International Women's Month back then... but that's just assuming I can ship them by then. *laughs*

So yeah, that definitely changed a lot from just this one point. *giggles*

Oh yeah, I suppose I should (again) talk about what this is, huh, the BOOTH thing. *giggles*

BOOTH is essentially another site to sell doujin items and the books are also just a subset of what else is available, and is in my opinion the 2nd choice out there besides signing an exclusivity deal with the largest online store of them all Melonbooks-sensei (lol) but also, is the alternative of selling their remaining stock because ironically, this is easier to ship internationally now that the former has just region-locked their site for viewing. *cringe*

Coming back though, a real advantage of BOOTH is how they utilize their filters. I can easily post the filters I used for Comitia 155 AND Comiket 107 events respectively because that is on their focus from the start they have specific filters for that, and then I can just sort by the rest of the parameters including in stock and newest posted or something, and not like the latter mattered but I will elaborate on that in a bit. It also doesn't help much that the list(s) are generally shorter than the behemoth of items in Melonbooks, and generally... and I don't mean most of them, are in the rather niche or not so polished styles (with respect to last year, nokia-sensei wasn't that great imo) so it takes a lot more effort to you know, evaluate how good they are on their social (provided they share some of their works) in order to give it the pass.

And that is not even talking about its local shipping policy- Haha okay here we go. *giggles* I do not know what I wrote last year because I think I can talk about it again this definitely did not go as well as last time, to say the least. *laughs*

The biggest problem with BOOTH so far compared to all the consolidated online stores out there, is the site if run by its owners, and even till today I have learned that "warehouse shipping" is still dependent on how the sellers respond to the orders, which is typically the doujin artists themselves, if you have not been exposed to that before. Either way, even as listed in the product listing, these can take up to THIRTY (30) days so as long as a month to ship, and this can be a rather picky issue for people like me who want to make use of forwarding services (or proxy services) who can only store items for up to that number of days... provided if we don't count the time to ship them, just waiting for them to fulfil the order, so to speak. I did consider staggering some of the orders first to give them some buffer, but who knows what the inventory situation will be like by then (see previous point with Shirokuma Shake-sensei, but flipped so went out of stock instead) so letting that go first before I make the orders for others feels more like a risk, so I didn't do that. Hey, and this is ALL independent of each seller's local shipping. *cringe*

There are other things I can mention including having direct feedback and chance for the sellers to NOT update their stock *cringe* and thus get your order cancelled (which thankfully I didn't get that) and also there's a tipping system so you can give them more than they deserve which is nice but I'm practically doing this right now NOT going to Melonbooks so maybe I'll think about that for next time. *laughs*

Alright, here's where it all fell apart. *laughs*

I started the confirmation and ordering of the books I wanted and confirming their inventory AND their shipping time on March 1st (which you can see is a month and a half as of writing) with 6 books so following objective as of now even to a tee with half of them from C107 that's nice, but the budget ended up to be 9600yen including local shipping (including those in warehouse which was supposed to consolidate before shipping) which if you would recall, would net you 9 books from Melonbooks with a 10k yen minimum with FREE local shipping. *silence* Yep, this is what happens when you want to support indie artists this way. *cringe* Toranoana would have been cheaper without the free shipping offer, remember that mess? *laughs*

Once that was confirmed though, things... started to get a little hairy. Everything was going well within the first week as half the books shipped on time ie. I got a notice they were shipping which was worthy of praise I didn't expect them to even respond to be fair (lol) and I had to contact 2 sellers (momochill-sensei and Nekotora-sensei) through BOOTH 2 weeks later in order to find out their progress (since not like they are showing the details on this BEFORE it was shipped, remember the fulfilling order part?) and they did reply a day later which was also how I found out that "warehouse shipping" on the product page just meant that it would be shipped to the warehouse... by the seller, which STILL depended on the seller, and BOY did they took their time. *cringe* THEN WHAT IS THE POINT OF WAREHOUSE IF IT IS JUST MEANT FOR CONSOLIDATION- Never mind, maybe I need to read up on the BOOTH FAQ in order to do this correctly(?) next time. *shrugs*

As I continued to wait and am kind of glad Buy&Ship had to spend time to ship to their HQ in Hong Kong in order to start consolidation period countdown (which is kind of based actually) so I managed to "delay" the waiting of orders to arrive, STILL waited for up to A MONTH in order to hear news from momochill-sensei specifically which in irony was why I skipped some books that listed seller will take that long to fulfil the order (again, warehouse shipping, by the way) and even then it only took until April 1st (as a joke) to FINALLY ship the order as the rest of the books were just sitting there waiting for a miracle to happen. *laughs* The book finally arrived for consolidation A DAY after the last of consolidation period of the first book that arrived on the 10th (since it needed up to 3 days to move from Japan to their HQ) and I think I was just glad they didn't bother to charge me for that even though I did not even barely make it... so yeah, thanks, Buy&Ship. *smiles* And that's why it took this long, I only managed to consolidate and ship out on the 12th. *sigh* Hey, if this were Tenso? I would even be able to consolidate. *cringe*

So yeah, it was a pain and all screw you BOOTH but also Buyee because Buy&Ship is better *giggles* but now that it has arrived, let's welcome our contestants!!

Wow this is quite a fresh batch of newbies we have here lol maybe that's why they can't pay the Melonbooks tax- OH WOAH WOAH WHO SAID YOU CAN JUST WALTZ IN HERE KID YOU GOTTA VERIFY YOUR ID WITH A THIRD-PARTY WEBSITE FIRST- No we don't do that here. *laughs*

Okay NOW we are done, I'll fix the rest in the next week ahead if you guys don't mind. *giggles* Next time around will be September if all things go smoothly maybe this will be slower if I were to use Buy&Ship again, but it's better for the shipping fees considering the oil prices aren't coming down, so we shall see. The world isn't becoming a better place, but my otaku life is. *dabs* SEE YOU IN HALF A YEAR, FAMS!!! *wink*

P.S. I did consider, when I browsed through the BOOTH listings and saw Guribaato-sensei's downloadable version of their illustration book for Comitia, to show a bit of what they have to offer as an extra even though we have already reviewed 6 books over here, but uh, it did feature male characters so I decided against it, we need to keep this place as straight as possible. Straight females, I mean. *giggles* (No, Chigusa Minori-sensei don't count lol their books are not thin)