FAQ

All prices are excluding taxes. These are calculated on checkout depending on the tax rate of your country (based on the shipping address you provided).

We understand this is unusual or annoying to some. Because we’re a small store in the EU that ships worldwide, however, these taxes vary and thus can’t be included in the price. (And they’re mandatory, which many online store owners seem to forget …)

No. We do not condone the dark magic that is called “buy now, pay later”.

It leads to debt and irresponsible behavior. Buyers who could actually benefit from such schemes, especially in the long term, are few and far between.

If you stumble upon a method to pay this way in our system, inform us and we’ll take it down.

We currently ship to two regions: EU (Europe) and NA (North America). Product pages clearly state which region it supports. When visited, the website already tries to figure out where you are and tell you if something ships to your address.

Your location or distance doesn’t matter for the price. As stated above, we have no shipping fees, even if you live super far away. (Though keep in mind that the tax rate is still calculated based on your billing address or company details.)

1. To incentivize people to buy infrequently, but when they do, to buy everything they want at once. This is better for the climate and for their own wallet in the long-run. (The number of times I’ve seen someone place six seperate orders on the same day instead of bundling it …)

2. To make the items the same price for everyone, regardless of where you live, time of the year, or any other circumstances.

3. To be able to offer no shipping fees, despite being a small webshop run on a small budget. (See next question.)

1. Because shipping costs can’t be properly predicted. Our system will select the cheapest and fastest ( = most local) provider once the order is already placed.

2. Shipping fees are often a scam. Many systems, unfortunately, mark up such fees with random ridiculous amounts. They also don’t use a single fee for the whole order, but individual fees for each product.

This is out of our magical hands. We decided we don’t want to scare people with a sudden 30+ dollar shipping fee at the end of checkout. Instead, expected shipping costs are included in the base price of all physical products.

And we, the sorcerers behind the shop, eat the risk of sometimes losing money on a sale because of shipping fees.

(When you live on, say, the North Pole, shipping is bound to be wildly expensive! But why would you live on the North Pole? Are you Santa?)

Every time we’ve bought something online ourselves, there was no urgency. We would have been absolutely fine with the product arriving two weeks from now. But we couldn’t choose that option!

Instead, the supplier rushed, and made bad choices for the climate, and asked more money, just to get the package at our doorstep the next day. It’s foolishness, we say!

The kinds of products we sell are not essential or urgent. Hence, we always pick the cheapest but slowest option for delivery. Set a new default for shopping and consuming. Things arrive when they arrive—you will be more at ease, and the climate will thank you for it.

A wizard is never late. He arrives precisely when he intends to.

There is no automatic refund or return option.

Of course, our system does support the option for manual refunds. And we are not greedy goblins trying to annoy you. Thus, if you feel you deserve a refund, or have a special case, contact us and we’ll try to work it out!

For Digital Goods, this is standard. It doesn’t make sense to allow refunds when somebody has already received a permanent copy of the file!

For Physical Goods, this choice was made after much consideration.

1. Our physical goods are printed on demand. This unfortunately means a refund just turns that product into useless waste, as it was made specifically for you! We can’t repurpose it, or resell it, or add it “back to the inventory”, or do anything else with it.

2. To incentivize people to think longer before buying. And, in doing so, be kinder to themselves and the environment.

3. For smaller webshops, the cost of supporting free (or generous) refunds and returns is simply too high, while, simultaneously, legal and risk protection is far too low. Amazon can only offer free shipping, free returns, and so forth because they are absolutely huge.

Might we suggest purchasing your products in a physical shop instead? :)

Webshops have their place. So do physical, local stores. Expecting the service, immediacy, and physical guarantees of a physical shop from a webshop is like demanding dark magical powers without paying the usual cost that comes with them. Such as losing your nose.

If you did your research but your purchase still disappoints, consider recycling it creatively or giving it away! Turn the “bad purchase” into a funny joke at parties. Obliterate this webshop on social media for likes. We are always big proponents of being flexible and making the best out of every situation!

It’s the name of my shared universe of art, mostly inhabited by stories. Over the years, more and more of my books were connected in subtle ways. A kind of magic from story A reappeared in story B. An important character or event was referenced in story C.

After a while, I decided to draw up an ambitious plan and craft this shared universe on purpose.

In that shared universe, there are many worlds—or “melodies”—all playing the same Song of Life. All of them fit neatly together. All of them are predictable, but in harmony.

Then our world, our galaxy, our current timeline … sometimes seems to go off the track. Surely, the bad stuff, the odd developments on Earth, they can’t all be according to plan? It seems we all live inside The Wayward Melody, and there are so many stories to tell.

There’s a mountain of technology needed for e-commerce, of course, but we’ll give the most interesting ones.

• The website itself is a “static website” built with the amazing Hugo. It’s built using simple default website code (HTML, CSS, JS).
• The general store management is done through Snipcart. This simply “attaches” to any existing website and allows full freedom how to use it.
• The domain and hosting are taken care of by Cloudflare.
• Payments are processed using Mollie.

In case it wasn’t clear already, we’re big proponents of minimalism, sustainability, openness, flexibility, and freedom. We didn’t want to be locked into some ecosystem, or rely on an existing webshop solution that might do who knows what with our data.

This entire webshop has been designed to fit on a postcard—and run on a potato laptop—so to speak. Hopefully without actually cutting corners. And I can know, for my laptop is 12+ years old and can’t even properly sync the date and time anymore.

Anything is possible now. We can add or remove any feature on a dime. We can offer both digital and physical goods, even using multiple printing backends at the same time. And if something goes wrong, you can contact us personally and we can manually set it right.

That would be me, Tiamo Pastoor. The one who also made basically everything that is sold here.

But, of course, I can’t do that alone. People help me by giving feedback. By donating once in a while, which kept me somewhat afloat for years as I gave everything away for free. Family that reads my stories. Friends who look at this new webshop-thing I’m making and say: “I hate those colors. Change them.”

Even a cheap and custom webshop solution has high fixed costs. All my other websites, the massive portfolio and contacts I’d built over the years, were necessary to get it off the ground.

Yes, many of our Digital Products must be printed, especially the educational ones to be used in classrooms. Printing is expensive; wasting ink and paper isn’t great for the environment.

This is such an important topic, in fact, that we wrote a separate article with printing and usage tips

When the webshop launched, we still had a huge backlog of old projects to make available or give merchandise. It will be a while before it’s caught up. We decided to lean on Digital Goods first, as they were easier to make and sell securely. Physical Goods are on a delay at the moment, as we verify all the systems are robust before going all-in.

A few more large “product batches” for the website are planned. They will only release, however, once the associated project / website / franchise is fully off the ground. There’s no public timeline for that yet.

Otherwise, the webshop is set up to follow Tiamo’s actual projects. When a new book series is released, for example, that’s when it will get merchandise and bonus materials.

Not automatically. In the future, perhaps, we might have a solid system for directly customizing merchandise or digital goods.

For now, however, this can be done, but only manually. Contact us with your specific request—both what to make and the price offered—and we’ll see what we can do.

In general, though, we encourage people to learn how to customize themselves! Most products in our webshop give you the source code and assets as well. I’ve written countless free articles about how to do what I do, so you can learn magic too and create whatever you want! For free!

This is a much deeper question than can be answered in this small box. But we’ll try to give a summary.

The core of creation is to, well, create. Musicians make music because they want to make music themselves. Writers write stories because that’s the thing that gives them satisfaction. Not holding some finished book that an AI wrote for you. Writing the book.

Through that lens, using AI at any point in the creative process is silly and pointless. You’d give away the thing that actually makes the creative process worthwhile.

As such, our default approach is always to fully create all our products ourselves.

In theory, AI is a great tool. It can do things more quickly than you. It can do things you can’t do it all (because of constraints on time, energy, money, skill, whatever). It can automate the things you dislike, it can catch errors in the things you did, etcetera. That’s why we’re not against AI entirely. That’s why some of our products, especially the earliest ones, can have small parts created by AI.

In practice, however, companies need to make a profit to survive and there are many things AI can’t do.

We could spend two days drawing a background image, or we can ask AI to give us the specific image we want in a minute. It’s the decision between creating 5 educational games a month, or maybe creating 1.

As a tool, when given specific instructions on what you want for a specific part of a project, it’s unmatched. We are on a mission to create lots of cool stuff for you, and to revolutionize learning. Classrooms would rather have that educational game now, when students have to learn that topic, than care whether it’s 100% human-created. AI is sometimes needed to allow us to do so sustainably. Because we don’t earn enough income from unfinished projects or only releasing one thing a month.

For very simple and streamlined projects, AI can work great. Most of our projects, however, reach across many disciplines and do things that are completely unique.

A quiz, for example, needs questions that humans find challenging but not too hard. Try asking an AI to generate quiz right now. Half its questions will be far too easy (“Who is the main character in Harry Potter?”), half its questions will just be wrong if you research them. AI can’t judge difficulty of its information. It surely won’t create/provide all the media (exactly the right image/audio clip/video clip) we attach to the questions.

An escape room, for example, needs text + images + maybe even more. No AI can do that sort of thing (as of yet). It needs puzzles tightly tailored to a topic in classrooms. It, again, needs puzzles that humans find challenging but not too hard. Which is something an AI can’t judge.

A board game, for example, needs even more. Rules that are succinct, streamlined, 100% internally consistent, and matching the game material. And the game material itself, of course, which has to match those rules! And playing following the rules has to lead to fun in humans, which is something an AI can’t judge. (Try asking an AI to invent game rules right now. Be surprised as it gives you a twisted version of Monopoly that contradicts itself and never actually states your objective.)

In short, for 99% of the projects we do, AI is useless anyway. Whenever it’s a great tool to save time and get better results, we will probably use it. We’ve used it most in our earliest projects. Once the store launched and earned income, and we realized we sometimes lost that joy of creation, we scaled that back even further.

Does that answer your question? (You can read about AI in more detail, and more context, in our article about our creative process.)