founder of Laguna Studios here to talk today about fulfillment. I would say every time we have a Kickstarter campaign consult meeting the number one question asked is tell me more about fulfillment and we are so grateful to have partnered with Lagona and been working with them handinand over 75% of our clients use them. Absolutely wonderful partnership. We couldn't be happier to give you guys an introduction to them, but we are also a client and a partner. So, we love working with them and I think they're going to clear up a lot of misconceptions about fulfillment. I know it can be really overwhelming and there's so many parts to Kickstarter as it is. Once you funded and it's over, then you're like, uh, the fulfillment part, it almost feels more daunting than the Kickstarter. So, we hope today that uh Laguna can ease your mind about all of the things that have to do for fulfillment. So, without further ado, Lori, the stage is yours. Why don't you tell us a little bit about you guys and get right into it? Hey, well, your intro was better than what I had planned, but um doubt it. So, yeah, I'm the founder of Laguna Studios. I'm actually here today with Eric, my co-founder, and Crystal and Lacy. Um, we wanted to spice this whole thing up with some live demos. So, uh, it should be interesting. So, we've been a fulfillment company for a few years now, but we actually started off as a comic book publishing company. And so, we started off just like everyone else here. We ran our campaigns on Kickstarter. We had all the difficulties and all the hoops to jump through and we figured it out. And I'm we're on our 41st campaign or something now, so of our own. And we learned how to ship stuff to very selective Kickstarter backers. Um, and it's it's been an amazing uh experience and I'm hoping we can kind of impart some of that knowledge uh to you guys today. Let me let me kind of share this. Um, so if you're a creator, you're taking the exciting leap of publishing your own projects. Uh, you know, getting your stuff into the hands of supporters is crucial. Packing and shipping is time consuming. It's it's overwhelming. But I'm going to try to go kind of through some strategies to build an efficient setup even in your own space. Um, reduce some errors, make everything smoother. Um, so the first thing we have we want to have is a dedicated packing station. Specific area solely for packing and shipping. Minimizes clutter, maximizes focus. big enough workspace to lay everything out so you're not trying to find stuff while you're in the middle of packing. And something we love here that I plug to everybody are adjustable height tables so you're not killing yourself just slightly bent over trying to pack stuff or it's slightly too high and you start to get wrist problems. It's worth the investment. um a clear system for storing everything, label everything. Uh Kickstarter gives you a really handy spreadsheet uh post campaign that you can use. Uh but we also use Sortly which is an amazing inventory system and it you could use it on your phone and it's really simple and userfriendly if you know you find yourself having a lot of stuff. Um but enough about me. I'm going to stop sharing this so you guys can kind of I'll talk and we can see a live demo because that's way more interesting than me rambling. Let me remove the spotlight and I'll put it on the factory. Yeah, there we go. Cool. There we go. So, you want to gather all your necessary stuff in one accessible location. And as you guys can see, we have the tape, all the different tape dispensers, we have the shipping labels, printer, scale, books, boxes, everything is right there within reach. So Eric doesn't have to leave or it's all within reach. It's really efficient. Um, Eric is being a very great Vanna White. Nice job. ideas. Um, we we also talk a lot about using the right box. Uh, what he has there is a Gemini mailer. We like to use those for comic books. It's really good for thin books as well. Uh, you can see it's kind of got that inside protection so those corners can't get dinged when you ship something because as we know, the post office isn't careful. They throw your stuff around. I'm pretty certain that the post office has like an ongoing competition on like who can treat packages worse. I I genuinely agree. Like I cannot believe what they do. So we have to pack stuff in preparation for that. He's adding extra tape to make sure everything stays secure. And we also um this is really important especially for authors with like thicker novels. We use 200 lb cardboard instead of flimsy cardboard. It's really important when you have an he a heavy item in a box. Sure. Like a lot of people on Kickstarter are doing omnibuses, right? So, you've got this big heavy weighted book and you know it's definitely not going to get gently placed on a doorstep. So, we have to protect it to the best that that we can. Oh, that there we go. State of grace. Yeah. See, there you're showing right. That's a that's a hefty omnibus that we've been shipping and you have to be you want to have that corner protection and that thick enough cardboard so it doesn't get broken. Uh we also, you know, you want to wrap fragile items with bubble wrap or protective foam. Depending on the item that you're packing, uh different fill will work better with different objects. Uh, as you can see, that's another book that uh, Blood Bath at uh, Influence produced. And I love that that bubble wrap. Is there a difference between bubble wraps in your professional experience? Like, so those, you know, I I love bubble wrap as I'm sure most of us on this call do because we want to step on it and it's like a tactical thing that helps probably with stress. Um, is there a better bubble wrap like those bubble wrap that that seems to be a little bit bigger. Is that a Yes. So I like we like for especially for heavy stuff that that's 1 in bubble wrap so it's real hefty. It's real loud when you step on it too. Cool. So it does two things everybody. Um but it's really good because again it it gives you that inch of buffer around the book so that if it's banged around by the post office because they love to do that. It prevent those co it'll keep those corners pristine. Oh, I love that. Oh, and foam. So, and then you also he's adding foam. You want to make sure books don't move inside of the box. They stay perfectly still while they're getting thrown around. You basically want to protect it like you're putting your child inside of a box and mailing it because they won't be careful. You want the utmost protection. Yeah, that looks fantastic. Now, that actually looks like a specialty specialty design box because there's an imprint on the front. Is there uh there that's just it's a it's a Gemini Comic Supply is a is a box company that we use frequently for comics. And that just that's what it is. I do like that. And then yeah, the strong packing tape, 2 in packing tape. And then as you can see, he's taping it more than you might think that you you need to just because again, if the box gets thrown around, we won't lose anything. It'll stay where it needs to stay. Yeah, I love that. Um, can he keep going as as we ask some of these questions here or do you want to go back to the PowerPoint presentation because this is really amazing to watch him do this. Yeah, we can go off script. What are you? Well, I've got a couple questions. I don't know if if other people do as well, but I think one of the He's like, "Give it to me." One of the things that I've noticed is like you have all those different sizes of the boxes up there. Is there a way that you work with clients to tell them like what box size they should use or do you suggest sending them a box to kind of test everything out or or how do you guys do that? Because obviously you don't have every single box size there. So, what would be the best way for people to do it at home, but then also if they're working with your services, right? Um, the best thing if you can, of course, is to get dimensions of the book as best you can. Um, most books or novels are the same about the same dimensions. They're, you know, within that 6 by9 approximately. And then you want to know kind of your thickness. Um, there are calculators you can use online also to kind of get a good estimate of how thick your book is going to be and how heavy it's going to be and those are really handy. Where where would someone find a calculator like that? I'm trying to remember the name of it and I can't. It's something just like estimate mybook.com. I can't remember. But if you just Google um Amanda, can you look while while we keep going and see you can find that one? It was really handy. I've used it multiple times. You know, when Amanda messages me and she's like, "Well, we're doing a set of this with a with a this and and we don't know what size it is yet, but we will." And so, I try to get a good idea so we know the size of the box in advance and we know, you know, there's going to be we want that inch around so we have for fill and we have room for bubble wrap. I love that. Okay, we can go back to your script. I wanted to ask that as we were going. Yeah, no problem. Also, um, Uline is a really great resource for boxes if you're just looking to get your own. Amazon sometimes will have good sizes, but I really like Uline because they have that 200lb cardboard and it's really easy to find every single dimension of box you will ever need and they ship real quick. So, fantastic. Amanda found one right away because Amanda, we we always call her I don't know how old everybody is on this call, but we always call her Jeves. Do you remember that? Axe. Ask Jeeves. Ask Amanda is what the influence does because she'll figure it out. I told her she should have worked for the FBI, but but they can't have her. She's she's The influences. It's called bookmobile.com/book-weight-cal. And Amanda did put it in the chat. Um, so if you guys want to just copy and paste that and click that somewhere, um, I think that's an amazing tool for you to use even for your stores at home if you guys are doing your own fulfillment as well. Yeah, it's fantastic. Uh, one more thing also I wanted uh Eric to show is something we've done with uh with you guys is, you know, we you can consider adding a personal touch, a thank you note, small promotional item. Um, we did Black Tai Billionaire with you guys and it had this awesome box and, you know, we added black crinkle paper so it looked it kind of went with the whole aesthetic. There's his little note and adding little things like that. Like backers love that stuff and we're happy to do it on our end, but if you're fulfilling yourself, I would highly suggest even just like a little touch like that I think goes a long way. Yeah, I do too. Anything in packaging that can help you connect with your consumer is huge. I mean, one of the biggest things right now and trends in the book world is unboxings. So, like to have a beautiful box, to have a thank you letter when you open it up, to have um a little bit more of that human touch other than just the physical product that was bought goes a long way in your consumer's mind because a lot of purchasing power comes from emotional purchasing behavior and especially on Kickstarter because it's a community. So, most of the people who are supporting you are feeling part of the process. So when they do get their package, if they feel that connection, that communication directly from the creator, it goes a long way. And it's such a little inexpensive item that has a real high ROI when it comes to emotion. Exact. That's exactly it. Yeah. It's it's always something to think about when you're when you're putting together your campaign or your book, what your what your aesthetic is and what you want your unboxing experience to be. Um, are is the PowerPoint on screen right now? It is. Yep. You're you're back to being the spotlight. Um, so while they're gonna they're getting ready to do another demo over there. I'm going to chat a little about a little bit about other stuff. Uh, invest in a good scale. Um, you can get a pretty cheap good scale uh on Amazon. Uh you can also uh go to your your local UPS or USPS and sometimes they'll have a like old scales or they're updating their scales and you can get a really nice postal scale for very cheap online shipping platforms. We love Pirate Ship. I will always plug Pirate Ship. Pirate Ship is free. Their customer service is unbelievable. They offer uh really cheap international rates. They you can unlock a custom simple export rate if you just message them. Absolutely fantastic. Always recommend spreadsheet to manage your addresses. Of course, that's you're getting that with Kickstarter already. Um, it's pretty straightforward. You can export kind of different kinds of spreadsheets from Kickstarter to get your uh info in an organized fashion. Do you have a suggestion on what kind of scale? Is there like a scale that you recommend? So, what we like here is we have like a little food scale for small items like bookmarks and postcards because it's hard to get those ounces on a bigger scale. Okay? And then a bigger scale that has a higher weight limit for especially if you're doing heavier books, just something like it's it's usually called a postal scale or an industrial scale or something like that where you know it's going to be accurate. Okay, perfect. I just told my assistant to buy a food scale and a postal scale. There you go. I'm already taking home notes. I love this. Excellent. Okay. Um and then yeah, back to pirate ship. Uh we international shipping. Um you know, right now I've been getting a lot of questions of course about tariffs. Uh tariffs have not affected shipping out yet. Hopefully they don't. Uh, and they are not affecting books. None of the April tariffs have been applied to books. We are exempt from those overseas as well, in case anyone was interested in that. That's that's really good information because I feel like we're all panicking and all we hear about is tariffs and there's tariffs being added to websites left and right and we're just like, what's happening? So, it's we're fine. No tariffs right now. We're great. Um, for international customs forms, uh, VAT, all of that stuff. Uh, you, as an individual creator, VAT is not really a big deal because you need to send a certain number of packages to the UK and EU to have to deal with something like that. Uh, customs forms, pirate ship handles everything. They tell you exactly what you need to input. they re the way they reroute it to a US uh uh shipping station and then all the customs information is relayed that way. Uh and then of course having your spreadsheet double-checking your addresses and let me bring them back here. Sorry for spotlight them again. Yes, please. You got it. And I just wanted to briefly talk about printing securely attaching shipping labels. Um because I have seen this in the past where people, you know, you want to attach your shipping label in a way that it's easily scanned. So you don't want to bend the scan code around the box. You want to put it flat. Um the post office, you know, has like I've talked to people at the post office and they that's a pet peeve for them. So, making sure the label is flat. Eric is very good at this. Like in another life, he should have been on QVC, right? Yes. Um, and then so, oh, we got the fragile sticker, too. Now, the fragile sticker helps, but we have to remember it's also just a suggestion to the post office. And as Dana and I were kind of talking about, the post office is horrible and throws everything around. Um, so what we do here and uh it's it's really fun and I think uh Oh, we're we're bringing us here. Um I think it's a little therapeutic for Eric, too, is we stress test. We run stress tests with products. He spikes them around the room. We pack them very carefully, spike them around the room, and we make sure that they don't get damaged. Nobody Nobody on the call threat. It's none of your books. No. Like we have and we don't do this pre, you know, pre-shipping your item. We have a we have test stuff. We usually use like if we get a damage book, we use the damage sample. Um, and then you know, we open it up and we check and we make sure that that isn't damaged. If it is damaged, we add more packing. And I highly suggest doing this. Like never I've had multiple um The influence is amazing and always ships me stuff in a way that it's basically 99 to 100% intact, which is unheard of. It's incredible. But a lot of places will ship me books loose in a box with a piece of paper thrown in as though the paper is going to do something like don't do that there. They're not going to be careful with it. Like Eric showed, bubble wrap, foam, test it, and you'll have a lot less a lot fewer unhappy backers. You'll have a lot fewer damaged books. And I love that you guys test it, too, because I think like if you're doing this on your own, this is so overwhelming. This is such when I talk to authors about buying their time back, this is a great way to buy their time back because you don't need to be tossing books around. However, it is something that needs to be done. You need to make sure that your packaging makes sense so that you have less time spent on customer service issues because there's damaged books. So, it's a catch 22, right? If you don't do a test like this, even though it was that was really fun to watch and kind of funny. Um, you could have a lot of damage because you're not maybe packing them correctly, right? So, something like this and and having Laguna at your side as your partner in a shipping um manner just makes so much more sense for buying your time back and being able to produce more content. Um, I Holly did ask a question. Are you getting those phone pieces cut like that from Uline? So those foam pieces are uh when we get our books from Influence, everything's packaged in foam squares. Um and we have extra foam from them. So we've been using that foam. You can get foam from Uline as well. Um other things I would suggest is like if you get a lot of Amazon packages or anything online like keep packing material because you will always use it for stuff like this. And that's what we do. We're hoarders of packing material here. Yeah. So, we try um and thanks for bringing that up, Lori. If you have a book that's over 500 pages, it is required on your um order form to have foam. And that's because those bigger books really need it. The other way that we can do it, too, is if you have books that are um you know, maybe 300 page count, we'll be like, let's put three of them in a foam packaging. You don't have to. It's not required at that point, but we do suggest it and highly recommend it. And then Lori does keep that. And then they can slice the foam however it makes sense to do the drop shipping. So, it's really helpful in more ways than one if you can add that to your order. If you're ordering with us, if you're ordering it with somebody else and using Laguna, that's fine, too. Ask them. There should be that should be a factory standard that they have. Now, I know that that is not USA um based. So if you are doing any print runs in the US, I know that they can't do that, but packaging options for us, we have foam, we have thick foam, we have thin thin foam, we have bubble bags, and we have bubble wrap. So those are the four different ways that you can do it. I like the foam the best cuz like Lori said, when they do the drop shipping, they can slice it up and utilize it again to really secure that book in place. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. [Music] Um, I'm trying to think of just a couple other things to run through. I have a lot of questions here from you guys, too. Um, we kind of already talked about a lot of this. Basically, my last couple slides are just, you know, we try to take this burden off of you guys. If you want to focus on creating, if you don't want to deal with this, if you're international, um, we can save you a lot of money shipping even just to your US backers. We do do that. You, you know, if you're in Australia, you can ship to your Aussie backers. We'll ship to your US backers. We offer whatever you need, we can help with. Um, and we want you to be able to reinvest that time into your own business, into your creating, into whatever it is. And we can handle everything here. You guys saw kind of our warehouse. We have we just want to make everything easier for you and we have the space and we have the time. Um, sorry, I'm looking. There's so many uh questions coming in, so I'm excited about answering those. Do you have any reli reliable suppliers that do custom box designs? Yes, we do. I like that question, Jen. So, I'm super excited to answer that. the custom box that Lori um showed from um I don't Do we still have Eric? Where' Eric go? I can get him back. Yeah, Eric, come back. Um Eric, can you show There he is. Yeah. Can you show the one that um we did for Black Tai Billionaires? So, this is a great example of a custom box that we did for Cat Singleton. Um we've got some other really neat ones. We can do foil uh on the outside. You can see here's the inside's really pretty. Um, so there's a lot of different things that we can do. Uh, so I think that, you know, this is a great way, like I was saying with unboxing that you can really make a magical experience for the consumer, having so many Oh, that looks so cool. Oh, how this is the first time I've seen it done like that. Like the inside matches. You can see the slipcase. Um, so yeah, we can absolutely uh do box designs for you. There's we do them overseas. There are some ones that are um in the He's very good at this, Lori, an actor in his previous life. Um there are some ones in the United States that you can use. Um Pakola is one that I do. They're just really expensive. So like a box like you're just seeing here, and I can't remember exactly how much that box cost, so forgive me, maybe is a couple of dollars versus like a a $10 box in the States. So, it's just a if you're ordering your books overseas, it is a nice add-on because it's under $5 compared to doubling that if you're ordering it in in the US. And there's a lot more you can do in the US, you can't do the foil um stamping or maybe soft touch. If you want to add a different type of um texture to it as well, you can do that, too. Spot gloss. We can also spot gloss them. Nice job, Eric. Um, and then just to go through the list, is your fulfillment primarily for Kickstarters or do you handle fulfillment for authors with their shops year round? Um, they'll do anything, but Lori, go ahead. Yeah. Um, we will do anything. Um, we do shop fulfillment for multiple authors right now. Uh, international authors, US authors. We do Kickstarter fulfillment, uh, backer kit fulfillment. Anything anything you need to send out, we send it out. Uh tiny orders, um gigantic orders, we we do all of it. We just want to help you. We want to make your life easier. Um and then does Laguna handle people changing their shipping address? And I uh Christine, I think you mean on uh when they change their address on Kickstarter, correct? Like if you get a a comment like, "Hey, I've moved." Right. Um, I'll wait till you respond on that one and then I'll I can I'll do the rest of your questions. Um, Robin asked, "I know I was late." Oh, because I just got the email, but I'm confused about what The Influence does verse what Laguna does. That's a great question. So, um, The Influence is a print and production design company as well agency. So, we do all of the design. We don't have to do the design, but we can design and then we also produce everything overseas. Um, Lagona is our preferred, well, actually pretty much our only fulfillment center that we link up with. You can use another fulfillment center if you use our services just like you can use um, Lori and Lagona's fulfillment services without using us as well. We just partner on a lot of projects together. And if we're ma u managing a Kickstarter campaign, we always do an introduction for our clients to Lori so that they have an option for fulfillment because we know that this is a tedious, timeconsuming, overwhelming process that we'd love to take off your plate and give to a preferred partner that we trust. Um, and so you don't have to use either one of us, but we do team up a lot, but we only handle the printing and production part. And then whether it's for Kickstarter or for a store, we do a lot of stores as well and so does Lori, which is really great because if you set up a Shopify page and you're ordering, you know, several hundred books, like who wants to go to their spare bedroom or kick their kids out of their room and be like, "Hey kids, half of your room's going to be your bunk bed and the other half's going to be my books." You want to have space and room for it. So you can always have your books produced and then shipped to Lagona Studios and then they can do drop shipping for you there. Um, and yes, Christine said yes. So, Lori, I'll let you handle that. When, um, a creator gets a address change, how do you work with the creators on retaining that information? Um, uh, it varies per creator. Uh, some creators just add us as a collaborator on the Kickstarter and then we see the address change, it comes through on Kickstarter and we handle that ourselves. Um what we try to do is also give um we give kind of a deadline and then close addresses and then kind of after that deadline you know if there's a change we try to squeeze it in. But you know you you do have to set a deadline to an extent for your backers to get their information in and shut their stuff down. send out a a backup email just to make sure um because you don't want to have to ship stuff twice and and take on that expense. So, we try to help you avoid that as much as we can. And like I said, we can take care of it or you know, we're on standby if you want to check if they contact you, contact us right away. We get that address changed if we haven't shipped it out already. And um she also asked uh how much for the billionaire box, the stickers, crinkle paper, all the extras to that. Um so I can't remember how much the box is, but I could give you an idea of range. So it depends on the box size and what we're doing to the box. So we can do a full color imprint on the inside, full color imprint on the outside. We can add spot gloss. Um we can also foil stamp it. So it it really depends. So I'll give you a range. A box, depending on size, is anywhere between two $3 up to seven or eight dollars if we're doing all the bells and whistles, but that's about 50% less than what it would cost in the States to do it. So, it it really is a huge timesaver. Um I a huge uh savings, not timesaver. Well, timesaver using Laguna savings uh using us for production. The stickers um and like bookmarks and things like that, they're actually going to be on our website within the next three weeks. We're going to post them for everyone. We do vellum inserts, stickers, art prints, all that stuff. They're really inexpensive overseas. We had a client come to us last week and asked for vellum inserts. She was paying a $167 for vellum insert and ours were 39. So, just to give you an idea of like price difference. Um, and you can order that stuff and airship it to Lagona. Like let's say you have the books in and you're like h I would love to add this extra to all of my um stores store orders. We can air ship those to Laguna and then they can sort and start um packaging that way too. Yeah, absolutely. We did uh we've done a we've done Christmas cards that go through uh we did we did a Christmas fulfillment for Jade West and we added like we had the stickers and the bookmarks from the influence and then Jade sent her own like little signed Christmas cards. anything like that, we can combine all together, pack it, get it out to the backers. Yeah, that was a cute one, the Christmas card. Yeah. Yeah. Um, we have a a question. Um, here. Oops, I moved too fast. Uh, where, you know, where are you based out of? Am Amanda answered on the chat, but they're based out of Texas. Um, I've been learning about how fulfillment location verse my location can affect taxes. Can you speak a little bit on that? Are you is that something that they would have to you would know or do they have to ask an accountant? Right. Um it's more relevant specifically for Shopify for shop fulfillment. Um you will likely have to set up um the through Squarespace and Shopify. They'll have you they'll say, "Well, where are you sending your items from?" And you'll say Texas. And you usually are able to apply through just through that platform and it'll give you it'll basically allow you to collect the Texas tax and that's it. So whatever platform you're using generally will have that baked in so that you don't have to go dig for forms online or anything like that. Perfect. And we've got a bunch of questions that we collected um from authors um prior to this. So, I'm going to start asking some of those as well. What are the most common fulfillment mistakes creators make and how can I avoid them if I were to do them on my own? Okay. Um, so I would say the most common thing that I have seen is is again uh assuming that the post office is going to be careful or that fragile stickers always work or that writing do not bend on a package will work. Um, again, you should always pack everything like it's basically going to be run over by a car. Fill it up as much as possible. Use as heavy duty cardboard as you can. Um, just cuz I've seen and it just gives me like PTSD basically like people will just throw a book or throw I mean you guys have seen it. Amazon ships terribly. We know this. usually don't like ordering books off of Amazon because they throw a book into either a bubble mailer or a gigantic box with no fill and then the book just bangs around in there and you get it and it looks like a used book. To to your point, Lori, this is that's actually a great selling point on your website. So, if you guys have a Shopify website and you do direct sales, this is actually a great point to add to your Kickstarter page. Unlike major retailers, when you're buying direct, this is like communication you can use towards your consumer. We make sure that the packaging is superior or second to none so that everything that you're purchasing and you're spending your hard-earned money on is getting delivered to you with the best case, best chances of success. And please word that better than I did, but it's a great way to communicate on your website. We take extra care with our shipping and it's a great way on Kickstarter to be like, "Hey, I know shipping can be expensive, but we make sure that you're gonna get your book and that book's not gonna come with teeth teeth marks from the dog next door because it was packaged so well." So, these are great selling tips and points, too. Yeah. Sorry. No, it's okay. No, it's it's it's fantastic because we don't we never I feel like we never we don't really think about it. We're used to just getting stuff the way it is and I'm just it's we obsess over it on a daily basis like how to pack stuff so it doesn't get damaged. I mean these are some of these omnibuses are very expensive. They're foiled. They're all good. Like we don't want it to get hurt. Yeah. So um next one was uh what's the difference between media mail first class and international shipping and when should I use each? Is that something when working with you that you can tell me about? Is that something I go to tell you about or how does that process work? Yeah. So, uh it depends on the creator. Uh but for us, we like to use media mail for books and anything flat. So, books, bookmarks, stickers, uh tarot cards, anything kind of like that is fine for media mail. Um, now and media mail is a flat rate all over the entire United States. It doesn't matter where you are in the United States. It will cost every pound will cost a different amount. That's it. It's flat. Um, for ground advantage, that's what first class used to be. I mean, it used to be first class, now it's called ground advantage. Um, the rate's going to change depending on where you're shipping to, but if you're shipping out, I mean, technically with media mail, you're only supposed to ship books. So, if you have, you know, a candle in there, if you have a shirt in there, if you have stuff that's going to jangle around, ground advantage is what you're going to have to use legally. You can actually get fined by the post office if you ship non-media mail items media mail. So, you want you do want to be careful with that. Um, and then for international, uh, like I said, I will recommend Pirate Ship every day. Again, it's free. You just message their chat and ask to unlock simple export rate. And that again, as long as your package is under four pounds, it will cost it's a flat rate internationally, well, flat rate to Canada and then a flat rate everywhere else in the world. And it's extremely affordable in comparison to something like Stamps or other platforms. like it's about half the price because they have um like I said kind of shipping stations all over the US and they reroute all of the international package to one place or another place and then ship them out internationally that from there and that's how they save a bunch of money. Sorry I'm rambling. No, I mean that's really good to know and I think a lot of people are like I know to use pirate ship but I don't know how to use it. So I think that that's really good. Um, can Laguna handle fragile or multi-ite item swag bundles like mugs, candles, pins, etc. Yes. Yes, absolutely. And again, like we pack it very carefully. Uh, we just did a candle for that black tie billionaire campaign you guys saw with the fancy uh foil box. Um, and yeah, it just has to be, you know, we pack the candle. First of all, I I would like to mention that the candle uh you you want to make sure you have air conditioned storage for something like a candle. So, we have that because it can melt uh if the temperature gets high enough. And then, yeah, anything fragile, we we wrap it, we pack it in, we have the crinkle paper, all of that. So, anything anything like that, we we can ship it. If you can dream it, we can ship it, I guess, is how we put it. No, I love that, too, because everyone's like, I want to add this. I want to add that and the little items make the most sense to add because then they don't add too much to the weight. But they're like, you know, is that going to how how are they going to package that or how are they going to know? But it sounds like that stuff that you guys are like just send it to us and we'll take I know that you guys do this so I'll just tell them that you'll take like a video and show them what it looks like so they can see how it's being packaged. And I think that's really great. But what happens if a package gets lost or damaged? How do we handle or how do you handle and communicate with the the creator or the store owner on um that piece? Like somebody customer service-wise writes in and says, "Hey, I never got this package or I did get it and it's damaged. What would be next steps after that?" So I immediately we get one ready to ship out and we get it out of course. um you know, if it's damaged, we'll probably get some we want to get some pictures from you and then we can make a claim uh with the postal service or with you US uh with UPS. Um lost rarely happens. Um but again, like we just will ship out a replacement right away. Like we don't want we don't want a delay. We don't want your backers to have to wait for anything. So just the fastest turnaround we have. I have to read Holly's message because I know Holly personally and she's so funny. You guys don't understand how funny she is, but she wrote this and this is true. When trying to decide what items to include in a Kickstarter shipment, are there any good rule of thumbs on what to figure out will go in a box? I feel like I lack spa spatial awareness and may try to pick too many items. Hopefully, Amanda will reel me in. So, yeah. I mean, yeah, there's a limit to fix it. But because we work with the influence, like we kind of go back and forth and, you know, Amanda will email me and she'll be like, "Well, what about, you know, we have one we're working on now that's a 10book set and it's got a 10 book set and a plushy and a puzzle and a" and she's like, "Can we fit all of this in a box?" And then Eric, you know, has kind of like a graph paper and he he maps it all out and figures it out and we're like, "Yes, or no, that's too much." Um we so we can pretty much do anything unless it's really big. We can figure it out. Um but to start I would recommend you know you have your book and then stuff that's smaller than the book and that's what I where I would start and then build crazy after that. And I think I think it depends too because like what your add-ons look like. I mean, this is more of your campaign strategy. So, this would be like what makes sense for you. And um Amanda wrote, "I will always reel you in." I mean, it's something that when we're doing campaign management, we always talk to you about is like, you know, how big do you want these packages to to be? And um you can always make them more valuable. Like I said, with those personal touches that don't take a lot, like a little note or a Christmas card or a letter or something like that, and those are all flat. So, um I think it's really per creator on how you put together these these tiers. Um yeah, I mean something to think about too is the weight of the package. So, if you're putting a lot of heavy items in there and you have a lot of international backers, that's a consideration, too. You might want a lighter package if you want to ship more internationally. And you could have rewards that are only US-based if you want. Like, you could say like this reward I can only ship to the US because there's so much in it. So, like there's options to play around with your tiers that make financial sense to you. So, um if you're working with us, we'll definitely help you with that. Uh what about custom fees or international backers? Um who pays for those? How how does that work? So, it's not a perfect system. I I'll start with that. Um we try to avoid customs as best we can. We try to mark thing mark things as a gift. Uh we try to mark the value down a little bit just because that can help uh with, you know, people getting dinged with $100 customs fees. We still will have some international backers that get hit with a customs fee. In my experience, most of them are used to it. Um so they're not hugely surprised, but it is something to keep in mind. Um, again, especially list shipping, a very expensive, a high price point book. Uh, with UPS cuz we use often UPS for international shipping that shipments that weigh a lot. Uh, we haven't had problems except for in I want to say Croatia and Belgium. And other than that, we have not seen uh ridiculous customs fees. But it's going to be completely subjective. just have to kind of warn people, hey, this might happen. We're going to do everything we can to prevent it. But yeah, I think you're right. They are used to getting hit with that if they're especially on Kickstarter. Let's start with that. Kickstarter backers are awesome for many reasons reasons and one of it is their expectations. So unless they're new to Kickstarter for the first time ordering, a lot of times they're like, "Oh, we've done this. We've been down this road before. Um, but if you, you know, I always say kill them with kindness. If you ever have somebody who's upset, just remind them that you, it took you years to write this book and that it's a passion project, but, you know, kill them with kill them with kindness. Um, what about late uh respon unresponsive backers or like late to the party backers that haven't gotten back to you? Like how do creators communicate that with you? And then what happens because you've got those, you know, let's say you have 250 books that you've got and you've got 20 people that haven't let you know and they're just sitting there. So what can creators expect and how can they communicate with you? So it yeah, it always happens. It's uh frustrating for sure on the on the creators part. Um, I recommend like beyond a Kickstarter message, emailing everybody directly, um, and being like, "Hey, this is when we're going to do the first wave of shipping." And then after that, giving them a gentle deadline. Um because like we have had backers come back after a year and a half and be like, "Hey, I filled out my survey yesterday. Can I have my stuff?" And it's like it's just not doable sometimes to keep the stuff and all the swag for that long. I mean, we can store it for you. That is something we offer, but I would suggest setting, you know, a threemon after the surveys go out or something, a three-month deadline, like, you know, in case people are moving, they have an emergency, whatever it is, to come back and get their survey and send, you know, an email uh once every two weeks or once a month or something, and then be like, I'm really sorry we're closing the orders now because it's just like you as the creator can't keep track of it for a year and a while you've already run three other Kickstarters and you have four other special editions that you're sending out, right? Yeah, I I like that. I think giving boundaries to backers is a good idea. Um, and reminders and communication off Kickstarter I also think is good because sometimes it can go to their spam or they think they're getting solicited by Kickstarter, but a personal email might go through faster. So, having those as two forms of communication, I think, is valuable for any business. Um, I love Holly. She just asked, "What's the weirdest or coolest thing you've shipped for an author? Or better or worse?" I want to know this one. I'm trying to think of you weird. Um, for comics creators, we've done poker chips. I mean, that's not really weird, though. Like, I would like more weird stuff to ship, so please come up with stuff. And all right, Molly, we gota give we're gonna give her so when she gets asked this again, challenge accepted. Thank you. Yeah, I want to see what what kind of weird stuff you can come up with because I'm definitely down. That would be amazing. I love that. Um, so more author specific questions that we were asked. How do you safely store and pack special edition books to avoid damage in transit? I guess you really did um tell us this when you when Eric was doing his lovely Vanna White, but is there a difference between what you do for special editions maybe versus regular books or is it really just you protect the books at all cost like every single one of them is made out of glass? Um honestly we treat everything like it's special edition anyway. So because we're we're crazy that way. So everything is treated, you know, temperature controlled, uh, packed very carefully, comic books, special editions, regular books, everything we take. We're really careful. That's just we can't do it otherwise. That's just how we are. What would be the best um, suggestion if like let's say, and a lot of Kickstarters do this, but a lot of stores do this too. So this is really good for your Shopify store. Um, many of our clients will do signed and unsigned. So, when they're sending the books to you, I know how we do it at the influence. Um, but maybe you could shed some light how others um have done it. So, you when you receive the books, you know the difference between signed and unsigned. Do you want me to tell you what we do as best practice and then you can tell me anything that's different that what won't we send to you? Yeah, if you want to talk about like how you guys do it. So, how we do we do it a couple of ways. So, one of the ways we'll do it is we have a sticker that's put on the outside of the shrink wrap and then we make sure that our factories put those books in separate boxes. Like there's two ways to This is what they're supposed to do. There's two ways we do it. We have the boxes and they say like signed and unsigned and then on the inside they're supposed to have a little sticker that says like um signed copy. That's how we, you know, suggest and we we like it to be done. So then when Laguna gets packages, they get the box that has like on the box on the labeling of the box signed and versus the other box unsigned. And then the ones that are unsigned, when you open them, there's nothing on them. Then the ones that are signed have the little sticker. I'll also tell you for retail purposes, people love opening the book and like taking the book out with the shrink wrap on it and having the little sticker that says signed edition or signed copy. So, I think that's really good. But if you were to like, you know, get all of them at home and from, let's just say, like a US supplier and you're signing some of them and you're not signing them, Lori, like how else could they do it? Do you think just separating in box or like a sticky note or like what's another way that might be good for you? Right. I would I would talk to your printer. I would ask them to separate them because like if you end up with a situation where you have a bunch of shrink wrap books and you don't know which ones are signed, you're in for a treat. You're going to have to open everything. You don't have a choice. Um so asking your printer if they can do that for you. Uh separate, you know, asking them basically to separate the orders depending on your printer. That might work. Um, and just uh I'm trying to think you if you're very worried. I mean something we do in the comics world is we actually have a physically a cover that actually looks different. Um, in the book world that's not so much a thing because I imagine that's an entirely different print run and it'll cost a lot to do. Um, so mostly just making sure that your manufacturer, your printer is labeling the boxes before they get to you so you don't have to go through every addition and you have that shrink wrapped experience like Dana said. Yeah. Um, hold on real quick. I'm writing a note down that you just said. Uh, okay. What kind of information does Laguna Studio need from creators to get started? Like let's say they're like, "Okay, this was great. I definitely don't want to do this on my own. What do I do next so that I can do start this process?" Or what should they even to have a meeting with you be prepared with so that the meeting is organized to the best of the ability? Like what would be those next steps? Um I mean we can help walk you through any amount of this. Uh we of course like to know uh the plan of what you're planning to ship the book, the add-ons, the stretch goals. Uh if you're doing a collector's box, if you want a custom experience like that black tide billionaire box where you want to open it up and you know there's LEDs and everything is amazing. Like just kind of that have an idea of how you want how you want your backers or your your fans to receive the books that they're getting and what you're shipping and that's it. and we can basically guide you from there. Um what does a fulfillment to timeline typically look like from um so from factory to door but then also from door to drop shipping. So I guess I could answer from factory to door it's 30 to 45 days unless we do a fast ship boat which costs more gas so it's a little bit more expensive and that's 25 days. So, just to give you backstory, if you're producing overseas, it's 30 days production overseas. That's not a uh influence thing. That's just a production overseas thing. And then shipping on boat normally takes about 30 days. And then you have um they go to port from port to a truck takes anywhere between five and seven days. And then another seven days on the truck. So, we say 30 to 45 days because that's typically what that'll look like. And um if you do any fast boat shipping, that's 25 days. So we typically say between 25 and 30 days, but it is an it is expensive and not necessary unless you've got an event that you're going to or there's something um you know timesensitive. But then uh Lori, when it gets to you guys, what does that timeline look like? So it it depends on kind of the intricacy of the project. If we're just getting books and we're turning around books for you, we can receive books and turn them around within a week. We can start that shipping within a week. Re, you know, receive them, count them, check them, get them, start getting them out. Um, if we're looking at a big Kickstarter with 500 plus backers and a lot of intricate tiers and we're kitting up, so if we're taking, you know, bookmarks and stickers and art prints and we're kitting them together in a plastic, then we're probably looking at two to three weeks to get everything shipped up to a month. Again, if it's a huge campaign and there's a lot of items to mess with, but I like to stay within two to three weeks max. Is there anything Holly asked that we can do as creators or should do on our side to make your job easier to make the process smoother? [Music] Um having especially on Kickstarter having simple tiers, simple reward tiers and not too many reward tiers. Um, I have had to we've had to fulfill comic book campaigns with 50 reward tiers. And it's very challenging. It adds a lot of time on our end to have all of those tiers, have all of the different items, have all the different covers. Um, and I know the influence doesn't do campaigns like that. Like when they run their campaigns, it's very streamlined. Um, but I would highly recommend to streamline your campaign. We don't and I'll tell you why. So you're going to lose consumers and this is for any type of direct sales. If you were to go just think about yourselves, you're all consumers, right? So you're all the ICP, the ideal customer persona. You go to a website that's convoluted. Are you going to buy over that website or going to Amazon? Right? You understand Amazon like it's the back of your hand. So if you were going to go to a website, I bought this sweater on Amazon. There's a story, but I'll save that for later. But if I were to go to a clothing company and I go to the website, there's so much around this sweater that I don't like that I could buy the sweater and it comes with a set of earrings and a bag and a this and I'm like, I'm so confused. I just want the sweater and I can't figure out how to get that. I would much rather go to Amazon where I just click buy and done. Right? So, it's kind of that way. And I'm giving you a simple analogy, but you want to make the process really easy for the consumer to be like, "Oh, that was a wonderful process. I'm done." If you've got 50 rewards and each reward has like your main item that you're creating plus one more thing plus one more thing plus one more thing, that is going to be extremely trying to have a success rate on your side without customer service issues. Now, I'll tell you why that used to happen back in the day because you're probably wondering why you've seen that five years ago versus why you don't see it as much anymore. Just last year, Kickstarter came up with the skew system. That's why it's so much easier now to have so many back add-ons versus the reward tiers because each item can be its own skew. That never happened before. So, creators were doing all these different reward tiers because add-ons weren't as easily accessible. So, I would say if you have tiers anywhere from like six to 10, that's great, especially for non or for fiction books. Non-fiction is a little bit different. So, if you had like anywhere from 10 to 20, that would be fine. And that's a whole different conversation. But for fiction, I think having tiers that are anywhere between six and 10 is really great. Even five, four is probably on the low side, but keeping it simple is is really for the best. So, you can have more people, have a better user experience, and yes, it makes Lor's job easier, too, but it's going to make you more sales in the long run. So that's that's um Oh, and Holly asked, "Is there considered a reasonable range of tiers?" That's our best suggestion from data we've gotten from Kickstarter and data we've gotten from the 50 campaigns that we've run ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say six to 10 as well. That's that's definitely uh the best range. And also more like just from an item production standpoint. If you offer too many items, you're just going to spend money producing items and then you'll have two or three backers on a tier where now you have to produce a hundred of whatever that is or like it's just a it's a nightmare for you too. Don't do it. Yeah. And a w a waste of money. We hate when we have like an item that's was less than 10 purchased and they've got a minimum quantity that they have to do. So, um yeah, I think that that's for the best for everyone. um when they get inventory, can they send it to you in waves or does everything need to arrive around the same time? Like how do you how do you do that? Because I'm sure if you're using us, we would obviously figure this out with Laguna, but if you're not and you're doing this on your own, you're not going to get everything at the exact same time. So, what should a creator be prepared for and how do they communicate with you about that? Um yeah, you can we can receive stuff in waves. Uh it's that's definitely a common thing. um you know people are they might be producing you know in the case of the influence they're kind of they kind of do everything under one umbrella which is really nice. So we get everything at once from them but some of our creators you know they'll use one printer for stickers and one printer for bookmarks and one printer for the book and another printer for something else. And so they'll get the stuff or they'll send it to us in waves and it's not a problem as long as you communicate with us that we're going to get it. Uh, I do prefer that. Sometimes we get surprise boxes and we're told about them and I prefer to know that they're going to get here. But that's fair. Something else that um we can do working with Lagona, so if you're ordering um like say 500, a,000 or more than a thousand books with us and you don't need them all to be drop shipped right away, but you want the lower price point, we can hold them at the factory. So, it has to be a minimum of um 500 books or 500 sets. But if you wanted to, let's just say you've got um you know, I don't know, 1500 books, but you don't want them to all go to Lagona at one time or you don't want them to all go to your yourself or wherever you're doing it. We can't hold them past, you know, 3 to 6 months, but we can hold them and put them on a a different boat so that they're not sitting, you know, for Lori. um at our at this time there's no additional cost for that on our end. We don't charge you for it. So that could be a way if you didn't want to give uh your fulfillment center everything so it was sitting there for a long period of time that you could do with your book production with us. Um now again that we can't hold it longer than six months but it's still nice to be able to stagger that um and give you another option for for fulfillment. Yeah, we have a window on our end too uh for Kickstarter campaigns. So, you know, if we get your bookmarks and it takes a couple of weeks to get another item, we don't charge you storage on that stuff. You know, we wait until the campaign is fulfilled before we talk or deal with storage. But you can do storage, right? So, if somebody's like, "Hey, I just want to get everything to you and let's do this for the next five years." Like, it's it's fine, right? Right. Exactly. Yeah. We store any amount of books uh as long as you need. Um we store them for shop fulfillment. We store them just to hold on to them because you might not want to deal with the shipping fees if you're international. Uh we have that space if you don't have the space. It's all temperature controlled here. So nothing like everything's cool and nothing can melt or anything crazy because you you that is a concern with storage. You want to make sure you keep your books and stuff in a low enough temperature so you don't have any issues with glue or anything especially in Texas because hot. So, we want to keep everything cool. Same with C. Like I said, candles, if you have wax melts, anything like that. Yeah, we offer. Sorry, I'm rambling again, but yeah. No, no, you're I think that that's great. Everybody wants to know that kind of stuff because they're giving you their babies, their book babies and their candle babies. Um, question for you, and this is one that we get often, so I know it's a good one for them to know if they're working with you and it's a Kickstarter. What happens when the um the uh consumer receives the package? Does it say it's from Lagona? Is there a white label op option? Like how do We always get um questions on our side, but maybe you could explain for the the create the creator and the um authors how that will get received by their backers. Um yeah, so well international backers, it'll come from my personal name because customs wants like an actual name on it. So, that's a little dicey. But everything else, um, what we default to doing is Laguna Studios for and then the creator's name so that they see both names on there. But creator wants anything, we can set it up, no problem. Uh, we Okay. So, there's a there's a a white label option. So, if a creator has like um you know a bigger umbrella name, right, where I don't I don't trying to think of one of our authors that actually does this where she has like a brand name and then it might be like the book name. It could be even like from Cat Singleton or the Singleton book family and then Black Tai Billionaires or something like that. So, they could have a white labeling type of um uh communication to the to the backers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we can do that. And we can also, you know, if you have custom packaging or custom, like some people have, you know, custom branded tape that they want us to use on the packages, custom branded tissue paper that has, you know, influence stamps all over, whatever it is. Yeah. You just you send it to us and we can we can make it custom that way. Same with the white label. I love that. And then do you integrate with backer kick edge manager or Shopify for post campaign fulfillment? Yes. Yep. Yeah. Whatever the creator wants to use, we uh we're versed in setting all of that up. So, if you need help setting that up, we can do it for you. But we also just work with all of those um those integrations on our end and have used them. We use them all. So, we can uh Backer Kit is nice uh because they we can actually print shipping labels through Backer Kit. You can load your shipping funds up through there. Um, all of them kind of work well depending on what you want to do. Kickstarter, I know, is rolling out some new features soon that I'm really excited about. Uh, pledge manager, just so everyone here knows, um, you'll be able to do that like on Backer Kit. Um, oh dear, we were just told yesterday, I think it's end of May. Don't quote me, but it it's it's coming where it'll be released for everybody. I know it's in beta right now. um to to talk about that because I'm actually interested on the Shopify side. So, I know that you can add somebody into your Shopify page. Is that something that if you were added to um you can automatically like orders come in, you guys get it, the creator, the author doesn't have to look at it or are you looking for like a report sent from the Shopify side? Nope. Yeah. Uh with Shopify and Squarespace, uh the creator can hook us up as like a partner or a user depending on the interface and then we get emails when you get orders and we ship everything out. You don't have to do anything. That's that is awesome. Um really nice. Rebecca, if you're on this call, that's awesome. But she's probably like, "Yep." Um, that's great because the one thing that I think even for me, like I was just laughing the other day because I was like, I haven't even gone in here and clicked all these have been fulfilled. There was like 30 orders. I forgot to say that. I know they Rebecca wrote definitely awesome. Yep. I knew girl knew your girl like that. I was like, "Oh my gosh, I haven't even said that these are filled." Now, everybody got their books already, but like going in and manually doing something to so to have a partner who would be able to get those orders and seamlessly drop ship and not have to touch it, that's like an author's dream. Yeah. And we so we do typically do we'll do shop orders. We'll ship twice a week for those. So, you know, as soon as they come in, we invoice you. We get them out and we get them out within that week. We're also working with uh creators right now for Tik Tok shop, which is going to be fun. Uh they have a three-day turnaround time. So, again, we can do it for you. We can get hooked up to something like that. We just need to know the turnaround time and and what we need to do and we can handle that stuff. I love that. Um, we have one more question. Um, do you have a knowledge base on what Kickstarter add-ons are most popular based on genre? Like for example, romance readers like candles or custom perfumes, science fiction readers, not as much. Does that something I think we could probably answer some of this too, but is that something that you see on your end? Um, uh, for comic books, I can answer more knowledgeably for, uh, metal stuff, metal bookmarks and metal trading cards and varied numbers are definitely like the big thing. I know, uh, for for books, people love upgrades to the book. I know that's not an add-on, but for stretch goals and stuff, uh, you know, adding foiling, adding, uh, sprayed edges, adding all of that stuff as stretch goals is a really good strategy. But I'll let Dana because you'll you'll know more about the merch. Yeah, I think so. Um, science fiction, um, high fantasy, not romantic, but high fantasy, they love their pins, they love patches, they love stickers. Um, they love book Everybody loves bookmarks. That's I don't think that's genre specific, but metal bookmarks for that genre. Um, Christine, I imagine that you are you thinking romance? What's your genre? Um, because I can give you specifics over that. Romance is uh Oh, she wrote me. Um, sci-fi. Oh, good. So, I was on the right. I was I didn't even know. Um, sci-fi love pins. They love patches. Um, we have worked with a couple for zipper pulls, like custom zipper pulls. It's been kind of cool because they can do those on their backpacks or on their actual um jackets. So, cover custom zipper pulls are really neat. Um, definitely bookmarks. Metal bookmarks are huge, I think, in that. Um, metal covers, PU, which is vegan le leather co covers are really big in sci-fi. Um, music, anything music related. So, we just did um Kevin Anderson's and he did music CDs. So, that that's a big one that we see a lot of. I'm trying to think, Amanda, if you want to jump in with anything, you're probably um pins. Did I say pins and magnets? Pins, magnets. uh decals like window clings decals instead of like traditional stickers. Um like foiled stickers like treatments to some of the more standard stuff. Um trying to think what else. Jen said custom metal art prints. Yeah, that genre. That's actually awesome. Jen, that that's a good one. They love metal stuff. Metal covers, metal bookmarks, metal artwork prints. Um I'm trying to think of some other things that have been like more on that metal side of things that we've done. The pins and magnets are really huge. I I don't want to keep saying that. Oh, playing decks, cards. That's great for all genres across the board, but card like card specific. Um tarot for romance, uh which is an announcement we're about to make down the road. Um mouse pad, like custom mouse pads, playing mats. Playmats, Christine. Playmats are huge. That's a big one that we've seen. That's a great one, Amanda. Posters. We've done a bunch of posters um for sci-fi. Keychains are a good uh alternative to like pins as well. Um holographic upgrades are very popular. Agreed. I would say that that's a big one, too. They like the leather. Um we've done a bunch of like vegan leather things for sci-fi lately. I'm actually working on four vegan leather um sci-fi covers right now. We just got them yesterday. So, that's been huge. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Um, well, we've run over. This has been our longest. This is Thank you for staying, Lori. Um, we absolutely loved having you. Um, we do have to cut it because I have another meeting to go do that. I didn't even realize how far over we were. But, I want to thank everybody for coming today and attending. I want to thank Lori and your team and and Eric for being the best Van White I've ever seen. Like, his acting skills are awesome. come so on point. And um thank you. Oh, thanks Holly. Thanks everybody for showing up. And for those of you at home that'll be watching this later, it'll be on our website. We'll send it out in an email within a couple of days. Um but you can always rewatch these at any time. We hope that these are really helpful. Next month we're going to have Oriana, the head of publishing um from Kickstarter on and she's going to talk about cohorts and some of the things that Kickstarter is doing behind the scenes to help bring in more community. So, for example, in July they're running Heartstrings and Hardbacks, which is for romance. Um, they're running in October, Amanda, I always say it wrong. What's it called? Witch Starter. Yes, you did it right. Witch Starter. I call it like Witchtober. I don't even know why I've made I've made my own things up, people. Um, if you're going to Author Nation and you're a signing author at Author Nation, there's a cohort for Author Nation. So, we're going to talk about all those things that Kickstarter is doing to get you a bigger audience on their platform. So, we can't wait for that. Remember, these are always every last Wednesday of the month at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time and noon Eastern Standard Time. Lori, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. That was awesome. Bye, everybody. We'll see you all next month.