Hey! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. Let’s talk about percentages. So, Stormlight 5 is at, Bing! 41% through the 3.0 revision. Still plugging away on that, making a lot of good progress. And, Bing! Skyward Flight, I am at 20% on my revision of that. So I am making some good progress on both of these. Skyward Flight’s in my hands until I finish this. Then we’ll pitch it back to Janci for her next revision. Feeling good about both books. A little overwhelmed by Stormlight. This is the period of time where I have a few months to finish the last revisions on the book, and it’s sometimes a bit of a challenge but moving along.

Let’s see. Store tells me all the leatherbound books are back in stock. So, hey, you can go get leatherbounds if you want them. 

And I have a moderately big announcement for convention attendants. We decided we want to go to different places when we can, and whatnot. And so this year we’re going to go to C2E2 (Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo) for the first time. This is in Chicago. That’s April 26th and 27th. That’ll be me and the whole Dragonsteel booth team. So look forward to seeing us there if you’re in the Chicago region. I grew up in Nebraska, which might seem far away, but Chicago was the cool big city that we would always travel to. So, eight-hour drive because the United States is big. But it was kind of like my home town big city, so I’m happy to be going back.

Those are the big announcements, but I want to talk to you a little bit about shipping. Because we’re getting ready to crowdfund Words of Radiance leatherbound. And I promised you all I would come back to you with some information on shipping, particularly to Europe and Asia. So let me explain why it’s such a challenge for us. A lot of companies, what they do is they go, and they print their products—this happens with board games—they print their products in China, and then they have one shipping container go to Europe, one come to the US, and then they’re distributed there. The problem we have is we print our books in the US. We don’t distribute them from China. We like printing, when we can, in the United States. There’s just a bunch of reasons for this, mostly having to do with quality control. And exporting from the US is way more expensive than from China. So when a shipping container goes from China to Europe, they charge certain tariffs. When a shipping container comes from US to Europe, those expenses are much, much higher. So that’s part of why those prices are very hard for us to deal with. 

So what have we tried to do? Well, we spoke to FedEx about shipping a freight to them, a shipping container or whatnot, and having them distribute once they’re in the country. They came back with a price, and it’s more expensive than what we’re doing right now. Shipping by boat has increased, about quadrupled, in the last couple of years because so much more shipping has happened because of the pandemic and things like that. So we have this problem where we can’t really ship to Europe and have them be distributed there by FedEx. We went and asked a bunch of distribution centers, and they’re also more expensive than what we’re doing right now. Again, it’s partially because, number one, we’re still a small business, so the numbers that we’re shipping out don’t get us the good, really, really good break points. It’s mostly because we’re shipping from the US and not from China. If we decided to print our leatherbounds in China, then these prices for shipping could come way down. Just, we worry about quality control. We worry about, you know, we do print some things in China, but we worry that we can’t investigate the working conditions and things like that. And, you know, that’s a big deal to us. 

So the next thing we did, because of the success of our last campaign, we went and started negotiating better rates with FedEx and USPS, and they’ve given us some discounts. And we’ve been kind of trying to pass that along to you. We’re still looking at all kinds of options. If some of you out there have options for us, please let us know in the comments. It looks like, with this crowdfunding campaign, the cheapest thing to do is what we’ve been doing. Nothing else we’ve looked at has been any cheaper. And if you’re wondering why it’s so expensive for us, it’s that. It’s that we’re printing the books in the United States. And so regardless, we’re going to try to do what we can to keep those shipping costs down. We do not add any handling fees to our shipping for anything that we do. It is all straight pass-along what we are quoted and the best quotes that we can get. Included in that is your taxes and fees. So it is bundled with your taxes and fees for bringing a book into your country.

So, like, I understand. Right? You buy a book that’s $250, and then the shipping cost can sometimes cost almost as much, sometimes more than the book you’re buying, depending on the book. I get it. It’s just really painful to see. So anyway, if anyone has any solutions for us, you know, the only thing we can think of at this point would be to print in China, but then we have, you know, distribution problems. It’s like, we have no quality control over the fulfillment. We can’t say when places are going to send them out. And when you send us a ticket of your book, you know, being late or something, we would have no ability to really influence that. And we would worry about what’s going on in China sometimes with some of the facilities there, since we can’t get over there and inspect them ourselves. 

But let us know. Let me know in the comments. I will go and read these comments. And particularly those of you from Europe, who see these shipping costs and your eyes bug out. You know, let me know in the comments. Do you want us to do a print run in China and try your books coming from China instead of the US? Is that something you want us to investigate? We’ve been very hesitant and resistant to that. But, you know, you’re the ones who want these books. And maybe that’s the answer that we need to pursue. But if you think of anything else, let us know. But for right now, with this crowdfunding campaign, we’re going to proceed in the way that we’ve been doing it before while still trying to search for other options for the future. 

So, that’s where we are. Please give me some feedback. And I will be back next week with some more updates.