Tom Mayer

So let's think about whether we want to publish the book into that season.

Or maybe you want to publish in the spring.

April, May, and June are traditionally very competitive months in book publishing because they lead to a book-buying season of Mother's Day, Father's Day, and graduation.

Those are traditionally strong book-selling seasons.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, the other one is September, October, November, which leads you into the holidays.

And that was like a real moment of committing the group to nailing all of our dates.

So that was a significant moment for, like, setting the deadlines for the work ahead.

The tricky thing about printing overseas is that you introduce risk and complexity to your entire process.

Because you have to physically put the book on pallets and the pallets physically have to go into containers and the container physically has to go onto a boat.

And then sometimes you wait months for there to be room on a boat leaving the port of whatever.

And then that boat has to sail across the ocean and then dock at the port of New Jersey and then be unloaded by longshoremen and clear customs and then be trucked to our warehouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

And there are a lot of steps along that process where things can go wrong.

I looked at it through, you know, my hands were over my eyes.

I felt deep sympathy for the publisher and specifically for the production manager of that book.

I mean, that must have been very stressful for them.

A leading question.

Yeah.

I mean, obviously, the looming tariffs and trade war issues introduced unknowns and risk that we had to account for as we thought about where we wanted to print.

My reaction to that was, okay, you don't like that?