Editing The Pen Addict 279/transcript (section)

== Atlanta Pen Show ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Yep. So in April 2016, me and Brad are at the Atlanta Pen Show. And we start getting a bunch of people tweeting at us because there are some weird notebooks beginning to drop in people's letterboxes. And it was a commemorative reprint of Butcher Orange and Butcher Blue. And it was then in 2016 that we said, oh, we have to get you guys on the show again to talk about that. And we've been waiting. And then when we think, we was like, oh, we'll do it, we'll do it. And we wait until now. Because we have no idea how you did that, the way that you did that. So first off, like this was a...

'''Jim Coudal:''' That might be my favorite edition, actually.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, that's pretty cool. I guess I've got a couple of questions for this, right? Okay. Why did you do it? And then how did you manage the logistics of one, printing everybody's names, and two, having them drop almost same day in a lot of places around the world?

'''Brian Bedell:''' You take the first part, I'll take the second part.

'''Jim Coudal:''' I'll take the first part, and I'm going to make it really short. I think I had the idea, and when I presented it to Michelle and Brian, everybody started giggling. And then we said, okay, we have to do it. And if we can do it, we have to do it. But how we actually... And then we were like little kids. We were like, oh, they're going to be so surprised. No one's going to know that it's coming. It was so fun for us. And we're always looking for ways to do a little extra for the subscribers, because subscribers, much like your Kickstarter subscribers, are the ones that really drive the business of Field Notes. So if we can really surprise them with something, and in this case, it was a surprise shipment, which we hadn't really done before. But how exactly we did it, I don't know.

'''Brian Bedell:''' Yeah, I mean, as far as printing them was simple. They're the very first ones we did, so there's not much to the actual printing. The belly bands, digital printing's come so far. We're looking at new ways to take advantage of that in the future, because it's getting to a point where it's pretty solid quality. There, even just a few years ago, that we would have never used it for a cover, and now we're looking at doing that for some things. But printing the belly bands was just a matter of mail merging. The subscriber list, weeding out. There were a few ones that were troubled, as far as matching names to real names to people's subscription names and things like that. But Dawson sort of handles all of our logistics and databases and website and things like that. So he had it all pretty organized into... He had it all really organized. Yeah, he's super organized. He keeps this place going. But yeah, I mean, so basically it was a mail merge into a digital printer that would just substitute whatever string for their name. We had to take into consideration... I wish I could remember some of the names, like Otto Klempner, whatever, from Germany, who had four names. We had to kind of go in and cut a couple surnames off of a few people. But in general, that was fairly easy. The trick was, if one gets lost in the mail, what do you do then?

'''Jim Coudal:''' But we solved that, too, by having a secondary run.

'''Brian Bedell:''' Right. So we knew all along we'd have to do at least one more run a little later. We also knew we were going to sell some more subscriptions based on that, and people would want to get that, too. So I think we ended up doing three printings, and then that got everyone covered other than a few stragglers, which I think we just laser printed a few in the last few. I don't know.

'''Jim Coudal:''' Dawson figured out all of the chipping part of it, but it worked, like, perfect. It was unbelievable. People were opening them in Chicago on the same day they were opening them in Berlin. Yeah. And the same day they were opening them in Toronto.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Because our first texts were from Europe. Yeah, because then... I'm in Atlanta.

'''Myke Hurley:''' We try to do that every time, and it doesn't usually work that well. It varies. Sometimes I get them the same day as Brad. Sometimes it's a week later. But, like, this one, just something happened. Like, as I sent a text to my fiance, and she's like, yeah, you got them. She opened up and sent me the picture of them. Like, that must have been a really huge undertaking to get all of that stuff to work so perfectly.

'''Jim Coudal:''' It was, and those days when we knew they were in the mail and nobody had seen them yet was so much fun. Because it was, like, looming.

'''Brian Bedell:''' We knew that it was out there. Part of the beauty of that, too, is that we weren't... There was no announcement date, really. So we had a little... No one was waiting for them, and we weren't really in a hurry to ship them out immediately or anything. So we got to kind of take our time and plan it very carefully. So with a shipment... Not a luxury we have. With an addition, we're like, we got to go, we got to go, we got to go.

'''Myke Hurley:''' As soon as they're done, they just go out. It doesn't matter who they're going to will win.

'''Brian Bedell:''' Well, we do time. With regular editions, we generally ship Europe a couple days early. Yeah. Or the rest of the world. And then Canada, Mexico a day or two early. And then maybe hold Chicago ones just so people in Chicago aren't getting the same.

'''Jim Coudal:''' The funny thing is that people are people. And once they realized that if they bought a subscription, they could still get their own customized commemorative edition. You should have seen some of the names that people put on their accounts.

'''Brian Bedell:''' Yeah, I think subscriptions that started with that edition had some pretty weird things.

'''Jim Coudal:''' If his name was very rare Field Notes, we didn't go along with that. That was very funny.

'''Myke Hurley:''' See, one of the things when we were talking about hype and audience, one of the things that makes the Field Notes edition so interesting is that you keep things close to the chest. How hard is that to do?

'''Brian Bedell:''' That's so hard. We've had a few. There have been some attempts to get info before it came out. I remember with the old website was in WordPress and people sort of figured out one issue. People sort of figured out the file structure of that and found pictures of it a day or two before it came out. People just digging around guessing file names. It was the Russians. Yeah, it was the Russians. And we've had all of our printers know what's up with Field Notes so they know what to look out for. If someone's calling like, hey, this is Mark at Field Notes. Can you tell me about people they know to keep it secret? So they're real good about that. They all do other stuff that's very sensitive too. So printers are very careful about not dumping a bunch of stuff in a dumpster or anything like that. So it hasn't been too much of a problem. I mean, it's hard for us to not brag about it because we're always excited about it. And Jim, I guess, Jim, you always put that photo in the mailer. I know. Sometimes it has nothing to do with it and still people guess what it is. Other times it's very clear. And no one gets it. So that's always kind of a crap shoot. But it's kind of funny when a few people guess it. That's obviously that tight group of people. So it's not really going to leak out into the world anyway.

'''Jim Coudal:''' Unbelievably, sometimes people out of nowhere with no information at all just guess it exactly. Or they guess the next one. Because people always have a conversation about what would you like to see in the next edition. And sometimes people get it and we're like, oh, that guy is going to be so happy. Yeah.

'''Brian Bedell:''' It's a lot of times. Yeah. There's just people guess and speculate so much on there that even a blind squirrel gets in it once in a while.

'''Jim Coudal:''' And we can't. Like people suggest additions to us all the time. But we really don't. Can't take those suggestions. We don't encourage them. We don't pay attention to them. Just because we have to do our own thing.

'''Brian Bedell:''' And really nine times out of ten it's something we've thought of and we're either going to do or we're sitting on it and thinking of a better way to do it or something.