20230102 Bublish Final Edit

Bublish is a company that aims to solve the problems faced by traditional and self-publishers in the book industry. Traditional publishing is broken, and self-publishing, which generates 30% of the industry's revenue, is also flawed. Most self-published books only sell 100 copies, even the good ones. Bublish helps authors understand the business side of publishing, including positioning their book in the marketplace and converting browsers into buyers. They offer tools and programs for different types of authors, such as business authors who want to link their book to their larger goals, and fiction authors who want to establish their brand and increase their sales over time. Bublish plans to automate the publishing process by using natural language processing technology to help authors understand what kind of editing their work needs. This technology will make the education process faster, more affordable, and more accessible. Welcome to Venture in the South, a weekly 30 minutes lighting the path to success for startups and investors in the Southern United States. Welcome to Venture in the South. I'm David and I'm here today with Kathy Meiss. She's the CEO of Bublish, a very interesting business. I want to tell you a little bit about Kathy. She is a publisher, has been a ghost writer, a developmental editor, an entrepreneur, and she's been in the publishing and media business for more than 30 years. She's worked with brands such as CBS and Forbes, co-founded the author-centric publishing conference PubSmart in Charleston, South Carolina, and she's been a speaker at many major publishing conferences, including Book Expo America, the San Francisco Writers Conference, Women in Publishing, and others. She founded Bublish in 2015 to help the emerging class of professional self-publishers. And we'll talk a little bit about that. And she's succeeded quite a bit in that competitive marketplace. So welcome, Kathy. Thanks for having me, David. So tell us a little bit about what problem Bublish is solving. Well, first of all, if you look at traditional book publishing, that model is really broken. Anyone who's followed the national news coverage surrounding Penguin Random Houses attempt by Simon & Schuster, which was shot down by the court, will know this to be true, right? It's not working anymore. But the other thing that's not really working anymore, and a lot of people don't know this, is self-publishing, which now generates 30% of the revenue in the $29 billion US book publishing industry. So it's also broken. The dirty little secret of self-publishing is that it's really about adding more authors and more books, much more than helping the authors publish better books and sell more copies. And the sad reality is that 90% of self-published books only sell 100 copies, even the good ones. And we think that it's time to change that. Because successful book publishing and marketing is a fairly complicated endeavor, and some publishers don't really understand that they have to master not just the craft of writing, but in self-publishing, they have to master the business of publishing. And that can be daunting. So we're addressing that problem. So let me just drill into this a little bit. You're saying that the publishing market is about 30% self-publishing? Yes, 30% of the revenue is now generated by self-publishers. And that's probably a little bit of an underestimate because the growth is so fast in self-publishing, right? There's no agent involved. You don't have to get a publishing deal. So anybody who wants to publish now can publish. So the problem they encounter is managing that, I guess it's a process of publishing, of writing, editing, publishing, printing, illustrating, all of that stuff. Is that right? Yeah, there's a lot of phases to the publishing process. There's a professional timeline that should be followed in order to do things in the correct order and do them well. And quite honestly, most self-publishers come to the process as creators, right? They want to write their story, tell their story, or they might be doing a nonfiction or business book, and they want to grow their business. But they don't typically put on their publishing, business of publishing hat, and really learn about how to publish successfully. At Publish, we say all marketing begins in the manuscript. And one of the things we do really differently here at Publish is around that positioning. Again, putting on the craft hat, but also the business hat and saying, where does this book belong in this competitive marketplace? It's an entertainment or information product, a book, and it has to be placed in the marketplace carefully so that you can find readers. And that's part of the business of publishing, that most self-publishers don't really come with a lot of information or understanding about what's involved in that positioning. And then effectively, if you get the reader to a product page on a place like Amazon, where there are millions and millions and millions of books, how do you convert that book browser into a book buyer? That's also the business of publishing, and it has to do with the packaging and the copywriting and also the algorithms and understanding how they discover and bring readers to your product page. It's fairly nuanced and complicated process. And that's where we step in as a trusted partner to help them understand the business side of publishing. Okay. So if you're an author that wants to write one book and it's just like a memorabilia type thing or something like that, like you described, going to sell a hundred copies or something like that. So that's one type of author and they have a set of problems and pretty much it's just lack of knowledge of everything. But then you have this smaller segment, like I think you referred 10% that are professional writers and they're writing something relating to their profession, or maybe they've already had a successful book and they're writing another book. What are the problems that you're solving for that group? Yeah. So there's really two types of authors in that group, that emerging professional class self-publisher. Business authors, for example, have always been at the forefront of self-publishing because they want to keep control of their brand. And we've developed a lot of tools, programs, special services for that type of author to help them link the book to their larger goals. Say they want to be a paid speaker or do lead generation or build authority, we can help them make the book, first of all, reach their target audience and delight that target audience. That's the business and craft of the content of the book, and then position it to make sure it does reach those people in the right categories, in the right advertising and marketing channels, and really help them reach their professional goals by publishing a book that's designed and aligned with those goals. For the other, think general fiction and nonfiction, we're really, for both groups, brand builders. And if someone's writing fiction and the dream is to quit their day job and write fiction all day long, that's a process that usually starts in the after hours of their day. And helping them understand how to craft an author brand, which means that they understand an audience that they're writing for, they understand genre expectations, they understand their competitive titles, those titles that we would advertise their book to so that we find the same readers that are looking for a reading experience like they've produced. All of those things have to start really early in the process. And we have programs, we have technology, we have tools to help them establish a brand, build a brand from the start. And what we see over time is they have success with the first book, they come back, we have huge returning author stats because we do set them up for success and then they can see each time they publish a book that they're selling more copies and the people who read the book the first time they come back, we teach them a lot of things. I think part of our real value add and part of what we really want to do with this raise is embed the education that we convey to our authors into the platform in a professional timeline so they are dripped the content that they need as they move through the publishing process. Because right now the only way to learn all this stuff is to go to a conference and get a brain dump or take a course, get a brain dump. But then when you need that information, can you remember it? It's overwhelming. So to have a platform like Publish where you can move through a professional timeline and our system will drip you what you need to do, when you need to do it, why you need to do it, and how to do it right throughout that process is pretty game-changing because you have a lot of great writers, you just don't get the business side right. You have a lot of great writers who need to do different types of editing. So I'm one of the few seasoned developmental editors, ghost writers, who runs a self-publishing company in the United States and what we encounter all of the time is authors don't understand the editing process. Most of them think, oh I'll just get a copy edit and proofread, where most of the manuscripts we see need higher level editing, structural editing, developmental and line editing. And part of this raise will be dedicated to using natural language processing to help them understand what kind of edit they need for their work and why. So I think you've probably seen in the news, you know, some of the revolutionary things that are happening with things like ChatGTT that will enable us to do this type of natural language processing on these manuscripts that are in our system in a much more affordable and practical way than maybe you could have done just, you know, three to five years ago. So that's pretty cool. So you would be automating this process to a large degree? Absolutely. This is a tech and talent raise, but on the technology side, it's all about automating what we know works. Educating the author, professional timeline, helping them with positioning. So that automation of that positioning information, that study that we do along the timeline, early in the process, and then when they get to the point where the manuscript is ready for assessment, to have technology tools that tell them what kind of edit they need and why. And even at the lower levels, you know, we believe that the technology in natural language processing is getting to the point where it can apply, you know, Chicago style, AT style to manuscripts and start to do lower level types of editing. But it's the higher types of editing that most authors need. They just don't know it. And then the automation will make the education on why they need it and what needs to be done, you know, much, much faster, much more affordable and much more effective. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think that gets into some of the technical and professional aspects of publishing that, you know, us in the public amateurs have no idea about. But obviously, there's a lot to it, just like any profession. When you're in it, you see all the nuances that the average public doesn't. Tell me how an author, so an experienced author or a professional author, why would they choose publish as are published as opposed to like a traditional publisher like Penguin or whatever? Well, we are actually publishing more and more authors who used to be traditionally published with the big houses. And oh, really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we see that growth every year because it's always been very time consuming and very eye of the needle to get a publishing deal, right? They, you know, you have to have the right agents, the agent has to get the deal can take several years, you may never hear back from people. But because of COVID and because of what's going on in the industry with this contraction, I mean, that's what the Penguin Random House purchase was, you know, the attempt was to purchase another big publishing house for growth. So as you have more contraction, the eye of the needle just gets slimmer and slimmer. So the whole agency model with age literary agents is, you know, really in flux. So those groups are just intermediated, because they can't get their people in and more and more authors are turning to self publishing because you can. I mean, many of our books get, you know, top accolades, they have movie options, they have top awards, and they're compared to top authors, and they become best sellers. So you can do pretty much everything in self publishing that you could do in traditional, it's just a different model. And it's more of an entrepreneurial endeavor. But it does give you more control. And it gives you higher royalty rates. So ah, so that the author has a better financial outcome, if they self publish, then if they go with the publishing house, if they do it, right? Yes. And I think that's the big thing is, you know, we can't just get the craft right, you have to get the business right. And that's really where we found our, our niche is that we are a complete, holistic, end to end technology enabled solution. And, you know, people come back, they learn a lot, and then they come back and they do it, and it gets smarter on the business side and the craft side, and they create commercially viable books that help them achieve their goals as writers and make more money. Or if they're business authors, you know, it might be to generate more leads, but it's about understanding goals, which we really help our authors understand, and then helping them achieve those goals in an ongoing brand building fashion over time. You know, so we started with authors who had one book and weren't successful out there, took them started selling more of those books, then taught them how to build a series, taught them how to build a lead generating novella at the front of their series, taught them how to package that book, help them get the copywriting and the positioning right and then advertise to a successful product page that's going to convert the right browsers into book buyers. And so when you start to see success, you tend to accelerate, you know, the amount you're you're writing, because it's achieving what you'd hoped. And that's a big difference. The acceleration and the revenue right now is really driven by quantity over quality, just more and more authors entering the marketplace and putting books up and selling some copies. But what we're saying is it's time now, there are authors that are very talented, you think of what happened in the music industry, a lot of the biggest names were found on places like YouTube, and they could go directly to their consumers and some of the biggest names in publishing, like Colleen Hoover, is a self published author. And you know, once all the risk was taken out, the big houses wanted her, but she's also maintained her own rights to her own book, so she can remain in the driver's seat. And I think that's what's very exciting about what's happening now. But these talented authors need guidance, they need those professional steps, they need great editing, great packaging, they need distribution channels. I mean, we can put a self published authors book in 40,000 channels around the world, in all book formats, so hardcover, paperback, ebooks, and audio books, and all they have to do is go to their published dashboard and, you know, see their, their sales, and we can help them run advertising in different countries, price promotions in different countries. So we sell books all over the world for them. That is pretty exciting. I mean, I can see how an author that has had a little bit of success would be attracted to this model for the reasons you just said, like in the YouTube model, where they, they have control, they get greater portion of the revenue. And I can see how this is an emerging trend. And it's driven by technology. Can you walk us through the author experience? Like exactly how does it work for an author, say the casual author, that's going to do one book, the professional author, and maybe the repeat successful author? Yeah, and you know, that's what's shifting at Publish. So we are constantly automating the experience. The next automation will be the author's ability to put together their own, you know, services that they need to access the positioning study in an automated fashion in the timeline. Right now, you know, basically, they come into the Publish system, and they can access the tools that we have there, have a book marketing tool, called the book bubble, they can create enriched excerpts from their book, share those on social media. And then every week, we put the newest book bubbles in front of 600,000 readers around the world. On their dashboards, they can see the interactions on different social channels, and also where the readers go to buy the book, say Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, or bookshop.org. And that alone is a great way for us to meet authors who are in the self publishing place. And then if they want to hire us for any services, we can provide those. And again, we do a lot of education, we have a lot of webinars, we offer them a lot of resources throughout the journey so that they make good decisions, and they're informed buyers of our services. Now it starts out as a subscription, though, doesn't it? Yes, that does start out as a subscription. So we have a free and a paid version of the subscription. And then they can opt into services and distribution from their dashboard. And if they opt into distribution, the contractual relationship changes with them, we then become the entity that uploads the book into all of the platforms around the world in all of the different formats. And that enables us then to be effective advertisers, because we can see, you know, the sales that are resulting from our advertising, for example, running Amazon ads, comparable titles, keywords, and comparable authors for them. And that's a separate revenue stream, right? Once they have a book published, and it's successful, that's a separate revenue stream than the subscription stream. Correct. Every distributing author does have to have a subscription, but then we get 15% of their net sales, and we manage that royalty flow and those payments. I will also add one of our missions is to really start to scale quality work. And we've created a group of programs called Publish Select that are invite only, that allow us to take books that are ready for larger markets, more showcasing more monetization into programs like translation rights sales. So we have the select authors now, you know, getting contracts from foreign publishers who want to translate their book and sell those books in foreign markets. Now, when you do that, those are traditional contracts for particular countries. So what I find really interesting about this point, this inflection point in the book publishing industry is like the blurring of lines between self-publishing and traditional. So if someone is invited, an author is invited into Publish Select, they sign another agreement that makes us an agent to sell their translation rights. We also apply technology there. We work with agents that have 25 years experience and have sold thousands and thousands of rights, but with a technology layer. So we get data to show the authors. These publishers from these countries have interacted with your content in this way. They've shown interest by visiting your page on our virtual catalog. They've downloaded the advanced reader copy, the sample of the book that you've shared. They've favorited your book for exploration, and then they pay advances and royalties to our authors. And we take 20% of the gross on those. So again, we help them do things that self-publishers, it'd be almost impossible for them to do. So these are another revenue stream that's automated, separate from the royalties and separate from the subscriptions. Correct. And part of this raise is to be able to onboard more books more quickly into our platform, offer services in more of a SaaS environment. So automate some of the things that people pay us for service. We put them into more of an automated SaaS referring revenue with higher subscription rates, but it would actually save them money to put a book together. So get more books of higher quality because we're guiding them along this timeline into our system and then automate the identification of books that are ready for publish select program. And then they would be invited by our system into things like translation rights programs and things like that because they're ready for it. Because when you move from putting books in front of consumers to putting books in front of businesses, publishers in foreign countries, you have to shake out the noise or else you don't build a reputation as a company that's bringing them the cream of the crop. They can see millions of books. The books have to be of a certain quality. They have to reveal that quality with the strong sales history, editorial and reader reviews that basically quickly tell a foreign publisher this is worth looking at. So it is about scaling quality, helping the authors be better business people and publish a quality book with an understanding of the marketplace that they're publishing that book into, the readers that they're speaking to, the algorithms even that are basically in charge of discoverability online where most books are sold. But then identifying that talent as we help it rise and bringing it into new contractual relationships where the authors make more money on the same title that they've published. Yeah, there's clearly a lot to this. This episode is brought to you by Rolling South, a startup investment fund focused on seed stage venture in the southern United States. Rolling South offers a rolling fund as well as single company investments through AngelList and will be launching a traditional multi-investment fund in 2023. Our investments have passed a rigorous diligence process and offer significant tax benefits with an outstanding track record of success. To learn more, visit rollingsouth.vc. Let's transition a little bit to the business side of this in terms of the market. So in this market, tell us a little bit about where self-publishing sits relative to traditional publishing and then where publish sits relative to other self-publishing entities. As I said, I think the industry is really at an inflection point. Self-publishing is very mainstream now. It is grabbing more and more market share from traditional publishing. It's also more agile. During COVID, you saw a lot of delays in traditional publishing because of backlogs that books weren't delivered. We use print-on-demand technology. So all of our authors were thriving during that time because yes, there were supply chain challenges, but they didn't have tens of thousands of books sitting in warehouses overseas. So they were able to keep selling and growing. So there's a lot about traditional publishing that just is having trouble adapting. And that's why you see this increasing market share. And there are a lot of self-publishing companies out there, but there are many fewer that offer a holistic solution and help authors build brands and educate them. And within that smaller group, there are almost none that have the type of technology that we're developing at Publish because our technology is focused on scaling quality, teaching the authors how to create a more commercially viable book, and then helping them scale their sales. That is almost non-existent in a fractured self-publishing marketplace. So it sounds like that Publish is disrupting the traditional publishing market by bringing the author-centric control that they don't have with large-scale publishers, but at the same time, introducing technology into your system that more effectively competes with other self-publishing entities. And so it's really disrupting publishing. Yeah, and I really like to say that self-publishing is disrupting traditional publishing, and Publish is disrupting the current self-publishing model. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah, it's flawed, right? Because it's about quantity over quality. Well, that is backfiring on self-publishing because if you can't get anybody to read your book, why are you going to keep publishing? Why are you going to keep writing? So the key is to find ways to help them create quality books, package those books so that they're attractive to readers. I mean, everything about book marketing has changed. So imagine you're a writer and you just write your opening scene. Well, that opening scene now in a place like Amazon or Barnes & Noble Online or Apple Books or Kobo or Google Books, that is what sells your book. So if you don't understand that the expectations for readers in that genre, say thriller, are that you just like come out of the gate and it's a riveting opening scene and you write something kind of slow, that's where craft and business mix because that's what sells your book. If you got the reader there and they look at the look inside feature of your book and do not have an experience that engages them and compels them to buy your book, then you lose that sale and you never know the person came, you never get to their email, nothing like that. So think about understanding that the opening of your book has to sell your book and just making that little switch in your mind, that is where craft and commerce meet and that's where we are focusing not only what we've been doing now, but our technology is about craft and commerce meet and that's the future to me. That's how you start to scale quality because you have an educated population of self-publishers who are going to do their jobs as publishers better and we're going to make all the walls fall down so they can do pretty much everything that a traditional publisher could do for them, but now they get more control over their career and their book and they get more money out of it. I can see how this would be pretty exciting for authors. It's just the whole thing, very exciting. Can you tell us a little bit about your traction metrics like what sort of revenue growth you've experienced, what sort of customer growth, what kind of sales channel growth you might have had, just what sort of growth have you seen over the past several years? Yes, so our growth is accelerating and our growth rate is accelerating and that's what I really like and it's very closely correlated with the complete list of our solution and the education that we give our authors to set them up for success and then now adding these new revenue streams on top for publish select authors. So this year it's going to be about 40% over last year and when we look at the projections with the technology that we want to create, that growth trajectory accelerates as well because, again, we get to onboard more authors, educate them more quickly through a professional timeline and then we have more quality books in the system to sell and we have those services to sell. Again, things like advertising are going to move over to a SaaS type of play rather than just pay for a service and all of that not only accelerates our growth but our EBITDA grows, which I love about the model that we're creating because we have more efficiency because we're automating a lot of the things that are done by humans. And talk about disruption and publishing technology, that's really what's missing here. It's an extremely human business that's been around for thousands and thousands of years without really applying a lot of new technology to the actual education of authors and the services that they need to be successful. So that's a big part of how this model shifts because it becomes not only more scalable with quality but more profitable. And as far as sales channels go, we do continue to expand our channels. We're getting more into audiobooks in the coming years so part of it is format channels that we're expanding because audiobooks are the fastest growing format in book publishing. But we're also expanding internationally and the Publish Select program with translation rights is part of that because we went to Frankfurt for the first time this year, which is in Frankfurt, Germany. It's one of the biggest book fairs in the world. And you'll see we already publish and sell books. We publish authors overseas but we've never made a real effort. We had planned to before COVID and then kind of had to put that on hold. So more of an international presence is what you'll see coming from us. You're planning a major technical evolution in your platform going to a SaaS model enhanced by artificial intelligence and you're raising money to support that. Tell us a little bit about what that evolution is going to be, what your technical plan is. Yeah, so it's going to be around all of the three major areas where we make money. Services, book sales, Publish Select and our subscriptions, of course. So on the services side to what I said earlier about automating the timeline and the education and tools that go into that timeline, some of them will be services but others will be automation of such services. For example, right now on Publish you can create an e-book through our platform but you can't create a print book. So we would like to automate that so that you could upload your Word document and you could get your book in two different formats, actually three because you could also do a hardcover. We also want to automate the positioning study so that an author can come into our system and again know a lot about the marketplace that they are going to publish into and learn to think like a publisher from the start while they're still writing their manuscript. Another big automation is around the editing report where we will be using natural language processing in order to generate a report which is currently done by human editors and the report would say these are the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript and this is the type of edit that we recommend and here's why. So you now have an educated author making a decision about the type of investment they're going to make and why they need to make it. So the natural language processing scales that process basically by a factor of maybe 10 or 20. Oh, so much. You know, interesting like in a traditional model authors are shepherded through a multi-layered editing process but in self-publishing because the authors don't understand what multi-level editing does to a manuscript, they don't even know that they should have done. So it's education and yes, massive escalation of our ability to educate these authors about the type of editing that their work needs in order to actually create something that will be commercially viable. And around book sales, you know, right now authors can go onto their published dashboard, they can see their sales and royalties but we're going to be pulling in data sources in order to show them how their book compares to others in the genre and how to make more sales, right? And then we'll also be inviting those titles, those authors who have titles that are showing traction and are ready for Publish Select into things like the foreign rights sales programs and other programs that we're developing in Publish Select. So, author analytics. Oh yes, yes. Because they need that and again, if you're really focusing on people who don't want to just stay at their computer and write but want to think of publishing a book as a way to achieve professional goals. It is a professional act to publish a book and you just can't do it willy-nilly anymore. You have to do it right because even if you have a great book, no one will find it if you don't know what you're doing. So the combination of getting them to think about craft and commerce together and not as two separate buckets, it's pretty transformative. And to do that with automation and education that's automated and natural language processing and more data makes quality scalable. Yeah, now part of this transition you're planning involves hiring a product manager, right? Yes, because this is very involved technology that we're building. I mean, luckily we've worked with the same development team for a long time. They have a lot of experience with natural language processing. They've actually developed several APIs with ChatGPT, which is great. But we will be having a product manager as part of the raise because it is a tech and talent raise. So we will be bringing on some senior talent to manage the growth of this product. Okay, and then what do you see in the future? So you have this raise that hopefully you'll close sometime in the next few months, and then you execute on that. And then what do you see beyond that, like a year or two down the road? Do you see additional raise to attain further growth? Or do you think you can get by with just this raise? Because you actually are profitable right now, aren't you? Yes, we are. And that profitability, as I said, accelerates because of the automation. So you have more cash to do the things you need to do, but you've also automated something that brings more. It feeds every stream of revenue that we produce. And it shifts that revenue from a human-centric service model to an automated SaaS model as much as possible. And as the technology evolves, we'll lean into that because it is evolving in natural language processing rather quickly now. We may need to raise more money. I don't think so because of the profitability factor, but we will always do what needs to be done for our stakeholders and to continue to build value. So I think we'll have a clearer picture. But what's interesting also is how many big players have moved into this space around acquisitions and investments. This year, Spotify was acquired Findaway Books, which is one of our audiobook distributors. Spotify moved from music to podcasts into audiobooks. So you see this, and this is part of the inflection point, I think, in the content industry in general and the storytelling industry is there are synergies between different ways that we share our stories. You saw Wattpad sold to Naver for $600 million. Wattpad is a self-publishing platform out of Canada. And you also have emerging in Europe, a new type of model in self-publishing that doesn't have the education component that we're talking about, but it does have that kind of publish-select style to it called InkIt, and they just received $53 million in funding. So there's a lot of interest in the space and the types of things we're doing from a lot of different sectors. And of course, you see traditional publishing hitting a real wall when it comes to just growing through purchases of, you know, through acquisition that looks like it's kind of coming to an end. So they're going to have to really open their eyes to self-publishing. But the problem there has always been around the quality. And that's really what we're addressing. And I think my 30 years of ghostwriting and editing gives us a real advantage in understanding quality and what that looks like and how to scale that quality. So I think we have a really unique solution. Yeah, it's very exciting. And it seems like you're in the right time for an inflection in publishing. And, you know, it's music to the ears of angel investors to hear a founder say, yeah, I think we may not need to raise more money because raising more money is more dilution, not just for the angel investors, but also for the founders. Although if it grows the pie significantly bigger, a smaller slice is worth more. So it's not all bad. And it sounds like you have some real potential for an exit in the next three or four years. Is that fair to say? I think it is fair to say, because I do believe, like I said, it's just everything that worked for a long time in traditional isn't working. But you also have so many because of this shift in how stories are told in multiple formats. You have Netflix always at these book fairs, really looking for content, you know, Apple TV, again, looking for quality stories, and more diverse voices and self publishing provides that and it provides, if it can provide quality, you can really start to scale quality and have the right partners aware of that content, you know, you start to monetize in lots of different ways. But all of that surrounds getting the content right from the start, which is the job of the author. And we're our job is to make sure that authors fully informed and given all the tools they need to be successful, and then have a business partner that has technology like publish does start to find that quality and raise it up to those business buyers who will license intellectual property rights, you know, then you're really talking about published being a media company, and it's already starting to happen organically because of the quality of our book. Yeah, you're a you're a content producer. A quality content producer. Yeah. Well, that's very exciting, Kathy, you know, and listeners should know that we're investors in publish. And so I wish you all the success and thank you for your time today. Thank you, David. It was great to talk with you. Thanks for having me. Contact us with questions or suggestions by email to davidventureinthesouth.com. Please consider rating and subscribing since this is the only way we get rating. Venture in the South is supported by the Rolling South Fund and Venture Carolina, a nonprofit focused on investor education.