Matt: Hello, everybody. Can - can you hear us okay? We good? 

Lauren: Wow. 

Matt: How about over there? Yeah? I can yell if you want me to. 

Lauren: You don't want him to. 

Matt: We're American, so we yell a lot. Oh, somebody laughed. Good. Okay. We're in the right place. My name is Matt Briel. I am the CMO at Lulu, and I'm joined by my co-host of our podcast, Publish & Prosper. This is Lauren Vassallo. 

Lauren: Hi. Yeah, and surprise, I don't think we've announced that yet. 

Matt: That's right, so – 

Lauren: So, thanks for coming. 

Matt: Technically, you're on air. Feel free to heckle us, or make noise, or ask questions. There you go. See? There we go. So again, my name is Matt Briel. I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Lulu.com, as well as Tilt Publishing. There's some things about me on the screen that you may or may not find interesting. I don't really find them interesting, but they're up there anyways. And I'll let Lauren talk a little bit about herself real quick as well. 

Lauren: Thanks. You said I'm boring, so I'm going to let her introduce herself with more or less the same information. 

Matt: Yeah, that's basically how our podcast goes too. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: I'm the boring one, she's the fun one. 

Lauren: Okay, I mean. I'll take that. I will take that, actually. But yeah, I'm Lauren Vassallo. I am… Content & Community Manager. 

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: I had to check my own title on there for a second, and co-host of Publish & Prosper with my boss, which is really fun. I - If it was…slightly less sweltering in here, I would probably be wearing my official Professional Yapper sweatshirt because I get paid to talk a lot.

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: And it's great. 

Matt: You are a Professional Yapper. 

Lauren: It's true and a certified Swiftie and a Disney Adult and a book hoarder and a book nerd. 

Matt: Are there any other Swifties out here to join Lauren? 

Lauren: That's right. 

Matt: Oh, there's four. 

Lauren: That's right. That's four more than are usually in the room with me when we're recording a podcast. 

Matt: Yeah. That's absolutely right. Does anybody here not know what a Swifie is? 

Lauren: Wow. 

Matt: I guess I'm the odd man out. 

Lauren: You know what a Swiftie is. 

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: Okay. Anyway. 

Matt: Great. 

Lauren: We are your co-hosts here today. 

[2:50]

Matt: All right. So what are we going to talk about today? Something slightly different. You've already heard a little bit about social media, how to use it, how not to use it, what's going on right now. Maybe I'll slow down a little bit for her too, but. What we want to talk about today is slightly parallel to social media. A lot of people understand the ecosystem of social media, kind of how to use it, you know, how to get on there, how to make some hopefully interesting posts, and hopefully how to start building some followers. 

What a lot of people don't understand about social media is how to take those followers and turn those into buyers, or readers, or long time fans, and build a business off of that. And a lot of people struggle - even those who have maybe in this crowd have built up 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, a million followers, but still struggle to monetize that follower base. There's some pretty solid reasons why that's happening. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. 

We're also gonna talk about what is most commonly known as algorithmic marketing. And that is this idea that you're on this hamster wheel of spending money constantly to post your ads on social media, or Amazon, or all these other places, and you're getting some traction there, but it's transactional traction. It's you paid this money, and as a result of paying that money, you've got an action. Somebody maybe purchased something, or they became a follower, but then that was it. And you don't know what happens after that. That is algorithmic or transactional marketing. 

What we want to talk about today is relationship marketing. And how do you turn those transactions or these other things that you're doing into long-term sustainable practices that you can build a business off of your content and off of your writing?

Lauren: We're also going to talk about this in the sense that - just to put this disclaimer up at the top - we're not talking about either or here. 

Matt: That's right. 

Lauren: We recognize that it's not possible to build an audience and a sustainable author business on just one or the other. We're talking about how to use them in conjunction with each other. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: There is a journey there's a path there and I think this this piece of relationship marketing that is often what people… They don't make it to that next level because they get stuck in the transactional or algorithmic marketing piece of that. You're constantly creating content to try and figure out the algorithm and go viral or become the next like, superstar….tokker. TikTokker, whatever. BookTokker. 

Lauren: Yeah? 

Matt: AuthorTokker. 

Lauren: AuthorTokker.  

Matt: IndieTokker.

Lauren: Author Tacos? 

Matt: Whatever. Tacos, yes. 

Lauren: Great. 

Matt: Yeah. And then lastly, we'll talk about how you turn these relationships into long term assets for your business, so.  

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: That make sense? Everybody here for that? Or are you in the wrong place? If you're in the wrong place, our feelings will not be hurt. 

Lauren: But also good luck. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Because if you've tried to get into or out of this space recently, you're taking your life in your hands. 

Matt: You're locked in now. That's it. 

Lauren: You are stuck with us, in fact. 

Matt: Okay. Let's move on. 

Lauren: All right. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Let's go. 

[5:52]

Matt: So what's algorithmic marketing? I touched on that very briefly. It is again, it's what most people are doing, right? You're creating content, hoping that the algorithm favors what you created so that you can gain some more followers in the hopes that those followers turn into readers or buyers. There are pros to algorithmic marketing. You can gain a lot of followers in a short period of time by spending money on social media ads, or really paying attention to what the algorithm wants, or working with a professional who's going to help you get to that level.

There are pros to using it. You can build a follower base quickly. You can acquire quite a bit of transactions in a short period of time if you're doing it correctly. You'll spend money to make money. So it's not that it doesn't work. There are pros to it. 

But there's also some cons, right? You're going to burn up a lot of mental capital. You're going to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what works, what doesn't. Why didn't this post of my dog reading the latest chapter of my new book get 70,000 views? Why didn't that work? My dog is awesome. He's standing on his hind legs, he's wearing a hat, and he's literally reading that chapter, but nobody's liking it. What am I doing wrong? 

There's a lot of mental capital that you expend in creating this content. There's a lot of mental capital that goes into sitting in sessions to learn how to be a social media expert or how to make it work. And then there's some financial capital that obviously has to go there. Most people are not gonna succeed in building a huge follower base or a transactional base without spending some money. And so if you're not prepared for that, that is a con of algorithmic marketing as well.

Lauren: There's also the concern that even when it is successful, it's still a flash in the pan short-term success more often than not. Like, you know, we see it all the time. We talk about it all the time. Where like social media ads are so good. How many times have you seen an Instagram ad or a TikTok ad that you didn't even know you needed that thing, but you need it now, you need it right now, and it's so easy to just click like two buttons. 

You don't even have to get your credit card out and all of a sudden, there you go. That thing's coming in the mail in three to five days. Great. Awesome. It might be your new favorite product in the world. Do you remember who you bought it from? Did you follow them? Can you say, oh yeah, I'm going to be checking out all their products from now on? Or did you, were you a one-time, one-click purchase and then never went back to that brand ever again? 

So even when it is successful, even when the algorithmic marketing does succeed in getting you a single book purchase, did you actually get a fan out of that?

Matt: Yeah, would argue algorithmic marketing and transactional marketing is really best suited for building a follower base. So if you're going to put in the time and the money and the effort to play that game, to get on that hamster wheel, use it to build your follower base. And then what we're going to talk about next, or along this journey, is what you do with those followers. That's the most important thing. And even the people, we have people we work with at Lulu, they've got millions of followers on their YouTube or their TikTok or whatever, but they struggle to monetize it. They don't know what to do with those millions of followers. And that's the important piece because as we've all seen multiple times, you could wake up tomorrow and those 5,000 followers you worked so hard to earn or those 5 million followers you worked so hard to earn could be gone. You wake up and some billionaire decided, I'm buying this social media channel and I'm wiping out every account that talks about science fiction books. There's nothing you can do about it. It's not your content, it's not your followers. It's the social media channel that owns that content. So if you're not actively taking steps that we're gonna talk about to bring that audience somewhere where you have more control over that, then that's where you're constantly gonna find yourself stuck doing the same things over and over again. 

[9:49]

Lauren: So then the alternative would be relationship marketing.

Matt: Sounds like a good one. 

Lauren: It does sound like a good one, right? So what is really relationship marketing? Obviously, it's focusing on building those relationships with your audience, with your customers, with your readers, however you want to look at them, and actually fostering that connection with them so that you're creating like, a long-term relationship. I mean, feel free to correct me loudly if you think I'm wrong about this, but I would argue that any author, just the number one goal is to have a fan of your work say… oh, Emily Henry has a new book coming out? No, you don't need to tell me what it's about. I've already pre-ordered it. I don't need to know what it is, any book that Emily Henry puts out, I'm gonna buy it and I'm gonna read it. 

And that's just the ultimate win for any author is to be on somebody's instant-buy or auto-buy or whatever list. And you do that by building a relationship with readers. So that's what we're talking about when we're talking about relationship marketing, is building that long-term sustainable relationship with people that have purchased your books and read them and love them. 

Matt: But let's be clear. Some of you might be thinking, these guys are idiots. I already talk to all my fans on social media. I have a relationship with them. You know, on social media right now is exactly what we're doing. We're talking to a broad group of people, but I don't know a single one. Well, I know a few people back there, but I don't have a relationship with any of you. I'm just talking to a broad group. I'm putting content out there. My opinions or research or things that I've learned, same with Lauren, but we're not building a relationship with you necessarily. So we're just putting content out. It's the same thing you're doing on social media, right? 

Building a relationship means you have leveraged yourself and your followers into an area where you have more control to have either two-way conversations or actual conversations that don't necessarily happen on social media per se, right? And examples of that would be anytime somebody follows you, you get a new follower on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok, you want to constantly try to get them over to a platform where you have control. 

So an email list, or if you have your own website with a sign up list where you can control those emails and have those conversations in a more controlled space where somebody can't come in and dictate how you're going to converse with or build relationships with your fans and followers who are now becoming, you know, potential buyers and readers at this point. Because again, on social media, you're just talking to a large group. And it will resonate with some and with others, it's just more content in the scroll pattern for what they're doing, right? 

So you might get lucky, they might stop, they might read it and hit the like button, but then they're just going to keep going. But if you can get them to come over and sign up for your email list or come over to your website and take some sort of action, you now have that bit of information. The most valuable thing that a reader can give you is their email address. That's the most valuable thing. That's the gateway to selling your books and creating revenue from what you're building.

If you can't get them to give you your email address, all you have is the potential for them to hit the like button and that's it. So you want to build this, this sustainable fan base, this reader base, whether you're an individual creator, a small publisher or even a large publisher. Many of you may have seen that a lot of larger publishers now are starting to offer things like the ability to buy books directly from their website, which wasn't a thing in the past. Part of that is so that they can gain - and this is what you should be doing - that customer data, that customer information, so that they can now remarket and they don't have to spend so much time on the hamster wheel of algorithmic marketing. 

They now have this database of their own they’re building, which by the way was the genius of the guys next door right here, right? Do you guys think Jeff Bezos was a massive fan of just reading books and that's why Amazon started with books? Does anybody believe that? No, he always wanted to build weird rockets and go to space. And the only way to do that was to build the largest customer data platform on the planet and monetize it. And he did it. And he's a freaking genius for it. And now he's taking weird phallic rockets to space. Am I allowed to say phallic? 

Lauren: I don't know. 

Matt: Rockets to space. But he wasn't a book lover, it was customer data, right? So that's the foundation of everything. You gotta get them from social media and these other places where you're just in that hamster wheel to somewhere where you control and you're starting to collect that data and you can use it for relationship-based marketing. Human impressions over digital impressions. If you take nothing else away today, write that down. Human impressions over digital impressions. Every day, all day. It's not one or the other, but you wanna get to that point where you've made a digital impression. It's now time to make a human impression. Authors that have relationships with their readers sell more books, period. Long term as well as short term. 

Lauren: They also maybe go to space more frequently, but if you are building these long term relationships with your readers because you want to fly yourself to space in a weird rocket ship… that's between you and your readers. So you just can disregard this entire session.

Matt: I have no desire to go to space that scares me. 

Lauren: What about Disney? 

Matt: Yes. 

Lauren: Okay, great. 

Matt: Absolutely. 

Lauren: Next stop. 

Matt: Every day all day. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: So. 

[15:09]

Lauren: There are obviously pros and cons to relationship marketing the same as there were with algorithmic marketing. Obviously, I think you can tell we have a preference between the two of which when we advocate more, but we acknowledge that there are pros and cons with relationship marketing as well. And you know, one of the cons with the relationship marketing is that it is… because it's organic, because it is about relationship building and because it is something that takes a lot of time and effort on your part.

It's also something that's not really easy to directly track the progress of how you're doing it. Algorithmic marketing, it's really easy to look at it and say, I'm going to attempt to do math right now, so it's your job. I spent $1,000 on an ad campaign, and I sold 100 books, and I made $10 in profit off of each of those books. So I broke even. Did I do that right? 

Matt: No. 

Lauren: No. Okay. 

Matt: I guess. 

Lauren: Whatever. I tried. I was an English major with a creative writing degree. I'm not a math person. 

Matt: As was probably most people in this room. 

Lauren: But you know, you can easily do that. You can easily look at the results of your algorithmic marketing and say, okay, was this worth it? Did I get a return on ad spend? Did I gain X number of followers and make this worth it? It's not as easy to do that with relationship marketing. It's much more a long-term payoff of… I came to London Book Fair and I had a bunch of conversations with people and unless you're the most type A person in the room, I challenge you to challenge me on that one, you probably don't have a spreadsheet where you've kept track of every single conversation that you had this week and every single thing that you learned, and calculated all of that and added up whether or not it was worth it to travel here, to buy the admission, to come here, to spend the time here. You can't track that.

But you can maybe track down the road, six months down the road from now. I met somebody at London Book Fair that I continued to have a partnership with after the conference. And now we're working together on an email collaboration, or we're doing a podcast together, or they invited me to come speak at an event that they're hosting or something like that. That's the payout that you get. And that, in theory, is more valuable than anything that you could calculate from a single sale.

Matt: But, for those of you that do like data like I do, and you are a little more analytical than Lauren, there is data and analytics to be found in relationship marketing, but it's found in a different place. Right now, the data and the analytics that you're working from are within your social media channels, right? You're seeing how many new followers you got. You see how many likes you get. You see how many DMs are coming in or some of those other types of analytics. YouTube, you're getting a little bit more. You're getting view time. You're getting some of those other analytics as well. 

The same thing applies when you start practicing relationship marketing. The easiest way to do this and the best way to start this is through email. So for those of you that do not have an email list started yet, I encourage you to start one when you get home tonight. Most platforms offer a free version to start. Pick one that has the best reviews in your mind and just start. And you might only get five new signups every couple of weeks for now. That list will build. It will grow. And the data that you'll be sitting on within that list is priceless in the long term. 

You will be able to start to see the return. You'll be able to start to segment each of those groups of email addresses. This group bought this particular title from me and it's a segment now and you can remarket to that segment at any point based on that title. So when the next title comes out in that series, you know that segment already bought the first title. So they're the first group you're going to for your pre-orders, right? Boom, right there. You don't have to worry about social media just yet. Go to those who already bought that first in the series. Hey, number two's coming out. You're getting exclusive access to the first pre-order and maybe it's gonna have like, a special edition cover or something like that. 

Being able to segment within your email provider list and understand the data and the analytics for those email addresses that are taking action is priceless. So there are data and analytics to be had in relationship marketing, but it does take time to build it. You need patience. It's not an overnight thing. So that is the biggest con of relationship marketing. It's just like in real life. You may strike up a relationship with the person next to you; a year from now they may contact you and say, I just got a job working at, you know, Abrams Books and we're looking for someone who writes the same thing I remember you told me you wrote a year ago at London Book Fair. Are you still doing that? You never know how those relationships might pan out, but sometimes they take time. They're not always overnight. So that would be the biggest con is the amount of time that you need to invest into relationship marketing for long-term success. 

[20:00]

Lauren: So how would you go about building this? 

Matt: So on the nose.

Lauren: Well, look, you're the one always giving me really weird lead-ins.

Matt: That's true, yeah. 

Lauren: I just thought I'd turn it around on you for once. 

Matt: Yeah, that’s true. Nobody in this room has probably listened to our podcast, but if you do, what she's talking about is I love to give her really cheesy lead-ins to the next topic or the transitions.

Lauren: And I drop the ball nine out of ten times. 

Matt: She does. She fumbles it every time. Well, nine out of ten times. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Every now and then I get it. 

Matt: All right. 

Lauren: I just edit the episodes that you can't hear it. 

Matt: That's true. So again, a little bit more about how you do this. How do you build direct relationships? How do you build two-way conversations with readers that aren't gonna wear you out at the end of the day? Because I don't know about you, I'm an introvert, and the last thing I wanna do is talk to 150 people per day about the same thing. 

Lauren: Yeah, because it's weird. We talk about this a lot - and again, feel free to disagree with me - but writing is a very insular activity that tends to be drawn, like introverts tend to be drawn to it more than extroverts. And then we turn around and give you all this advice of, if you want to be an author that's going to build an audience of readers, you have to go talk to them all the time. And you have to go get up in front of a room full of people and talk to them and read your book to them and be super active on social media. And everybody that I know that is really into writing wants nothing to do with that. But it is an unfortunate - 

Matt: Me either. 

Lauren: Yeah, same. But it is an unfortunately reality of it. But it's worth it. It is worth it to take that time to build those connections with your readers, and in formats that make sense to you. 

Matt: Yeah. In the interest of time we're gonna - 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: We're gonna we're gonna move on to - 

Lauren: Go ahead. 

Matt: From how introverted writers - and marketers are, by the way. Most marketers are very introverted. Nobody ever believes that when we say it, but we are, we're extremely introverted. You want to take all of these followers, all of these email addresses, all these people you meet at, you know, events like this one on social media. Other types of activities where you may be at a book signing, at a bookstore, or whatever that might be. Wherever you can gain a new potential follower email address, somebody that you can put into your owned ecosystem, you want to get off of that rented land because that's what social media and some of these other channels are. They're great for building up followers and initial audiences and maybe even getting some transactional quick sales out of it, but that is rented land. You don't own any of that, right? 

You want to get to somewhere where you own the land. You don't want to build a house on rented land because somebody could just come along and say, that's my land. I want it back. I don't care what you built there. But if you own the land for the most part, it's okay to start building your house. Your house…is my metaphor clear? 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Your house is your content business, your books. You know, email, website. If you don't have an email list, start one. It's super easy. I don't care if you can only get five people on there a week. Trust me, in a couple of months you're gonna go, holy crap, look at all these email addresses I have here. The people that actually wanna hear from me, right? If you don't have a website yet, start one. There are lots of easy tools out there where you can start a very simple, clean looking author email, or website, and just have that there as your home base that you can start building from, right? 

It's just like the old adage that a lot of writers get stuck. They can't keep going because they don't feel like they're writing perfection. It's much better to just get something on the page and then come back and make it perfect versus trying to write something perfect out of the gate. It's just not gonna happen. So you've gotta get started. And the easiest way is an email list and a website. That gives you a strong home base, a solid foundation, right? 

Lauren: And we've seen the real, like, this isn't an abstract concept. We've seen this, even if every single person listening to this right now is UK-based and was not affected by the fear, that TikTok was about to be removed off of your phone effective immediately. I maybe spent the entire day before doomscrolling TikTok just in case. 

But even if you were not affected by that, you were affected by the fact that if you have any US audience as part of your audience, those people were all going away. So we've seen in real time the effects of what happens in the event of… tomorrow, you could wake up and a percentage of your audience is no longer accessible to you if you have spent all of your time building your audience on just one platform, and it's a platform that you don't own.

[24:21]

Matt: Yeah. And so how do we go from building this slow but steady relationship based foundation to actual revenue? You need to incorporate some way to sell to them, right? You can either now take those email addresses and all those people that you've spent time bringing into your ecosystem and send them somewhere else to buy your book. Here comes the pitch, right? 

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: Or you can sell to them directly, okay? That's the next step. How do I set up a way to sell directly to my readers and my followers so I keep all this customer data. I'm in control of all of this and I control the journey from start to finish. Many of you spend a lot of time, by the way, building out, you know, the worlds that are part of your story ecosystem and your arcs and those things. Why not keep all of that part and parcel of the journey of your reader as well when it comes to buying your content? So look into these avenues of how to build a store using something like Shopify or a lot of these other tools that are out there. 

You guys have all seen it. AI is the big topic. Selling direct is the big topic for indie authors. This is how you control that journey from start to finish. This is how you build a sustainable long-term author business and maybe if your goal is to become a small to medium-sized publisher, this is how you do it too by controlling that journey and all of that customer data and just not giving that to somebody else. We're not saying don't use the other platforms. We're not saying don't use social media, but those should just be parts of how you build your business. 

The ultimate goal should be you are your own Amazon. You're your own Lulu, you're your own Ingram, you're your own Hachette, right? You have all that customer data. You have all of those things so that every time you have a new book or one of your authors that you're working with has a new book. You've got that audience already tapped. They're already ready to go. They're segmented in your email list. You craft a really fun, cool email, which by the way, don't just send a bunch of crap to their inbox, right? Again, somebody gives you their email address. That is the most intimate thing they can do in the digital landscape these days. My kids would argue they'd rather send you a picture of them topless than give you their email address, which is absolutely insane. Am I allowed to say that? 

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: Doesn’t matter. It's true. If somebody gives you their email address, don't abuse it, right? Send them cool stuff. Talk about what you're working on. Give them a little sample of the latest chapter. Keep them engaged. 

Lauren: Pay attention to what your favorite authors send you. 

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. 

Lauren: Absolutely. 

Matt: Or even your favorite publishers. If you're on their email list, what are they sending you? What do you like? What do you not like? Learn from those things. Go to ReallyGoodEmails.com. There's tons of examples of what a good email looks like even right down to if you're a publisher What a good email would look like there are so many good resources out there. So the goal is to go from rented land where you're building these followers, you're on the hamster wheel of algorithmic marketing, right? 

Next you want to get to some relationship marketing. You want to start building up this, this email list this, this website list. You want to start getting people to become direct buyers of your stuff, to where you ultimately get to this place where you are self-sustained. You can use these other outlets to make extra money and get extra exposure and awareness. But these days, that's not gonna happen unless you're spending more money and more time. 

So the goal really is to get to this point of that own database, right? You want people knocking on your door, by the way, a couple years from now going, hey, you got 600,000 active people in your database. Maybe we could give you some money to get in on that, right? Like you wanna be the ones that people are coming to now and saying, hey, what do you think about maybe publishing my book or let me get in on what you're doing? Like, it just creates so many more opportunities and ways for you to build a sustainable business that you're in control of, that nobody else can just come in and say, hey, we're going to take this. We're done. You no longer have this space, right? 

Lauren: I really do want to reiterate again, just to be clear, that this is not an either or thing. Whether it's either relationship marketing or algorithmic marketing or whether it's either selling with retailers or selling direct. When we're talking about this, we're talking about doing all of it together.

Matt: It's a journey.

Lauren: It's a journey. Maybe think of it as a sliding scale where right now you're doing 100% algorithmic marketing and 0% relationship marketing. And over the next couple of months, couple of years, whatever, you want to slowly shift that scale over so that you're doing maybe 75% relationship marketing and 25% algorithmic marketing. 

And the same thing with selling direct versus having your book on retailer websites. We're not saying that you can't do both. There's a lot of talk about going wide. If you're not familiar with the idea of going wide and selling your books on multiple different retail channels, definitely look into that. There might be a podcast episode about it from this podcast called Publish & Prosper maybe, I don't know? 

Matt: Yeah. All right. 

Lauren: You might be able to find it by scanning this QR code. 

[29:14]

Matt: So we're pretty much out of time at this point. We had a little shorter session than the others. We're happy to take questions over at our booth at Lulu. I don't think we'll have time right now. You can scan this and listen to some of our podcasts where we cover a lot of these things more in depth and we break things down one by one as well as a lot of other things. 

If you want to know a little bit more about Lulu. This is who we are. We are next door, the big purple booth. We got a ton of people there who are happy to talk to you about these things. Otherwise, again, I think we're out of time. You guys have been pretty fun for the most part, so.

Lauren: Thanks, thanks for listening. And definitely come talk to us if you have any questions. You just want to say hi. You want to know more about anything. We'll be here all week. I was paid to be here, so make me work for it, I guess. 

Matt: We'll be here most of the week. Thank you. 

Lauren: Thanks, everyone.