Hello there!

Three important points:

1. Poster foils are live in store. And just a reminder that the store closes for pre-orders at the end of day on Friday, November 1st.

2. If zine hasn’t arrived yet, let’s give it a few weeks. I wrote some more below on why I’m not stoked about my shipping organization and time from order to your mailbox this issue. I’m going to make improvements around shipping for the next zine (hint: more paid help) so I can better track when yours has shipped out of a pile of 1700+.

3. If you haven’t grabbed a zine yet, grab one here! …Remember, the zine is not a subscription like a magazine or newspaper, each one requires a new order.

📻 When you read this email, why not listen to the first episode of my radio show, Train Songz Presents… featuring Buffalo Galaxy?

🛍️ New Merch

Forest City Press and I decided to print the summer ‘24 poster (made by @darkstaratlas + featured on the back of the zine) on foil, in addition to regular poster paper.

These foils are in the store, along with the rest of the summer ‘24 stuff! (Here’s the store.) All proceeds from the store are re-invested into the zine.

The store closes for pre-orders on Friday, November 1, at the end of day.

If you already ordered a regular poster and want to switch to foil, I will refund your previous order and you can make a new one. Just email me.

📫 Shipping

As I was saying earlier… Unfortunately, I don’t 100% know if your specific zine has shipped. (The majority have shipped, which I am proud of! The rest of existing orders should be out by Friday!)

People frequently ask if I know when their zine shipped or when it might arrive, and I don’t think not knowing at all is an acceptable answer from me, now that I’m asking for payment up front. (We’ll always kinda not know, which is the joy of basic USPS postage, but I can at least try to know the date your specific zine got mailed.)

That’s for January 2025, when I will more strictly ship zines in the order they were ordered and assign your group (say orders 1–300) to a specific mailing date.

But shipping is not fixed yet! Until it is, I do need to ask everyone for two more weeks of patience on zine delivery, whether you ordered yesterday or day 1. Once I know all orders are out, which will be by this Friday, then we can start getting worried about lost zines and re-sending them if they haven’t returned to sender.

You deserve a better estimation of delivery date going forward, and I’ll make that happen by paying for more help and freeing myself up to better manage things.

📈 Shipping Improvements: 2025

Shipping organization and speed is my biggest area of improvement for the next zine. The delays happen because I’m taking too much on myself, and the zine has grown beyond the scale of doing this myself. (I’m noticing a pattern.)

To free myself up to make organizational improvements, I’m going to invest in the following help on manual labor:

• Printing addresses on envelopes

• Printing postage on envelopes

• Stuffing envelopes

• Shipping envelopes

This will give me more time to stay on top of things! I need more time.

Let’s say each envelope is about a minute of work: print it, stamp it, stuff it, seal it. Right now I’m doing all of this at home, mostly alone and sometimes with friends.

And let’s say I have 2,000 envelopes to do this to. That’s 33 hours! (Before all of the other administrative work and coordinating that goes into keeping the zine running, and mailing merch, and working my actual jobs, etc.)

I’ve done this song and dance four times now, and three of the four have involved over 2,000 orders. I’ve spent a lot of time (mostly weekends) doing this, and it’s getting to be too much—even with a few friends helping.

I want to turn the zine into a sustainable situation, not an all-consuming side project. True “wealth” here (and everywhere) is having the time to make and ship the zine in an enjoyable way 4x per year, and time can be bought back with paid help.

Thanks to everyone reading this, I can most likely afford a few more workers (at $20/hr) to help me out and materially improve shipping speed and organization.

That’s all I got for you today.

—The Conductor