Shows / A People's Guide to Publishing
A People's Guide to Publishing
Do you find that the traditional methods for book publishing aren't working for you? Are you a publisher or author who wants to innovate, succeed, and expand your audience through time-tested methods? We offer time-tested publishing methods that we know work because we have used them to sell millions of books in a changing industry. We have been inundated with requests for consulting so we created this show to share everything we know. We are the executives of Microcosm Publishing, a Publishers…
Episodes
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 264: What does AI mean for publishers? (starring Jane Friedman)
Much hullaballoo and many predictions has been made about how AI will "disrupt" the publishing industry. Typically, with a new technology the steps are 1) fear…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 263: What are the Limits of What You Would Publish?
In the dawn of a young publishers' life, they focus on their own tastes. Gradually, they see which books are well-received and branch outward. Some publishers…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 262: What Can Your Regional Bookseller Association Do For You? starring Larry Law, ED of GLIBA
What is a regional trade association? What can they do for you as a bookseller or a publisher? This week on the pod, we feature Larry Law, executive director…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 261: What Can a Publisher's Advocacy Association Do For You? w/ IBPA CEO Andrea Fleck-Nisbet
Corporate publishing has the distinct advantage of scale: they command more sales dollars, they can push customers and vendors around more. This week we take a…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 260: Bookstore Solidarity Project: King's Coop Bookstore
You may know King's Coop Bookstore as the winner of our How to Resist Amazon display contest, but they are so much more than that! This week on our continuing…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 259: Are Audiobooks Profitable? (starring Jane Friedman)
At the release event for this very book, the first question was about making money from audiobooks. The answer? It's complicated. And increasingly so with…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 258: How Can Publishers Reach Their Core Audience? with Leah Hernandez- A People’s Guide to Publishing
Leah Hernandez has a story unlike that of most publishers. With a background in business, she realized that children relate better with younger authors and set…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 257: What Did the Funk Brothers Teach Us About Book Editing?
The Funk Brothers, the legendary bestselling band (possibly of all time) and house band of Motown Records, wrote and performed on more tracks than you could…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 256: How Should A Publisher Change Distributors?
After the recent news of Small Press Distribution (SPD) closing, we thought it would be prudent to walk through best practices for changing a distributor! A…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 255: Bookstore Solidarity Project: Charlie's Queer Books
In 2013, we predicted that the bookstore model would shift to more specialized indie stores that offered a narrower offering around their own curated interests…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 254: What Does a Publisher Need to Distribute Books?
Most small presses use a trade distributor. What do they do? What are the components of a distributor's function? Can you do them yourself? What does a…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 253: Bookstore Solidarity Project: Alibi Bookshop of Vallejo, CA
Nestled deep in the heart between San Francisco and Sacramento lives the Alibi Bookshop! This week, in the latest of "What makes all of these cool indie…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 252: How does a book publisher deal with failure?
Not everything that you do will be a great success. It's a matter of how we navigate these less-than-graceful moments that determine our ability to respond and…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 251: Why Does Publishing Create So Much Waste (and what can we do about it)?
Largely due to consumer preference and obstinate legacy behaviors, the world of book publishing still operates on the same model from the 1800s. Mass…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 250: Joe Biel awarded PubWest Innovator 2024 by Andrea Fleck-Nisbet
In February 2024, in Maricopa, AZ, IBPA's CEO Andrea Fleck-Nisbet awarded the PubWest Innovator Award to Microcosm Publishing Founder and CEO Joe Biel for…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 249: Bookstore Solidarity! Josh Christie of Print: A Bookstore
Print: A Bookstore has been a triumphant, bright light in envisioning what a bookstore could be. Both as a brick and mortar that is a champion for information…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 248: Which Publishers Grew 12% Over The Past Three Years?
The pandemic was an unexpectedly magical time for the publishing industry. Sales went up when they were expected to go down. Printing slowed to a crawl due to…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 246: What is ONIX and do small publishers need to use it?
How does the entire world get information about what you are publishing? It's from a feed called ONIX, that propagates every detail about your titles. This…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 247: How Should Publishers Create Budgets and Predict Finances?
Many publishers find money to be very unpredictable and scary. So this week we take a look at how to create budgets and predict cash flow as well as how to…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 245: Can Book Publishers Vertically Integrate? Blackstone Publishing President Anthony Goff
So much of book publishing is about distributing tasks, so how can publishers take more of these operational aspects in-house? This week on the pod, guest…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 244: 2023: A Publishing Year in Review
What was 2023 like for publishing books? This week on the pod, we review what happened, how our plans shook out, what aspects threw wrenches into our plans…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 243: What Did We Learn at Frankfurt Book Fair?
Frankfurt Book Fair is now the world's largest publishing industry show. It's open to the public, but it's primarily for industry veterans to pen big business…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 242: How Should Book Publishers Talk About Current Events?
We live in an era where Hershey posts perspectives on trans rights and Heinz offers opinions on foreign wars. Naturally, book publishers feel pressure to talk…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 241: How did we become the distributor for the new Lydia Davis book?
Popular author Lydia Davis decided that she no longer wanted her books sold on Amazon. So she tasked her agent with finding a publisher who could do this for…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 240: How does design build community bookselling? w/ Rick from Shop at MATTER
The Shop at MATTER has been an innovative bookseller and design studio for decades. For our featured bookseller of the month we invite Rick Griffith to discuss…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 239: What is a Sales Conference?
In several previous episodes, we've made reference to presenting your books at a "sales conference." It's a fundamentally misleading event, since you aren't…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 238: How Should Publishers Handle Submissions?
How do authors find a publisher? (or how can publishers find them?) How do publishers choose which books to acquire? What does the development and contract…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 237: What are the jobs of a publisher?
When we tell strangers what we do, they either bemoan the death of the publishing industry or assume that we sit around and read books all day. So this week on…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 236: How Do I Know if My Book is "Good?"
Taste is subjective and arbitrary, but still, everyone carries a certain amount of imposter syndrome, wondering if their book if any good. So this week on the…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 235: Who is the book's client?
When you are working on someone else's book, there is frequent confusion about who has the final say. Many people consider the author to be the final authority…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 234: How do you make a book's sales last forever?
In traditional publishing, sales are thought of as a steep upward curve, a peak, falling action, and a steady plateau, moving slowly downward towards the…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 233: How to Love Your Queer Kid, an interview with Marc Campbell
Marc Campbell, a Black, gay therapist, works with queer kids and parents to create loving and accepting homes where people can safely be themselves and parents…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 231: Bookstore Solidarity Project: Copper Dog Books of MA
The Copper Dog didn't set out to be controversial; just a lovable weird bird next door to spooky Salem. However, some of their customers don't understand the…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 232: How do you manage book inventory and reprints?
Too much or too little inventory is almost always a publisher's biggest problem. These are the two biggest problems facing the industry. So this week on the…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 230: What Does It Mean to Have Distributed Client Publishers?
Once upon a time, we were a client publisher of Independent Publisher's Group (IPG). Then, as we continued to grow, we embarked out on our own and now handle…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 229: Who is your reader?
The first step of writing a book is figuring out who will read it. What else are they interested in? What attracts them to those things? What implicit…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 227: Bookstore Solidarity Project: The Raven Bookstore of Lawrence, Kansas
Each month we feature a new bookstore that we operate in solidarity with. This month it's the Raven, a classical bookstore of many reboots, owners, and…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 228: How Do You Get A Job in Book Publishing?
This is the question that just about everyone actually wants the answer to, beneath all of their qualifying questions: where are the jobs in publishing? Where…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 226: How Do I Protect Bookstores? (with Danny Caine)
Every trip out of the house results in sad looks from strangers about how nobody reads anymore or how the bookstores are all gone. It's not uncommon for us to…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 225: How should you utilize Profit & Loss Statements?
For most publishers, profit and loss statements are either an afterthought, something they "don't have time for," or a ritualistic capitalistic enterprise that…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 224: Do Smaller Publishers Have Different Economic Models?
Much ink has been spilt over the illusion that big publishers have different economic models. The reality is that larger publishers benefit from scale but the…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 223: How Can Publishers Expand Adult Reading?
You can read many academic articles about the need to get more people reading and how wonderful this would be for critical thinking and education. But most…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 222: Why make masturbation graphic? An interview with Vic Liu
Vic Liu's Bang! delivers a walloping dose of information about masturbation; probably more than most readers have ever thought about it. And we think that…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 221: Queer Affirmations (an interview with Joe Carlough and Ally Schwed)
It started as a joke at the kitchen table at 7 AM before AWP. We were looking at the many books of "helping sayings" that really didn't say anything at all…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 220: How do we solve Publishing's Biggest Problem?
Last week we presented to you the biggest problem in publishing. So this week, we present the solution. Yes, the industry is very crowded but people are…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 219: What is publishing's Biggest Problem?
We've said it hundreds of times on this pod: the problems that everyone assumes and claims to plague publishing aren't programs at all. So what is publishing's…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 218: What Does a Day in the Life of a Publisher Look Like?
Most people imagine us with our noses in a book or having charmed candlelight talks over a manuscript in development. The reality, as always, is very…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 217: How we came to distribute Seth Tobocman's War in the Neighborhood
The year was 1999. Seth Tobocman's landmark graphic novel, War in the Neighborhood was published by Autonomedia. We ordered some copies. Quickly, we noticed a…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 216: Year of the Witch (An Interview with Francesca Black)
Wanting to create a keepsake of meaningful discoveries she made as a younger woman, Francesca Black created Year of the Witch for her daughters. This week on…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 215: How does an old punk get fiction published?
Question on the pod this week: an old punk wrote a novel and is finding that it's harder to find open submissions without an agency from an amenable press that…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 214: Queer Community with Laura Q (A Tight Squeeze)
Laura Q writes Queer Smut in the tradition of Nerve Endings and the sparse and isolated incidents of trans erotica. This week on the pod, we talk about queer…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 213: Be Present in Your Emotions with the Monthly Manifestation Manual, featuring Jessica Mullen and Kelly Cree
This week we feature the very exciting guests, Jessica Mullen and Kelly Cree of the School of Life Design and their brand new book, Monthly Manifestation…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 212: How Do You Write a Pitch? w/Jessie Kwak (From Big Idea to Book)
So much of publishing work is explaining something to someone else, why they care, what their constituencies are getting out of it. So this week on the pod, we…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 211: How did we end up with a Third Book Warehouse?
You never end up with the problems that you expect or plan for. In fact, the biggest problems are usually caused by unexpected successes. Many publishers are…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 210: What does it mean that Booktok represents 4% of book sales?
Over the past year, it was reported by a wide variety of sources that TikTok sells 3-25% of ALL books—about 90 million book purchases last year—by most…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 209: Should an author have a contract when they self-publish?
The question seems silly at first, but what happens when the publisher releases a book that they wrote? What happens a year, five years, or ten years later if…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 208: If an author doesn't have an agent, should they hire a lawyer?
Most novice authors do not have a lot of familiarity with a contract and do not have an agent, so they both don't know the standards of these agreements or how…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 207: How should publishers think about Platform w/ Guy LeCharles Gonzalez?
It is oft repeated that an author needs to already be famous in order to publish a book. This week on the pod, we are rejoined by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez who…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 206: What Forms Your Publishing Perspective?
What defines a "good book" for you? Where do your ideas come from? What is "worth" publishing? This week on the pod, we answer these questions and more, based…
A People's Guide to PublishingEpisode 205: How do I make a living as a writer? An interview with Jessie Kwak
For many, the ultimate dream is to make a living as a writer! Jessie Kwak (From Chaos to Creativity, From Big Idea to Book) has achieved just that for over ten…