A People's Guide to Publishing

How does a publisher evaluate their success? What are the numbers and measurements to look at? This week on the pod we take a good, hard look at how to chart your metrics and see how things are going for your press!

Tomorrow marks our 25th anniversary of Microcosm Publishing so we bring you one formative memory from each year that creates the amalgamated experience of our success and story.

You've created a pile of data about your books. Where do you keep it? Who do you send it to? How does it get there? We've got the answers!

Before long, publishers are juggling a lot of information. How many books do you have? What at their attributes? What is interesting about them? Who are they for? Who has responded well to them in the past? What do they look like? How do we order them? This week, we tackle how to store and deliver that data to everyone you work with!

What are International Standard Book Numbers? How and why do publishers use them? When do you need them? What information is contained? What is useful about them? When do you not need them?

Every year—like a nonprofit—we publicly post our financials with some analysis and comparison to previous years. What's changed? What's exciting? What's difficult? And now we'll also review it on the pod every year.

With lightning precision and relentless candlelight editing, we publish a handful of new zines every month. So in our latest pod feature, we are going to add a monthly roundup of them!

Harvey Pekar's American Splendor showed the world that comics didn't have to be restricted to superheroes in tights embroiled in epic battles. And in Joyce Brabner's latest book in the new American Splendor Family series, they show that one epic battle can be rebuilding our children after a sexual assault and that comics can be an effective format for teaching this.

Barnes & Noble was recently purchased by a new parent company invested in brick and mortar retail during a year of COVID closures. They cleverly used this time to shift layout and planograms in their stores, change inventory management, buying habits, and what is centralized versus localized. What does this mean for publishers? What do we think about all of this?

In publishing you make plans and try and stick to them. Then everything in the world insists on sticking a screwdriver into your front spokes. We discuss how that impacts us, how we respond, and how we need to pivot on a double nickel.

Penguin Random House has negotiated the purchase of Simon & Schuster for over $2B. Sterling Publishers has been for sale, on and off, for years. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's profitable trade division is for sale. Why are all of these corporate giants merging?

Due to the difficult year, we've had many publishers ask us for advice on how to find a buyer for their publishing company. Essentially, this is a prospect for some small and medium presses, so this week we look at the things to do in order to make that happen and some unforeseen consequences!

Improve your relationships, get better at boundaries, and end toxic cycles Accountability means accepting responsibility for your actions and repairing any harm you have done. This book can be used by anyone who is ready to do the work to change toxic behaviors and patterns, from quitting smoking to atoning for abuse or crimes. At its heart, accountability is understanding that your actions do not...

GG Allin, the scumfuck king, set out to make music dangerous. He died 27 years ago from a heroin overdose. So why did we make two books about him? Well, because no prior books actually told his story, preferring to lay out a red carpet of glorification in his wake.

Harvey Pekar fundamentally changed the way that comics convey information and entertainment. The advent of the nonfiction comic allowed books like these, to share the history of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and how a young anarchist prince became influential anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. We talk about these books and how we came to publish them!

Another week, another pair of new books! How did they come to be? Why did we choose them? How are they received? This time it's Practical Witch's Almanac by Friday Gladheart and Trans-Galactic Bike Ride by Lydia Rogue, with a contribution from Charlie Jane Anders!

"Workbooks are the new coloring books" we declared to Publisher's Weekly last year. "Prove it." they responded, unimpressed. A year later, publishing nearly a dozen of them and selling around 100,000 copies, we believe that we have. Here's how you can too!

Many years ago we ran out of a 600 sq' office and we would repeatedly hear rumors that it was a false front, like the Hershey's fake factory in Hershey Pennsylvania. I liked the myth that we had a secret, larger operation elsewhere. So let's face the facts. What happens in our building? How do we do it? Where do we keep things? How does it all work together?

The minute that you open the boxes of your first books, it's SOOOO EXCITING! Then a few days, weeks, months, and years go by and...where do we put all of these? How do we make sense of them? How many do we have? How do we keep track? How do we know when to print more? We tackle all of that and more this week!

Most of the time in publishing, when we talk about brands, we are talking about authors. But recently, in independent publishing, we've seen the rise of the series and its own form of unique branding. So we are going to explore best practices and how to manage your brand!

Last week we talked about the evolving definition of midlist so this week we are cracking the lid open on how to write a midlist book or twenty! The lens is Marc McCutcheon's book, Damn, Why DIdn't I Write That? which you can snag a copy of here: https://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/books/9585

Recently we ran into an article claiming that the publishing midlist no longer exists. So we talked about it and realized that the definition of it is merely changing. So this week we took a look at the up and downsides of that evolving definition and who the culprits are (spoiler: some familiar subjects).

In 2010 we published Firebrands. In 2013 we published Grow. In 2020, we hired a bindery to rip the covers off thousands of existing stock and redevelop them with new covers and titles. Learn why!

This week we answer a reader question about the brain science of how many words go on a page and how many words in a manuscript!

When the bookstores closed up shop, the publishers suddenly lost their ground troops. What should publishers do to promote their newest titles? Here's what we did!