A People’s Guide to Publishing: Building a Successful, Sustainable, Meaningful Book Business From the Ground Up

Learn what it takes to publish books successfully

Drawing on 30 years of experience operating an independent publishing company, Microcosm founder and CEO Joe Biel has written the most accessible and comprehensive guide to running a successful publishing business. You’ll learn all the skills of the trade, including how to:

• Develop your individual books to connect with readers on a practical and emotional level
• Choose between offset printed, digitally printed, and ebook formats and work effectively with printers
• Build an authentic niche so you can reach your audience and sell books directly
• Understand if and when you’re ready to work with a distributor or large online retailer
• Create a budget and predict the cost and income of each book so your company stays in the black
• Decide what work you need to do yourself and what can be done by others
• Plan for sustainable growth

Featuring interviews with other upstart independent publishers and funny anecdotes from publishing’s long history as well as detailed charts and visuals, this book is intended both for beginners looking for a realistic overview of the publishing or self-publishing process and for experienced publishers seeking a deeper understanding of accounting principles, ways to bring their books to new audiences, and how to advance their mission in a changing industry. All readers will come away with the confidence to move forward wisely and a strong sense of why publishing matters today more than ever.

Keep going to read an excerpt of Joe Biel’s A People’s Guide to Publishing! Available now through our site, or via your favorite independent Microcosm peddler 🙂

Introduction to the Second Edition: Independents Grow Faster

During the release event for the first edition of this book at Powells in Portland in 2018, a bookseller asked me if I would update it every few years. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. “Publishing really hasn’t substantially changed since the 1800s,” I joked. In 2024, I saw the first mentions that some parts of this book were outdated. This was humorous to me, as the next newest book was 20 years older and the author had written it in 1998, after retirement. However, industry jargon was evolving and so was my analysis. Splitting hairs besides, my views change over time. I learn new things every day that I would love to share with other people on this journey.

In 2018, Microcosm fired our final distributor in favor of self-distributing. A relatively obvious advantage to us is that we would no longer need to bow to Amazon’s demands and market dominance. Breaking up with Amazon was a business decision even more than it was a moral one. They took larger discounts with every contract renewal and so we made the decision to ignore them, as any adult ignores their ex who insists on continuing to behave badly in public.

Our sales more than doubled over the next year. For reasons that I cannot entirely grasp, the headline was never “Microcosm’s sales double by selfdistributing,” it was always “Microcosm doesn’t sell to Amazon.” Indeed, six years later, I am still asked about this in every interview, rather than the fact that our sales have now more than octupled in the past decade through this decision. I digress.

There are other reasons that we have been so successful. We built our own custom royalty, fulfillment, inventory management, and publishing software, WorkingLit, from scratch and added every feature that we needed to work more effectively.¹ This saves us several hundred thousand dollars per year as well as managing marketing and strategic growth. We figured that we should make it available for other publishers to use too, so we made it free for very small presses.

In 2021, the only words that I ate in the previous edition were my claim that it never makes sense for publishers to own their own printing equipment. In a year when every press that I have ever met got in touch to ask me to teach them how to print in the U.S. and turnaround times hit six months for even domestic printing, it sure would have been nice to have been able to better manage keeping our books in our warehouses. But part of writing an authoritative book is realizing that you will sometimes say something confidently that is, in fact, entirely wrong.

Fortunately, my track record is usually in my favor. In 2021, another two-year Publisher’s Weekly “Fastest Growing Publisher” brought me on to do consulting for them. They had invested heavily in Amazon as their sales force—gaming the system by strategically publishing hundreds of books on topics that were heavily sought and undersupplied on Amazon, without any regard to if those books would sell elsewhere. When Amazon dumped books during the pandemic, the publisher had no recourse. The CEO’s assistant put our appointment at 8 PM instead of 8 AM, so they stood me up. Two months later, they laid off 70% of their staff, after bleeding money for years. Six months later, the company was bought for scrap by a major. A week after that, even their bestselling inventory was put on auction. The whole situation is perplexing. And more importantly, preventable.

They brought me on too late to prevent their freefall, had grown too fast, and invested too heavily in Amazon as a sales and demand discovery tool. If there’s one parable to take away from the industry changes in the past eight years, it’s that one. Even if your model and systems are working magnificently, if you have all of your eggs in one basket, the whole thing can quickly fall apart. A shocking number of even “Fastest Growing Publishers” become financially insolvent within five years because they insisted on supercharging that growth instead of small, incremental steps. The best news is that independents continue to grow faster than the majors. As book sales grow with the population each year, independent publishers have increasingly larger market share. This should be the best encouragement for independent publishers today, in addition to the overall stability of the market. However, this growth and stability can quickly be undone when you try to do anything too fast. So take your time and figure out where there is room for you that nobody else will get in your way, or where one company can’t singlehandedly pull the rug out from under you.

1. Created by Microcosm in 2001 and with a rebuilt stack in 2021, WorkingLit.com is the only publishing software that is entirely created by and for publishers. Throughout this book, when I refer to “WorkingLit,” I mean the publicly usable version at WorkingLit.com. When I refer to “legacy WorkingLit” I mean the internal version only available to Microcosm staff which has more features that will eventually be available at the public version when we finish perfecting them. ↩︎