On today’s episode of the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joestradamus makes some predictions about the lasting changes that we’ll see in the publishing industry as a result of the global pandemic of 2020.
Watch or listen to this and 98 other episodes about the art, science, and business of publishing books!
Coming up next week: our 100th episode!
This week on the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joe and Elly answer a listener question: What is a fair royalty for a publisher to offer to authors for the rights to publish their books? There are a lot of different royalty agreements out there, each one more confusing than the last. Should you pay based on a percent of the cover price? Based on gross sales (ie, the amount the publisher actually gets paid per book sold)? Based on net sales after printing costs? Profit sharing?
Find out how these various options work, the costs and benefits of each, and how certain so-called indie publishing platforms use large numbers to trick you into agreeing to unfair royalty agreements. Listen or watch! And don’t forget to subscribe to hear our newest episode every Thursday.
Back in February, Portland’s had big snow scare…the same night as Dr. Faith Harper’s event at Powell’s Books for Unfuck Your Intimacy + Coping Skills. She answered TONS of audience questions.
Joe Biel and Elly Blue draw upon 24 years of publishing and selling millions of books in order to explain what goes into designing a successful book cover.
This week on the vlogcast, we discuss submission guidelines, what ours look like, how most of the industry operates, and what best practices are both as a publisher and for submitting to publishers.
Our protagonists, Joe Biel and Elly Blue, swashbuckle their way through how recent threat of additional tariffs will affect the publishing industry
In the latest in our vlogcast series, publishers Elly Blue and Joe Biel discuss challenges that they’ve overcome with doing their jobs, being organized, and how workflows interconnect
For many years, new publishers and authors have posed questions to us about distribution. They want to know why distribution is so expensive and exclusive. It’s a much more complicated answer than they were expecting so we’re going to break that out in a weekly video series over the next few months.
This week, when we made the announcement that we will part ways with our trade distributor at the end of 2018, we also announced that we won’t be seeking a new distribution relationship directly with Amazon. We’ve gotten a lot of virtual high fives for this, and there’s also been some misunderstanding about what exactly this means.
“I feel terrible because I still sell / buy on Amazon,” is one reaction we get. “But won’t your company / authors suffer if your books aren’t available on Amazon?” is the other. The answer is simple, but the background is complex, and this post is meant to help clarify the relationship Amazon has with publishers, authors, and consumers, and will hopefully give you some guidance in making more informed choices. (more…)
Recently we were approached about starting a new thing on a new platform that was all very top-secret, and we jumped at the chance (we like shiny things). That platform is Drip, Kickstarter’s new subscriptions program, and our project launched today in its inaugural class of creators.
We’ll still be using Kickstarter to fund the production of some of our individual books. Meanwhile, Drip is a little different: it’s about monthly support—it’s similar to Patreon, which we also use. It offers various levels of support; you can get ebooks or credit for our online store. By backing at our core level, you can have access to regular posts with advice about all aspects of our publishing work. You can ask us anything and we’ll do our best to talk you through it. And we’ll share regular windows into the life of our office.
Some posts we have planned for the near future include:
We’ve been doing this a long time, and we love sharing our books with you. Now, let us share our knowledge and lore, too.
Thank you for your support!