What publishers can learn from preppers (from someone who’s survived climate disaster and lived to read about it)
This post is part of a series by the team at WorkingLit. WorkingLit is cloud-based software developed by Microcosm Publishing that gives independent publishers tools to thrive and grow at their own pace. Our industry is run by billionaires and conglomerates, and we want to give our fellow publishers the freedom to market and sell your books, understand your business, and painlessly pay royalties. Learn more at WorkingLit.com.
Excerpted from Microcosm zine Books and Math: A Manifesto On Publishing Tools by Elly Blue, Joe Biel, and Sara Balabanlilar. Take a look at the whole zine and purchase a copy on our website.
For the unprepared, every small shift in the publishing industry can feel like a disaster on the horizon. But it doesn’t have to be this way if you have your tools at the ready. Even before the current unprecedented times (™), there was an influx of seasonal disaster fearmongering from all areas: the whole west coast looks forward to The Big One and wildfires that grow year after year; the northern Midwest has to batten down the hatches for yearly snowstorms that shut down business for days. I grew up on the Gulf Coast, where weather predictions regularly forecast a potential Cat 5 hurricane that might decimate coastal cities.
I’m deeply uninterested in fearmongering, and if I were, I wouldn’t be on the administrative side of the independent book world ;). The thing is, the disaster is already here, I’ve seen it (many of us have), and getting anxious about a future era of climate dystopia is kinda useless. Y’all saw, or lived, last year’s horrific hurricane that swept away entire areas of southern Appalachia and the East Coast, or the terrible fires that reached Los Angeles and burned down entire neighborhoods. The Gulf lives in the shadow of Katrina and a number of other hurricanes that did irreparable damage to the landscape and population. Heck, my home city has fatal flash-floods multiple times a year that come and go without much comment.
Something I’ve learned (and this is where the prepper stuff comes in) is: the time to prepare is now. Don’t get scared, get ready! That might sound a little desperate or fatalist but I don’t necessarily mean it like that. Yes, I have met the rural Texans with a large store of firearms, but there are also my beloved queer anarchist friends who preserve food every winter, raise their own animals in the middle of their southern cities, know how to fix their own houses when high winds blow the roof off, and build decentralized, anti-surveillance communication networks. What I mean is, think about what you would potentially lose in the face of a crisis and figure out a sustainable practice to keep what you need. Learn to grow, find, and can your food. As these pals have shown me, teach yourself survival skills outside of the system and see if, instead of feeling paranoid, you just feel like your life has become less fretful and more expansive.
Anyway. Now transmute that ethos into other realms. How do you build a life practice that supports you no matter the eventuality? After all, I’m trying to get at a holistic view of existing in the world that invests in climate safety practices alongside all other kinds of safety and nourishment. So of course, coming as I am from a WorkingLit point of view, I’m starting with books.
First, let’s agree that there’s no one impending disaster in the book/publishing industry. Disaster, industry-shifting changes, and outside forces have come and gone in multiple forms, each shift shaping the industry and unfortunately ridding the world of some amazing publishers as it goes. Whether industry-specific, like the rise of eBooks and Print on Demand (see the prescient and thoughtful A People’s Guide to Publishing podcast episode) or U.S. economy-specific, like tariffs (see…another prescient and thoughtful A People’s Guide to Publishing podcast episode, lol) and Amazon’s relentless pursuit of money at the expense of publishers and bookstores, shifts are wide-ranging.
The same outlets that forecast the disappearance of New Orleans due to rising waters are also persistently forecasting the disappearance of print books, or bookstores. But come on, y’all, the binary deserves to be complicated, there’s no Black and White, we already know this. There is no “existence” vs. “complete disappearance.” We can forecast that, reasonably, such shifts will continue to occur, just as I can unfortunately assume that another hurricane is going to hit my home city and, in advance, make sure my family has flood insurance, a stock of potable water, and a generator.
I guess from what I can see, preparing for disaster breaks down to a few major things:
- Know what you’ve got on hand. Keep track of your stock. Life is a mystery, your assets don’t have to be. Publishers: Make your systems as infallible as possible. If you’re hand-counting stock in a garage to keep track of your catalog, please please stop. If you’ve not taken inventory in a while, please build it into your schedule at least twice a year. Track your product movement so you’re not scrambling to reprint or find space for bestsellers.
- Recognize your network. If you’re just the “firearms” type of prepper, this is your nuclear family, I guess; if you’re the “queer anarchist” type of prepper, this is your family too, but maybe not so much in the bound-by-blood type of way. And if you’re a publisher, this is not just your audience of readers but your community of peers. You need them and they need you! Keep track of the actual stats year over year, don’t just make assumptions based on your loudest customers. You’ll find out a lot more about your highest-selling accounts, the wild online-only stores that try to return 60% of their orders from you, and the small but determined gift accounts that love what you do.
If you’re sure of what you have, you’re sure of where it’s going, and you’re sure of who’s doing it with you, then you can… - Prepare for the future and any eventuality. Remember when I said “getting anxious is kinda useless”? Ok, we’re back to that again. Knowing where your weak/strong spots are means that, as time passes and the world changes, you know where your business could use growth and will need support. At all costs, stay the flexible, creative, generative person I know you are if you’re reading this. With the stable support of data behind you, you can focus your brain on that critical thinking and spend less time wondering when you accumulated 1000 extra copies of an underseller…
Pile these three together and they lead to the hopefully inevitable outcome that you can: - Feel like you’ve got the control to do what you WANT. One of my friends referenced disaster preparedness including a “go-bag” and knowledge of evacuation routes. I’m from the south, baby! We don’t have evacuation routes, we hunker down and keep our “bunkers” above ground-level. But you do you. You know your apocalypse best; preparedness is not a one-size-fits-all process. In the publishing world… I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. If you’ve followed steps 1-3 above, you know your context, your catalog, your pals, and your requirements to move forward. You can pivot depending on each year’s needs. In Microcosm’s case, this means owning the software to track sales proactively, thereby weathering recessions with relative ease and sticking around for decades to sell more great books.
- Lift up yourself and your community. In the Gulf Coast case: make sure you know the person on your block with a boat (it might be you).
As a book industry worker outside the coastal hubs, I spend a lot of time, mostly digitally, with fellow book people talking about our geographic challenges. There’s something incredibly loving and thoughtful about what I have seen: a growing group of book people who can share their gripes about working in South Carolina, Idaho, Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico, Missouri, etc., but also share support systems and brainstorm solutions together. Non-New York presses were some of the first to pivot when Covid started in 2020, and I think it’s because we’re so used to existing outside the spotlight, and (already limited) funding, of the literary world. Decentralization is not a gimmick, it’s vital that we retain independence and also support our fellow indies. Rising tide and all that.
May we all survive and live to tweet (or whatever the next inevitable post-apocalyptic social media is, as the samsara of app churn continues) another day.
Sara Balabanlilar has spent almost ten years working in the book world, including bookselling, event organizing, design, marketing, sales, and indie publishing. She is currently the Marketing Manager at WorkingLit and a Senior Sales Specialist at Microcosm Publishing.
