Tweet
Pin
Share
Share

Carla King interviews Joe Biel on how to publish with Microcosm Publishing.

Nonfiction Authors Association Podcast | July 5, 2023

“Think of [publishing] like a creative partnership. The publisher’s job is to know how to speak to their industry. It’s about understanding like you’re a translator. Where you say, ‘This is what it needs to look like. This is what it needs to sound like. This is how you talk about it.’ And so it’s only when the author comes in and they have really rigid ideas about what it needs to be called or what goes on the cover, that the conversation breaks down, because then we can’t do our job.”
-Joe Biel

Joe Biel - How to publish with Microcosm Publishing

About Joe Biel

Joe Biel is a self-made autistic publisher and filmmaker who draws origins, inspiration, and methods from punk rock. Biel is the founder and CEO of Microcosm Publishing, which was named by Publishers Weekly as the #1 fastest growing publisher of 2022 and #3 in 2023. Biel is the author of People’s Guide to Publishing: Building a Successful, Sustainable, Meaningful Book Business, Autism Relationships Handbook, Unfuck Your Business, and dozens more.

Nonfiction Authors Podcast: Joe Biel

Find the video podcast, show notes, links, quotes, and podcast transcript below.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Watch the video interview on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or on our YouTube Channel where you can subscribe to our playlist.

Got feedback on our podcast? Want us to consider a guest or topic? Please let us know on our feedback form here.

Show Notes

Links 

In this episode…

  • The story behind Microcosm Publishing.
  • Microcosm Publishing submission guidelines and a general idea of their ideal author.
  • Call for authors.
  • More about Microcosm Publishing’s unique reader and fan following.
  • How Microcosm Publishing sells direct to readers.
  • The acceptance process for authors submitting work to Microcosm Publishing.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Carla King: Hello, and welcome to the Nonfiction Authors Podcast. I’m Carla King, your host, and before we start, I’d like to invite you to go to the Freebies tab at nonfictionauthorsassociation.com to check out our free reports. We developed these reports to help you figure out things like ISBNs, distribution, optimizing book sales on Amazon, generating book reviews, growing your email list, and we provide checklists on things like publishing and book launches.

Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and visit our website to find transcripts, show notes and links to all of our episodes, explore our membership options and download free reports, search the archives, and get answers to your writing and publishing questions.

Okay, now I’d like to introduce our guest, Joe Biel, who was a self-made autistic publisher and filmmaker, who draws origins, inspiration, and methods from punk Rock. Biel is the founder and CEO of Microcosm Publishing, which was named by Publishers Weekly as the #1 fastest growing publisher of 2022, and #3 in 2023. Biel is the author of People’s Guide to Publishing: Building A Successful, Sustainable, Meaningful Book Business, Autism Relationships Handbook, Unfuck Your Business, and dozens more.

After our conversation, I encourage you to go explore Microcosm Publishing at microcosm.pub. Welcome to the podcast, Joe.

[00:01:34] Joe Biel: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:36] Carla King: You’ve been all over the news, and you’ve been getting lots of recognition. Congratulations on your growth and recognition as being PW’s #1 and #3 growing publisher. How does that feel after, I think, 30 years in the business?

[00:01:49] Joe Beil: Yeah I know, right?  This is kind of what I tell people–and I used to joke about this, because I have a friend who is a very successful author, and who is also a very good author. And I was like, “If you work hard and apply yourself for only 30 years, you too can become very good at something,” you know? And it’s funny–but I think it’s also true that–when you stick with something, you do get better at it.

[00:02:14] Carla King: And it seems like you’ve had fun with it all along. This is definitely your passion, your purpose. And I’d just like you to start with maybe why you started this publishing company. What was the inspiration and purpose behind it?

[00:02:26] Joe Biel: Sure. So it was a combination of two seemingly conflicting ideas. So when I was growing up, none of the reading that had been given to me was remotely interesting. And I had friends and had seen things and I had a childhood neighbor who wrote for the paper and was an author as well. And all the things that their family showed me were really interesting.

And I was like, ‘Oh, books could be really cool. Why are all the ones being handed to me not that interesting?” And then, as a teenager, you have a little bit more pompousness, and you have a little bit more–you do something that you wouldn’t do as an adult, because that’s actually really difficult. And so I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just make interesting books. I’ll make the kind of books that I would want to have handed to me.’

And then the other side of that is that I was an autistic, at risk kid. I ran away and I really needed a lot of resources at the same time. So between those two things–that really put me on my path that I’m still on today.

[00:03:36] Carla King: So what is your niche? You’ve got a lot of stuff on your website–and it really is a destination website. But if you had to just in a nutshell say, what is your niche as a publisher, what would that be?

[00:03:47] Joe Biel: The criteria we look at in every single book is–does it give you the tools to change your life and the world around you? And that can be self-help, that can be gardening, that can be culture or politics.

When we did the AWP Conference a few years ago, people kept coming up and saying, ‘Oh, I never knew books could be like this.’ And I feel like we want people to feel that way, but then also feel like they kind of got away with something when they find one of our books–like maybe there’s something debaucherous about it.

[00:04:19] Carla King: Yes. It is so fun to look through your website again, and because you don’t publish only books. But before I go to that, you have very good submission guidelines, so I want everybody to go look at them. They’re super thorough. I believe you say–on your submission guidelines–that the book needs to be not more than 20% about you. It needs to be informative. What do you mean by that?

[00:04:44] Joe Biel: At one time, we were doing a lot of memoirs and we were doing a lot of things where somebody was a part of a social scene, but they’re writing about the parts that are important to them. And now there are more memoirs in print than there are novels in print, which has been something that has changed in the past 30 years, let’s say. And so, that has made it much more difficult that way.

So we’re really looking at reader orientation. So when we develop a book, that’s normally the number one thing in submission review–where marketing and editors will be like, ‘This book is not enough about the reader. It really needs to be more about the reader.’ So then we go back to the author and say, ‘Well, this is what it would need to work for us.’ And sometimes they very much are grateful, and they say, ‘Thank you. It hadn’t even occurred to me. I’m so close to it, I wouldn’t have observed that.’

[00:05:46] Carla King: And who was your ideal author? Who are you putting out a call for especially?

[00:05:53] Joe Biel: So our ideal author is somebody who wants to change and impact culture, and that’s their primary motivator. Because I feel like that is the freshest perspective–where they’ll take a topic, they’ll write about it in an interesting way. They’ll take a topic that I didn’t know was interesting, and they’ll make me interested in it.

[00:06:16] Carla King: A lot of your books have images, graphics–they’re very colorful. Does the author do that, or do you help the author with that?

[00:06:25] Joe Biel: Sometimes. It’s a mix. A lot of times someone will come in with–they’ll have an aesthetic hand and they can do all of that. And then other times, we usually bring more of that, because not everybody is a born illustrator or has an artistic sensibility. But they’ll have ideas.

[00:06:47] Carla King: And I read–or heard somewhere–that you have a lot of books in mind that you need authors for, and they’ve been percolating for some years. Do you have any books in mind right now, or any at the top of mind, that you could put on a call for here?

[00:07:00] Joe Biel: Some topics we’re interested in right now are house plants, beekeeping, we have a huge list of coloring books that we’re working through, and we have a few illustrators that are working on that, but obviously they can only produce so many at one time. And there’s other things–right now people are really interested in house and home type books and project books.

And that’ll likely shift again, as people ease back into the world. We’re still really seeing the crumbs of–what was once sourdough baking has kind of moved along, strangely, into beekeeping and just home projects, in a more scoping sense. And so there are some of those and adjacent topics, too. Again, the hardest part of, ‘What are you looking for?,’ is always–we want stuff that partners well with books we’ve published, so it would fit in well with our existing catalog. Because those are the relationships that we have–is with those retailers. Our job is really to make the authors work more valuable, and we can do that most easily if we already have the network for it.

[00:08:17] Carla King: And unlike most publishers, you actually have a reader following–people who come to your website. You even have a ‘BFF’ button on your website for your fans. This is just so unusual, and I want to point it out for two reasons. Because people don’t Google HarperCollins or Simon & Schuster to find their next read, right? But your readers do. Who is your audience? Who are your most avid readers and fans?

[00:08:43] Joe Biel: So it’s interesting, because this has really been unchanged. And I think a lot of this has to do with my own background, which creates my perspective, and creates the way that I do book development.

So our typical fan has always been low income, women of color who feel sort of categorically ignored. And now it’s not as rare as it once was to have that be an audience. But when I would tell people that 10 or 20 years ago, they would be like, ‘They read books?’ You know. Which is now accepted and understood, but at one time, the demographic idea of a reader was really thought of to be an older person, and a person of a certain amount of disposable income.

And I think that’s why we have so much loyalty in that way–is because, we’re really looking at a different lived experience in the eye that we’re putting to the books that we publish.

[00:09:48] Carla King: If you look at your catalog, there’s neurodiversity, there’s racial diversity, it’s very edgy, it’s punky. It’s cool. I’m still digging in, and it’s endlessly entertaining. And I was going to say, you wrote this guide to publishing, it’s called The People’s Guide to Publishing: Building A Successful, Sustainable, Meaningful Book Business From The Ground Up. And I’m going to dig into that really soon.

But I wanted to point out that in the dropdown–you sell it directly from your website and you can select the paper book, the audiobook on cd, the ebook, the paperback signed by the author, the second edition paperback, preorder, paperback and ebook, magnet of the cover, and slightly damaged version. And you do this for all of your books, and you do sell direct. You’re a pioneer of selling direct to reader, and you ditched Amazon. So how does that work? How do your readers feel about it? How do your authors feel about it? How has it improved your business?

[00:10:57] Joe Beil: So when we started out–I mean, I think this is probably the most typical part of our story–is that, in the nineties, I would go to bookstores and I would say, ‘Hi, I am Joe Publisher. Please sell our books.’ And they would be like, ‘Do you have an appointment?’ And I would be like, ‘Oh, can I make an appointment?’ And they would say, ‘Eh, that’s okay.’ And then coming from punk rock, this is sort of how you do it–is you build your own platform rather than relying on somebody else’s platform.

So then, we were sold by National Book Network, 25 years ago or so. And then we made our tour through all of the different book distributors and by the end they were really like, ‘Your Amazon sales are really low.’ And it’s harder to explain to them that we had been really cultivating this idea that you would order our books from us since the very beginning.

And I remember in 2007–you mentioned Harper Collins–they launched a direct to consumer program. It was more than 10 years after ours, which I felt very entertained by at the time. But that’s exactly it. And so because we had that relationship, and the trust, and we had a warehouse, and we had staff that managed it, you knew that the fastest way to get our books was to order it on our website. And then that pushed down our Amazon sales throughout that period of time, even as Amazon took on increasing market share.

And so, by 2018, we were looking at the terms and the agreements, and we were like, ‘We’re spending so much time on this paperwork.’ And my business partner–she said, ‘Oh, maybe we could see if we could do as good of a job doing all of our own distribution.’ And I was like, ‘That’s kind of ludicrous.’ It was a lot of infrastructure we didn’t have yet, so we spent the next year building that infrastructure, and part of that was that we would not service Amazon. And we had no idea how that was going to go.

Twas really felt like a gamble–six of one, half dozen of the other. And hen we did it, we were up, immediately, 59% that first quarter. And we were like, ‘Wow, that is really wild, because who would’ve thought that we would be able to do a better job than a distributor who is a multi-billion dollar company and has international relationships and outposts everywhere.’

And so that was really telling, because by the next year we had more than doubled. And then we doubled again. And so instead of Amazon, we started with about, I think it was 20–or no, it was 3,600 independent retailers we had direct relationships with five years ago. And today that’s more than 12,000. So we’ve more than quadrupled the number of stores that order from us to sell books. And that’s part of it. But the reason for that is because we’re not bending to Amazon. We’re developing for independent stores to really be the masters of selling our books.

[00:14:18] Carla King: So the lesson is–your readers shop at independent bookstores, not on Amazon.

[00:14:24] Joe Biel: Yeah. And, I think anybody could do their development that way. I think it’s just more–there’s an entrenchment problem in publishing, where people are attached to the world they know, and it’s more fear than aspiration, you know? And there’s definitely a fear of change, and I think it’s harder to live your ambition. It was hard for us. I know it’s hard.

[00:14:48] Carla King: It’s funny you should say that, because on the Write Minded Podcast, which I encourage everybody to go listen to–I wrote down a quote that you said there. You said, ‘When you really want to speak your ambitions and not your fears–that is a much better course for decision making.’

[00:15:07] Joe Biel: Oh yeah. That does sound good. Who said that? Wow. But that’s the kind of thing. And I just don’t think that’s what is motivating people.

And whenever I tell this story early on, people are like, ‘Oh, you got lucky.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, no, we were strategic about it. We had a plan.’ And I don’t think that has to be unique to us, and I think we’re just the tip of the iceberg as far as critical creative thinking.

[00:15:41] Carla King: And luck is an interesting word. My dad always told me luck is where preparation meets opportunity, right? Boom. We’re full of quotes today. Okay. Back to how authors can publish with you.

[00:15:55] Joe Beil: We don’t even take pitches for fiction. So all the pitches we take are nonfiction.

[00:16:02] Carla King: What is your acceptance process? So somebody queries according to your very detailed submissions, you get it. Who reads it? Do you have a team of acquisition editors? Is it you? How long does it take to say yes and no? And what’s that process?

[00:16:16] Joe Biel: So kind of joking, kind of not joking–thank you. Because I feel like the submission guidelines are the best piece of writing I’ve ever created, because it really hones in what to do, what not to do.

And it’s really the first test of–can we work with somebody? And by that I mean– can they follow these directions, rather than trying to shoehorn their way in? And so what we do–we take a sample paragraph from each chapter, and we take a five second pitch about what the book is and how it’s different from other books that would occupy the same shelf in the store.

And people can really have a hard time with that, because that’s not how authors are trained to think about their work. And we run into this a lot–where they’re like, ‘Well, how do I know that I’m qualified enough to write the book?’ And we’re like, Well, do you have critical ideas? Do you have your own point of view?’

We don’t want somebody that’s just rehashing or summarizing existing work. We want somebody that really has something to say, in addition to rehashing and summarizing what are the existing points of view on the subject. We take that–and we can tell within normally a few days if we’re going to do it or not, based on the sample and how seriously they take that project. And we don’t even normally need to see the whole manuscript to know, because the sample is normally sufficient.

And sometimes we’ll have it where we will need to take the manuscript and we will need to talk it over with editorial and marketing and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I don’t know, this needs more of this, or I would be nervous about this or that.’ All that is really in the author’s best interest too, because you don’t want us publishing your work if we can’t put it in stores. Because then we’re not helping you, we’re hurting you.

So we’re really trying to make sure that we’re ideally your best option, but at least a very good option. Because, again, our job is to make the work more valuable.

[00:18:32] Carla King: I love that. That’s a great description of how a publisher ought to be thinking. You know your market–you even publish outside of bookstores. That’s been a big business growth for you lately, hasn’t it?

[00:18:44] Joe Biel: Yeah. And it’s odd because when I would get turned away from bookstores in the nineties, I would go to other kinds of stores. And so the record store was really into selling things. And then it turned out they could sell a lot of books. And now, today that’s called ‘special markets’ or ‘special sales,’ but in the nineties, that wasn’t a thing that existed. Now the publishing industry got a little more comfortable with gift, whereas special sales are businesses that use books to tell their customers what their values are.

Whereas gift is more like a set of impulse items that are more generalized–they’re not used to specifically speak to the mission of the business. But we do both of those, and we’ve done both of those for so long that yeah, we know how to do it. And those have been really successful for us, especially during the pandemic when, I mean, honestly, more and more people were going to those places to buy books because interest in books just soared.

[00:19:48] Carla King: Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of books in housewares. I sell for the motorcycle market, so my books are in motorcycle shops. And that’s what you want the author to know, right? You want them to bring that knowledge of the market to you. Yet you don’t actually insist that the author have a platform. As a last point, can we talk about that? How much platform? This is a great interest to a lot of authors who don’t have platforms. Yeah. How much do they need, or need to commit to, and how might you help with that?

[00:20:23] Joe Beil: So this is the thing that I tell people–and this is maybe the most shocking point when I’m teaching at Portland State, or things like that. All of our bestselling authors were debuts. And up until 2016, our bestselling author didn’t know how to use a computer.

So she not only didn’t have a platform, she had never written a book before, she didn’t even exist on social media. Because it’s not congruence with the world that people conceive of being an author in, or maybe what they’ve heard, or what they believe, or things like that.

But now our bestselling author–she’s very good at texting and using a computer. She had never written a book before. She had been turned down from many publishers, and then she saw that most of the books that she owned on her shelf were published by us, so then she came to us after she had been turned away by all the people that sort of control thought in her shelf. We went on to sell 5 million of that book.

[00:21:33] Carla King: Wow.

[00:21:33] Joe Biel: That’s what I said. It’s like I knew it would be big, but I didn’t know it would be that big. Again, think of it like a creative partnership. The publisher’s job is to know how to speak to their industry. It’s about understanding like you’re a translator. Where you say, ‘This is what it needs to look like. This is what it needs to sound like. This is how you talk about it.’ And so it’s only when the author comes in and they have really rigid ideas about what it needs to be called or what goes on the cover, that the conversation breaks down, because then we can’t do our job.

And so platform is sort of immaterial because–don’t get me wrong, it’s great if an author has a platform and then they can just say, ‘Go buy my book.’ But as we’ve seen in the last five years, there’s so many great examples where somebody would have a platform in the millions, but their audience does not read. So no matter how many times they say, ‘Buy my book,’ the people are like, ‘Oh, that’s so great. You have a book. Not of interest to me.’ And it’s been really interesting to watch that shake out. We’ve seen it with podcasters, we’ve seen it with Instagram influencers, we’ve seen it with musicians, we’ve seen it with YouTubers. And so again, it’s–if we can do our job, then ideally, what we tell the author is, ‘You should be writing your next book. You shouldn’t have to do a big publicity circuit or have to do our job for us. You should just let us do our job and then we can all win.’

[00:23:19] Carla King: Beautiful words to many authors’ ears. I can hear them singing, ‘Yeah!’ Well, where can we find you? Microcosm.pub, you mentioned that you speak a lot. I’m gonna put in the show notes the Write Minded podcast, the video about your publishing company, and all of that, so they can find that there.

[00:23:41] Joe Biel: Well first, we have a weekly podcast also called The People’s Guide to Publishing, and that’s where I have my most public appearances. And we answer reader questions there. And so you can just literally say, ‘This is something I’ve been wondering.’ And then we answer it on the air in a future episode.

I have Instagram, and Twitter, and things like that, but it’s mostly for me to make jokes and observe, and there’s information to it too. And I’ll do similar things where if there’s a common misconception, I’ll debunk it or, sometimes we’ll have a special or something. Right now we have a ‘Humble Bundle,’ where you can get a whole bunch of books that I wrote for super cheap as well as buy a bunch of our other authors. And so that’s a cool opportunity that has a limited lifespan, and so that kind of thing.

And then we also have–we made software for publishers, too, called Working Lit. That might be something that would be of interest, because I know that a lot of authors these days are also publishers. Nature of the business, you know? And so that might be something where that organizes all of your data and it’s everything from how to do your taxes, to managing inventory, to managing shipments and invoices. And that’s been something that we made for our own necessity of functioning. WorkingLit is a major reason why we were so successful these past three years. We had that tool to organize, and now we’re making that available for other publishers, as well.

[00:25:09] Carla King: Yeah. A lot of writers are business minded, especially in the nonfiction space. And they have groups, and niches, and masterminds, and everybody wants to write a book. And they are doing co-ops. Would that be appropriate for a cooperative publishing house?

[00:25:23] Joe Biel: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’d be perfect for that.

And I’m the keynote at PubWest Bootcamp this year, and I’m going to talk about really fun things like how to think about–and how to understand–the decision making process. Things like leverage and how to really structure your decisions so you’re building off of each other and growing that way.

I really enjoy things like this and things like that, because it’s an opportunity to reflect more on what we do and why. And to help other people, because it’s a really difficult industry, and I learned so much. And I had really great mentors twenty, thirty years ago, and I feel like I need to give back in that same way.

[00:26:07] Carla King: Well, thank you. You are an activist–an activist publisher. Your writers, your authors are activists. You have strong activist roots. I encourage everybody to go look at the media on Joe’s journey. And thank you so much for what you do and for talking directly to the authors.

[00:26:24] Joe Biel: Of course. Happy to do it.

[00:26:26] Carla King: And thank you to our nonfiction author listeners, and the professionals who help you succeed. Remember, keep writing and publishing. The world needs your experience and expertise.

Quotes from our guest

“Think of [publishing] like a creative partnership. The publisher’s job is to know how to speak to their industry. It’s about understanding like you’re a translator. Where you say, ‘This is what it needs to look like. This is what it needs to sound like. This is how you talk about it.’ And so it’s only when the author comes in and they have really rigid ideas about what it needs to be called or what goes on the cover, that the conversation breaks down, because then we can’t do our job.”

“Our ideal author is somebody who wants to change and impact culture, and that’s their primary motivator. Because I feel like that is the freshest perspective–where they’ll take a topic, they’ll write about it in an interesting way. They’ll take a topic that I didn’t know was interesting, and they’ll make me interested in it.”

“And so platform is sort of immaterial because–don’t get me wrong, it’s great if an author has a platform and then they can just say, ‘Go buy my book.’ But as we’ve seen in the last five years, there’s so many great examples where somebody would have a platform in the millions, but their audience does not read. So no matter how many times they say, ‘Buy my book,’ the people are like, ‘Oh, that’s so great. You have a book. Not of interest to me.’ And it’s been really interesting to watch that shake out. We’ve seen it with podcasters, we’ve seen it with Instagram influencers, we’ve seen it with musicians, we’ve seen it with YouTubers. And so again, it’s–if we can do our job, then ideally, what we tell the author is, ‘You should be writing your next book. You shouldn’t have to do a big publicity circuit or have to do our job for us. You should just let us do our job and then we can all win.’”

Tweet
Pin
Share
Share