A People's Guide to Publishing

The dust has finally settled and we've got our numbers for 2021. Wow! This marks the end of a year of more than doubling our previous “busiest year ever” with a growth of 119.24% over 2020. We believe that publishing our annual financial and business recap is a vital part of our vales—financial transparency helps everyone! And this year, it’s extra nice to be able to show that all the news is good. In February, 2021, we doubled our warehousing space (and shortly after that our warehouse staffing) with the opening of our Cleveland warehouse. And still, we struggled to keep up with shipping and receiving at the end of the year. https://microcosmpublishing.com/blog/2022/01/microcosms-2021-annual-mony-report-with-infographics/

We've constantly heard falsehoods thrown around like "There's no way to know how many books to publish per season" or "There's no science for how to figure out how many books to publish" so this week on the pod, we cast that science. It's remarkably simple with math and a little bit of critical thinking! 

Reader question this week focuses on a book that's had publication thrice delayed. Why do books get delayed, sometimes for years? We walk through this general and specific example, as a way to understand the logic of publishing schedules and how they are used to leverage the desired results.

One of our first ten episodes remains one of our most popular, about the fundamentals of designing a book cover. Fans of the program have routinely continued asking for more information about clarification about covers, so we thought that we'd give you the sequel: about making your cover great!

For every publisher, their motivation arrived because of a pivotal work discovered at an earlier age. We all know the magical, transformative nature of a good book! So this week, we take a look at what those were, why they were so influential, and how we channel that into our work today! 

A year ago, this week, we opened an additional book warehouse in Cleveland, OH (not so coincidentally, this is also where Microcosm was founded). Wow! What an adventure. From turning on the electricity to occupancy permits to setting up sales tax exposure in a new state, we learned a lot. And we've laid it all out here! 

This question is remarkably common: someone publishes something and stores don't flock to put it on their shelves. What do you need? This week on the pod, we figure out which is the cart and which is the horse and what sequence of events can put your books into stores!

One of the most exciting aspects of being a publisher is watching it grow. A little at first but compared to two or five years ago, it can often be a lot. How do you measure this? How do you keep up? What if it stops? All this and more!

2021 was a year where the old tricks didn't work. But what are the new tricks? How do we find and choose the ones that are right for us? This week on the pod, we take a deep dive into experimentation and how its best implemented!

One of the most confusing aspects of publishing is the branding. With hundreds of thousands of active publishing companies in the world, we constantly run into confusion about who is big, who is small, who is independent, who is corporately controlled, and why you have never even heard of this publisher before. Largely, this is because branding is done to the industry, rather than to the public. This week on the pod, we take that apart and put it back together!