Hi everyone, this is Elly. Ten years ago, on December 20, 2014, I sent an email to Microcosm Publishing‘s longtime programmer Nate Beaty with the subject line “Hello! And some SEO stuff.” This was my first week at Microcosm, with the newly minted title of marketing director. Absolutely nobody had told me to take over managing our software development, but I quickly saw that the biggest problem in marketing our books was making sure people could find them online. I picked up the ball and never stopped running with it.
Ten years before that, Nate had been working in our production department, and mentioned to Microcosm’s founder, Joe Biel, “you know, a relational database could handle a lot of this stuff better than a person does now.” At the time, Microcosm had a rudimentary early e-commerce site and was tracking stock levels on a whiteboard in a decommissioned church basement. Joe said, “sure, go for it.” Several publishers and booksellers (Quimby’s and Top Shelf are still running versions of the same site) got together to fund the initial app, and Nate still hasn’t stopped running with that ball either.
By the time I got involved, Microcosm had become the most demanding user and had already built a sophisticated system that integrated fulfillment, accounting, title management, and royalties. It was called “Clixel admin” or usually just “admin.” Nate was squashing bugs and tweaking features and fending off a half dozen people coming at him with malformed and contradictory requests. Joe had a big vision for what it could do and a huge backlog of ideas.
Coordinating all of these ideas and requests, learning to deliver feature tickets and bug reports, and thinking through ways to change one system without breaking another or overcomplicating someone’s workload soon became my favorite part of the job. It’s thinky work with tangible results that allow people to do their jobs more easily and focus on the parts of the work that matter. We’ve added so much more complexity since then and each new feature has taken a burden off of at least one person or department at Microcosm, for instance letting them focus on strategy instead of data entry, or improving their systems instead of rushing to catch up.
And more important: It’s helped Microcosm survive and grow. We’re convinced that we survived the recession of 2008, the publishing industry downturn of 2012, and the early months of the pandemic in 2020 solely because we had this software that removed barriers and steps from every part of the process of marketing, selling, and fulfilling a book and getting paid. We were able to leave our giant trade distributor and strike out on our own, growing 5-fold in as many years—and survive that growth—for the same reason. We know how many books to print and when, which warehouse an order should ship out of, and how long it will take any title to become profitable. We send out over 500 royalty statements quarterly and it takes one person four hours of work to do that. We own all of our product data and send it out to industry partners on our own timeline and on our own terms. We can easily fulfill a large order from a candle shop across the country or a zine about someone’s local punk scene that they need by Friday.
In 2019, we had tea with our friend Ryan and were telling him how our new self-distribution was going far better than we’d expected, and it was all because of our software. He gently pointed out that the software itself might be something other publishers could use. Cartoon light bulbs appeared above our heads. We talked about it nonstop and spent five years alternating between jogging with that ball and setting it down while we tried to keep up with Microcosm’s massive growth spurt.
Around this time, Laura Moulton, who started Portland’s amazing trike-based library Street Books, emailed to say hi and we invited her to come by the office and drink tea and catch up. She brought her husband, Ben Parzybok, along with her and we all had a good talk. We already knew of Ben because his novel Sherwood Nation was a favorite of our biggest customer, Tom at Artifacts in Hood River, Oregon. We were obsessed with this software idea so of course we brought it up, and Ben told us that he ran a software company that he’d started and built from scratch. More light bulbs went off. We met again and Ben gave us some great advice. We talked about him joining the team. And then we set the ball down again while we grew.
Also in 2019, we met Nellie McKesson at The Next Page publishing conference organized at Kickstarter by industry firecracker Margot Atwell. Nellie’s another rarity: someone with feet in the publishing and tech worlds. Her company, Hederis, helps automate book layout. In 2021 we were busier than we’d ever been with Microcosm so we figured it was a great time to start building a new tech company in earnest and Nellie came on for a year to build a prototype site.
Microcosm’s internship program went remote during the pandemic; this didn’t work out great and our last class of interns was in 2021. One of them was Ru Mehendale, an MIT student who was one of the best editorial interns we’ve ever worked with. They mentioned at one point that they’d taught themself to code, and after their internship ended, Nellie passed them the torch. Ru spent the next couple years building out the WorkingLit you can see today, honing in the royalty math, the user interface, and the logic that gets you around the app, writing a ton of documentation and setting up project management infrastructure along the way.
A couple of years of intensive coding later, growth at Microcosm had slowed down to a manageable level again and we had a WorkingLit app fully functioning in beta. By the end of 2023, publishers were signing up and using it to run their business, which felt amazing. Ru decided to step away from the computer and go into labor organizing, so we got back in touch with Ben. We humbly told him that we were overwhelmed, that running a growing publishing company was more than a full-time job for each of us and so was running a software startup, and asked him if wanted to run the joint.
A remarkably short period of time later, in 2024, Ben came on as CTO. He shook his head the first week after familiarizing himself with our workflows and sheer backlog of stuff to do, but “There’s definitely no shortage of low-hanging fruit” was his only comment. He hit the ground running, bringing in coders, creating a system for onboarding users, and starting to communicate regularly with our audience. He created the momentum and time so that I could sit down and write this short history, and he’s creating the conditions for more history to be written in a few years.
More than twenty years later, we still approach everything as “how can the software free us up to do the parts that require a human?” It feels like magic, but it’s people + math. Thanks for reading our story—we hope you join us for the next chapter and make it part of your own!
Elly Blue, Portland, Dec 2024