Publishers, look into your brain and your search history. I’m sure you see any number of the following:

-How to save money while still making great books
-How to publish without a small loan of a million dollars
-Best publisher budget ever
-Books + __ = profit???

Publishing books is a remarkably complex, rewarding process, but admittedly we’re not known for being a high cash-flow industry. It’s easy to fall into the pattern of thinking “we’d finally have enough resources if we had X amount more money…”

There are so many ways to learn how to structure your business financially (we recommend picking up Joe Biel’s A People’s Guide to Publishing, for example). But if you’re here, you’ve already started. We won’t tell you what to change or how to do it. However, there are a few considerations that have outsized impact; actions we’ve taken during our staff’s considerable business experience at Microcosm and beyond that helped us get a better sense of our business and create more sustainable spending habits.

Reconsider your overstock

Your distributor overestimated how many copies of a book would sell overseas. You got excited about an author’s network and printed a copy for every Instagram follower. Bizarre worldwide tariffs cause your customer base to shrink as accounts limit spending.

All of the above have happened in our collective publishing experience. It probably happens to you. We’re so sorry. Suddenly you’re left with 50, 100, even 1000+ extra copies of books that just aren’t moving. While the books sit in your warehouse, they’re costing money that accumulates dizzyingly quickly.

If you’re working under a distributor, often they’ll offer to pulp the books (optimally turning them into paper for new books… the circle of book life). With larger quantities, selling remainders at a heavily discounted cost can get pallets off your warehouse shelves. But there are more ways to support your overstock that can also support your community! Ask school libraries and teachers if they could use a classroom set of one of your kids/YA books. Talk to community centers around the city. Many amazing bookstores around the US are donation-based; our staff has loved sending book festival overstock to the dear folks at Housing Works in New York or Open Books in Chicago. The initial outreach may take some time, but building a long-term relationship with your own community of readers can be invaluable.

Prioritize the accounts that love you back

Depending on your distribution model and audience, this can take a few different forms. We’ve seen distributor sales managers follow an instinct to prioritize orders from big accounts like Amazon, at the cost of anyone else’s orders. Unfortunately, these big accounts sometimes have the highest return rates and lowest reliability. Sending hundreds of copies to another anonymous warehouse didn’t do much to grow a reliable fan base, namely, individuals and accounts who would come back to the press for other books.

This is all about relationship building, something you’re already doing when you consider the marketing potential and comps for the books you want to put out. The specialty markets that love you, the indie bookstores that have a shelf dedicated to your books with handwritten signs: those are the people who know what you’re about, who can pass on that knowledge to happy readers and customers.

Know what’s going on behind the scenes

One of the biggest reasons for financial woes? Being blind to your own data and what it can do. We think it should be easy to see what your business trends are, what’s working and what isn’t, so you can build your business in an informed way. With the right tools, you can use your business’s own history to help project and grow into a better future.

At Microcosm, we spent the last 20+ years building up software that has supported our development through tough times like economic recessions and Covid, and exciting opportunities like tremendous catalog growth. In 2008, when we were staring down the throat of pay cuts, a blogger wrote about one of our books, Make Your Place, and we woke up to thousands of online orders, which we were able to fulfill quickly ourselves thanks to WorkingLit. In 2021 when our company tripled in size in just one year, the new demands on our inventory, royalties, and invoicing would have broken us if we’d still been using rudimentary systems or doing double data entry. Thanks to our software, we are able to get a detailed look at our own business: who’s ordering what, what’s selling when, what’s going wrong and right. It allows us to turn on a dime and make decisions that keep us thriving.

Down with sorting through endless orders, spreadsheets, apps, and paperwork. UP with accessible, data-based tools that help you get a clear sense of your business! To toot our own horn, that’s exactly the role of WorkingLit. As publishers ourselves, we know that the industry deserves to thrive with accessibility, collective support, and knowledge.