Episode 64: The Benefits of Independent Distribution with Joe Biel

Joe Biel is an independent publisher who draws origins, inspiration, and methods from punk rock to sell millions of books. He is the founder and CEO of Microcosm Publishing, a Publishers Weekly‘s fastest-growing publisher from 2022-2024. 

Biel has been featured in Time, Esquire, Forbes, Bulletproof Radio, Spectator (Japan), G33K (Korea), as well as ⁠NPR⁠ and PBS. He is the author of ⁠A People’s Guide to Publishing⁠ (and ⁠cohost of the podcast by the same name⁠), ⁠Autism Relationships Handbook⁠, ⁠Unfuck Your Business⁠, ⁠Enduring Legacy of Portland’s Black Panthers,⁠ (and dozens more), and the director of five feature films, including ⁠Aftermass: Bicycling in a Post-Critical Mass Portland⁠, ⁠$100 & a T-Shirt⁠, and ⁠hundreds of short films⁠. 

Joe joined us from the floor of the London Book Fair to discuss Microcosm’s 30-year anniversary and what makes them stand out from other publishers. He also discusses their move from traditional publishing distribution to independent self-distribution, touching on how it has positively impacted their book sales and improved the company as a whole.

To learn more about Microcosm Publishing, ⁠visit their website⁠. Also, check out their ⁠People’s Guide to Publishing⁠ podcast on any of your favorite podcast apps. You can find Joe on ⁠substack⁠ and LinkedIn.

Digital Transcript

Joshua Tallent
This month on the book smarts podcast, I’m speaking with Joe Biel, who is the founder and CEO of microcosm publishing. If you’re listening to this, you might be hearing in the background noises and things like that. We’re actually recording live. I don’t get to record this podcast live very much, but we’re the London book fair, and Joe agreed to sit down with me and just chat in person and have and have a little conversation. Joe, thanks for joining me.

Joe Biel
Thanks for having me. Yeah.

Joshua Tallent
So you guys are celebrating at microcosm publishing your 30 year anniversary, and that’s really the reason we wanted to chat, was just to give an opportunity for us to learn a little bit about your your publishing company, and what you’re doing. What’s interesting and maybe different about your approach, but also to give you a little some some kudos and congratulations on making it for 30 years and and succeeding in the ways you succeeded. So let’s, let’s start off with a little bit of history. Tell us the history of microcosm. Where did you get started? How did you get started? What was the impetus behind it? Why did you Why were you crazy enough to start a publishing company? What’s, what’s the background?

Joe Biel
Well, it was the 90s. It was a very different world and era. There wasn’t the level of strain that you might think of in publishing today. It was kind of like the big, wide, open and independent presses. It was a very interesting time for us. There was a lot more room to be a specialized focus press that has a niche and really commands and controls that niche. And so our at the time, my it was just me, singular focus was to create tools to change your life in the world around you. And that hasn’t changed in 30 years, which I feel like is part of why it works and we It wasn’t initially intended to be a business that came. I guess when I saw how much it was really resonating with people at the time, I really just thought of this as tools and resources and solving a problem.

Joshua Tallent
Okay, so what thinking back to that, you know, beginning stage, what were the resources or the tools or the things you wanted to produce that you thought were unique, or thought were were special that you could bring to the market? Sure.

Joe Biel
So, a lot of what I had seen in, you know, I grew up in Cleveland, it’s not, you know, it was like in the backdrop of the bankruptcy of the city, you know, we had just gone through the recession. It was, you know, there was a lot of darkness to it, and things felt a little you know, you could find maybe something that would like talk about anxiety, or would talk about, like, finding meaning and purpose in your life, but they were all little sterile. Yeah, and I grew up in punk rock clubs and hung out in those places and saw just like tremendous creativity and school had really left me cold on reading so meeting those people at the time and the age that I did, you know, in 9293 I was like, These people are the people that should be writing the textbooks. And so I sort of engaged and began talking to older people. I mean, you know, when you’re a teenager, you can be sort of like, pompous enough to be like, Oh, I could just sort of publish in a way that maybe you wouldn’t and, you know, like, 50 years old and for example, and so a lot of it was just like looking at what was so interesting about like, the city’s history, what was so interesting that I felt like was not present In like, everything from like self help books to like gardening books to like house and home books, essentially all the same things that we do today. And it’s like we’re a little more polished now, maybe, but like, the subject matter hasn’t really, maybe it’s expanded adjacently, but it hasn’t really changed.

Joshua Tallent
Okay, that’s great, and that’s that’s really cool too, that you you see the need, right? This any entrepreneurial kind of venture, right? See a need and feel like you have something unique you can provide. But now you’ve turned it into a company that actually is doing this all the time, and you have a team that’s working on and same vision, same heart, I’m assuming, same kind of approach and and publishing books that actually have meaning to the world,

Joe Biel
and that it’s interesting, because most people you know, we were at a WP last week in Baltimore, we’re now at London book fair, and the number of people that walk up have never heard of us pick up a thing. They are like, this is really cool. We give them, you know, we have a comic that is a poster that folds out like a map and tells our story. They walk away with it. I cannot tell you the number of times where two, three years later, they’re the ones writing books for us. They’re the one when we have a job posting. They’re the ones that, not only like apply, but we’re like, this is the most qualified person. They’ve probably been overlooked in other positions, and so that wasn’t intentional, but it has really made sense how the meaning and purpose is, what resonates across all you know, it’s the whole vertical, yeah.

Joshua Tallent
What would you say in the last say, 10 years has been the biggest challenge for you as a publishing house. I mean, obviously covid and all those things, will ignore that. But beyond that, what do you think has been the biggest challenge, and how has your team adapted to that and moved and moved into the next stage?

Joe Biel
A lot of it was through as the industry was increasingly consolidated, we found that level of service at other companies was not really meeting our needs. We really felt like there was so much more potential for sales and placements of our books that we were just continually bumping into, you know, either bankruptcies or a company that goes out of business, or just somebody that doesn’t have to do a fantastically good job, because they have very little competition. And that really, you know, and we’re an efficiency model. We’re really built on systems and automation and things like so, you know, to be in the publishing industry where it’s not that fake, and to constantly be seeing the insides of these other companies, you’re like, okay, yeah, that’s really been the thing that was holding us back.

Joshua Tallent
So you found ways to automate processes and ways to systematize things that maybe helped you adapt to that, that challenge and and you’ve become more independent, more self sufficient in many ways. So you’ve gone to a self distributed model instead of doing traditional distribution, and you’ve, you’ve changed your focus, shifted your focus to getting your books available into a lot of other smaller players. Maybe a little bit about that, what is, what was that? What was the reasoning behind that, the thought process behind that? You’ve, you’ve moved your focus, shifted your focus. What would that come from?

Joe Biel
So I mean, I guess it started 30 years ago, where we would go and I would try and have a meeting with a bookstore buyer, and they would say, Do you have an appointment? And I would say, Okay, can I make an appointment? And they would kind of be like, and so then you go to the gift or specialty store next door, and you, you know, I would just line things up on the counter, and they would be like, these are awesome. Like, can we just buy these from you? And it was like the exact opposite experience. And so that became increasingly our focus. And as we grew up as a publisher, you know, we worked with, we signed with NBN in 2002 we had worked with, we did the tour of distributors, and a lot of that was really good because it helped us to take things more seriously and to learn how other people would perceive what we’re doing and improve our development. And it really made us more of a professional operation. However, every one of those companies is focused on the top 20 accounts, right? Every one of and, you know, and it was when you do that, you know, they’re trying to direct our focus that way. And every year, we’re watching what them getting a slightly better deal, you know, we watch, you know, free freight shift to every account. You know, it used to be that the accounts would pay freight. Now the publisher pays the freight. We watched, as, you know, Amazon’s terms improved with every contract renewal, and it just got to the point where we were like, is this the right direction for us to be go like, is this working for us, right? You know? And so in 2018 my business partner came back and said, It seems like the most stressful part of your job is managing all of those mediated relationships, rather than just like selling books. Yeah, you know, which is what we were historically very good at. Gift and specialty were always around combined, like over 70% of our sales today, bookstores are about 13% of our sales. Direct orders actually exceed bookstore sales. Oh, my goodness. And so that was kind of a shocking and those numbers are way up, you know? There was times where that was 1% you know. And so the more we looked at it, the more we said the growth is in these brick and mortar, independent specialty retailers, gift retailers. They’re never going to be writing huge invoices. But if we. Work really, really hard, we can probably do as well with this as a global corporation does. And that was sort of the idea, is that we would just simplify and strip off this layer and like we would maybe get worse terms, but we wouldn’t be paying an intermediary. And in the first year, our sales doubled, wow. In the second year, our sales doubled in the third year, and we were like, oh, okay, it’s working. We were doing it wrong, like we we kind of fell into industry thinking. And I think this is very, very common for other publishers as well, and it’s just hard to, you know, remove the blinders and see how big the world is.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, but that that shift also took a lot of work. I’m assuming, I mean, you move away from a traditional distributor. Now you’re doing your own fulfillment, your own distribution. You’ve got to have sales team. If you didn’t have already, I don’t know if you did already, but now you’re focusing a lot of effort. You have more work to do in order to complete that process and make that process. How did that? How did you how did you handle that? What was, what was the what was

Joe Biel
the process there? I was motivated by there was a head of a distribution company that said we weren’t organized enough, okay, and telling me that at that time was the moment where I was like, oh, okay, well, then either we are or we aren’t, but we should be. So I accept your challenge. And you know, we had automated inventory management systems. We had, you know, we had an ERP already. We had order management, we had warehouse software. We we owned a warehouse already.

Joshua Tallent
It wasn’t that big of a transition. In some ways, it was just getting the systems to work in the way it needs to work,

Joe Biel
and we’ve had to buy more warehouses since then, but the concept and the model was there. We had to bring in independent rep groups that sell us. You know that we that were through our distributor relationships Previously, we had to bring in, but it’s mostly little things. And again, it’s, it’s the thing that really shocked me was that my business partner was right. The amount of time and effort in every day that went to working with the distributor was the same amount of time that went into managing all of those independent systems, yeah, and, you know? And there’s other things too, you know? I mean, you have to have a certain amount of consumer marketing. You have to have a certain amount of like industry presence. You You have to people have to know that your books exist, you know. But a lot of it is really just, you know, a way to have data out there, a way to take orders in a way to, you know, remind people that you exist a way for them to see your new books. It’s not rocket science, you know, but it’s distribution is kind of managed as a black box in our industry. And I think it’s kind of the way that money feels a little unholy to talk about in publishing that people don’t want to say, oh, you know, what is it caught, you know, they want to look at it more of like the distribution handles all the sales, and I deal with the consequences.

Joshua Tallent
And in some ways, I know publishers who have made the transition to distribution, you know, and they they love it because they don’t have to deal with it, but at the same time, they’re giving up something to be able to get that value so it’s a value proposition for anybody. And making that decision, if you were talking to a publisher today, not to me, you know, tech guy, whatever, what do you think? Maybe one or two recommendations you would give to a publisher who’s in that place where they’re thinking distributions working for me, it’s fine. I like what I’m doing. I don’t, but I do want to take advantage of the things that microcosm has done. Right, right? What do you think? What you would give? What advice would you give to a publisher who wants to adapt a little bit, but maybe can’t leave distribution for whatever reason, doesn’t have the warehouse and all those things in place. What do you think you would say?

Joe Biel
I think I would say, start with looking at your numbers. There was a publisher that approached me last year and said, the way I’m figuring it, even if we lose 25% of our sales, we’re still making more money. Okay? And I was like, that’s not how I would approach it, but that is a fair point. And looking at it that way, I would say the first thing to do is to understand your numbers. Because I don’t think most publishers do the number of people that I talk to where they don’t know if their statements are correct, they don’t understand them, they’re, they’re just kind of trusting on faith that they’re reaching their potential. And then I would look at unearned or lost potential in terms of both, like, where you think your books would work, that they’re not currently available, and you’re sort of, your hands are tied from selling them there. Yeah. You know. And those are, I would say, the two biggest things, and then from there to cost it out. You can, you know, plenty of publishers use a three PL warehouse for fulfillment. There’s plenty of ways any part of it that’s uncomfortable. You know, maybe use are an introvert and you don’t want to be a salesperson. You can hire sales people. I mean, we, we just, we hired so many people that were industry veterans, that were laid off, who can get on the phone and can call eight hours a day and be told no all day long, and just turn in tremendous amounts of billing and and that, I can’t do that, but it doesn’t matter. You know, it’s like you can. You can fill the gaps in your own strengths and supplement to suit if this is what you want to do. I have, there was a point in time where I thought, Oh, this is the best thing for all publishers. But I have since seen a number of models where I’m like, Oh no, they are truly optimized to be through a distributor that’s really working for them. And I don’t know there’s a better solution,

Joshua Tallent
yeah, and that makes sense. I mean, publishing is a very diverse industry, so it’s not like everything is going to be exactly the same for every publisher, but we’re going to learn, right? And those, those are valuable lessons to learn. I am curious, what do you think is the coming in the next 30 years? You’ve made 30 what’s, what’s the next 30 look like for Microcosm

Joe Biel
for us? Well, we’re at the point where we have to do sort of secession planning, yeah, because we have, you know, I’m, if I’m still doing this in 30 years, we have a different problem. Though. To be fair, lots of people do, you know, it’s like, you see plenty of people in their 80s that are still publishing. You see lots of obits where they’re like, was still an editor at, you know, when you’re like, I don’t, I mean it. Part of me wants that. But, you know, most I know that that’s not what’s best for the organization, you know. And so a lot of it is, we have, we constantly do what we call a defrag, where we look at, you know, because when you say restructure, people assume layoffs. But what we’re doing instead is we’re saying like, this is marketing that’s working. This is sales that’s working. You know, this is what’s working in the warehouses. We can adjust and adapt how PNP works to make things more and more efficient, you know, so we can say we need less of this and more of this. Everybody gets to keep their jobs, but your job looks a little different now. And you know, like people really appreciate that, because they well know that like this is in everyone’s best interest, yeah, and, but on top of that, we’re identifying younger people within the organization now that we’re like, okay, they have the traits to lead their understanding. And so a lot of it is cultivating them to take that over and to gradually, you know. So I have an assistant now who is lovely and, you know, and so she’s taking over aspects of my job, in the sense that, like, in some ways, the more I teach her how to be me, the more she can look at my deficiencies as well as, you know, where we can just tighten things up. And, you know, a lot of it is planning for the future, but a lot of it too, you know, we, a lot of people have come to us and said that, like, we’re going to be the next big, cool, independent distributor. And I don’t know, we don’t want that sure we there’s plenty of people that are doing that, because I think the minute you water down something that’s working or loaded up with too much, you know, beyond its capacity, it’s not going to do a very good job, right, you know? And so what we do, well, that’s what we want to keep doing. And looking at efficiencies, we just identified a new program in our front list where we published 54 books last year. And we looked at that and we said, you know, a younger member on our team said, every company I’ve ever worked with, we’ve begged management to publish fewer books. So two days later, I was like, wait a minute, do you think we published too many books? And then she kind of sheepishly, was like, here are all the things we could do if we published fewer books. So then I went home and I looked at the numbers, and I said, Okay, this is what our, you know, P and L looks like on titles where we have a lighter season, and this is what it looks like in a heavier season, and revenue per title is tripled on a lighter season. So she’s right, you know? And so we then cut back our front list in order to make more money. Yeah, you know. And so it’s things like that where I don’t think, I think publishers need to get more comfortable with the data.

Joshua Tallent
Good. That’s awesome. And you know, the section planning, everybody you know, has to do that eventually. So getting the right people, building them up, putting them in the right position, and use. Their strengths to benefit the long term success the company, and it’s obviously really great. Thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate you taking some time to chat about the future, and congratulations on 30 years. Thank you. So where can people find out more about micro costuming, publishing, and where you know, what can they can they do to interact with you guys more?

Joe Biel
So we have, I we’re doing a new edition of The People’s guide to publishing book for the 30th and that has 50% new content that was really fun to overhaul and research. We have a weekly podcast also called the People’s guide to publishing that is where we answer reader questions, and that’s really fun. I’m becoming increasingly active on sub stack and LinkedIn, where, you know, it’s kind of casual observations, but you know, it’s like, I’m very, very happy to share what I’ve learned over time, because I feel like, you know, I want other people to succeed in the way that we’ve been able to.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. Yeah, we’ll put links in the show notes for all those who are following. Thanks so much, Joe. It’s great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. So that’s it for this episode of the book smarts podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can rate us and review us on Apple podcasts and Spotify and everywhere else you listen to the podcast. And if you have suggestions or topic ideas for the show, you can reach me at Joshua at Firebrand tech.com thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books you.