Episode 65: The Indie Voice: Advocacy and Community with IBPA’s Andrea Fleck-Nisbet

Andrea Fleck-Nisbet is Chief Executive Officer of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), where she leads the largest nonprofit trade association serving independent publishers. With more than 20 years of experience in publishing, she has held leadership roles at Harper Horizon, Workman Publishing, and Ingram Content Group.

On this week’s episode of the BookSmarts Podcast, Andrea discusses the evolution of the IBPA and its mission to serve a diverse membership of independent publishers and author-publishers. She provides a deep dive into the recent merger with PubWest, the advocacy efforts the IBPA is leading against censorship and book bans, and the upcoming Publishing University (PubU) in Portland, Oregon. The conversation also explores how the IBPA provides a space for peer-to-peer learning and the massive catalog of member benefits that help independent voices thrive in a consolidated market.

To learn more about the Independent Book Publishers Association and their advocacy work, visit ibpa-online.org. You can also find details on the upcoming conference at publishinguniversity.org.

Transcript

(Joshua) 

Welcome to the BookSmarts Podcast, where we talk about publishing data and technologies and send you away with insights that will help you sell more books. I’m your host, Joshua Tallent.

This month on the BookSmarts Podcast, I’m speaking with Andrea Fleck-Nisbett, who is the Executive Director of the Independent Book Publishers Association. Andrea, thanks for joining me.

(Andrea) 

Joshua, thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here today.

(Joshua) 

Yeah, it’s great to have you. You’ve been around publishing for a long time. I don’t remember when we first met, but you’ve been in the publishing world for your entire career. Maybe a little background—maybe on kind of your background, where you come from.

(Andrea) 

Yes. So I know it’s hard to believe, Joshua, we’ve known each other for a long time now, probably about 15 or 20 years. So I’ve worked in publishing for a little over 25 years. I got my start at Workman Publishing, which at the time was the largest independent publisher in the country. So in this role, I feel like I’m coming back to my roots. And I always say that I got a liberal arts education at Workman. I was Peter Workman’s assistant. I started in special sales. I sold to Amazon. I grew our digital publishing program, and I did business operations there, so I got to do a little bit of everything.

And then from there, I went to Ingram Content Group. I worked on the Lightning Source side in a content acquisition role. And the amazing thing about that was it opened up a much broader world of publishing to me, which I didn’t realize existed. So I spent 15 years at Workman, not knowing that there was publishing outside of New York and a couple of other places in the world, and really had an opportunity to work with everyone from small, small indie publishers all the way through large corporate education publishers and the Big Five. So that was a great experience.

From there, I went to HarperCollins, where I ran a small startup imprint called Harper Horizon, which was a lifestyle imprint. So I got to do some really cool things there, like acquire a James Beard Award-winning cookbook, which is probably one of the things I’m most proud of there, and work with a lot of great authors. And you know, at one point, I was actually getting my degree in social work, and I decided to stay in publishing. But I’ve always had that desire to serve the industry, particularly the indie community. So when this role came available, and my predecessor, Angela Bole, who you know very well, was leaving, I decided to try something really different, and so I’ve been here for three and a half years, and I’ve loved almost every minute of it.

(Joshua) 

That’s great, yeah. And IBPA is a great organization. I served on the board years ago before I joined the BISG board, and so it’s a great organization with very committed, very passionate people. And I’d like to talk a little bit today about the organization and what you guys do as a publishing association, who you serve, and kind of the efforts that you’re doing. So let’s start off with who you serve. The Independent Book Publishers Association serves a pretty broad range of different types of people. So how could—how can you explain that to people listening?

(Andrea) 

Got it well. So first of all, absolutely. So we have over 4,000 members at this point, and it really is a reflection of how our industry as a whole has evolved. So when we started out over 40 years ago, we were really an organization that was meant to serve established but small indie presses that didn’t always have the opportunity to be in the room with larger publishers, and so we put together cooperative marketing programs. So we would go to ALA, which we still do, and have a booth there, but it was really focused mostly on marketing efforts.

And since then, we’ve grown and evolved to expand not only our offerings but whom we’re serving. And as we see the industry changing and evolving so rapidly with emerging technologies and just access to the market, what we’re finding is that our author-publisher part of our membership has grown really exponentially even since I’ve been here. So we still serve large, established, independent publishers all the way up through the size of like New Harbinger, Lerner, Llewellyn, Gibbs Smith are all members of IBPA. But then we serve on the other end of the spectrum author-publishers who may just be starting out or only have you know one title in the market. And we always try to meet those members where they are from an educational perspective and a marketing program perspective. But it is a challenge, for sure, just because the industry has become so diverse that our membership is really a reflection of that.

(Joshua) 

And you guys merged with PubWest. That’s a year and a half ago. Now, I can’t remember exactly the timing, but it’s been a little while, and that brought in, I’m assuming, quite a few publishers who weren’t members of both and the more established publishers, or the larger publishers, brought in some people. How has that—how has that merger gone?

(Andrea) 

It’s gone really well. It’s actually been surprisingly smooth. And one of the wonderful things about it is not just that we have had an influx of new community members, oftentimes people who have been in the industry for a while and are interested in not only getting the benefit of being an IBPA member, but also giving back to the community. So that’s been really fun to see. You know, someone from a Sourcebooks or a Gibbs Smith showing up and providing education and being part of our community has been really cool to see.

But then we’ve also inherited some new programs which PubWest used to run. They did a day-long what they called a virtual boot camp for staff of independent publishers. And that was the first time we ran that as an organization was last fall, and that was a really successful event. So we’ve now replicated that for different member types across IBPA. So now we have a boot camp for author-publishers, and we’ll do one for smaller indie publishers. So integrating those programs, while a lot of work on our end has provided more robust offerings for members. And then the other thing we now have is just more community space for larger independent publishers to gather and problem-solve, and we know, especially in this moment in time where the industry is evolving so rapidly, publishers need a space where they can kind of communicate with one another and say, “What are you trying to solve for? What is challenging for you?” So we’re adding more programming like that for the established indies as well.

(Joshua) 

Yeah, that’s so important. And one of those things that I love: this peer teaching, peer communication, peer relationships—all of that is so important in publishing because we’re all dealing with the same issues. It’s just a question of, how are you being affected by this, and how are you addressing it, and how are you reacting to it. Those things are different for every publisher. And so how can you—how can you address something if you don’t know what other people are doing, and how can you address it effectively if you don’t know what was effective for someone else, so that you’re giving space and opportunity for publishers to have those communications in a way that you just can’t get in your everyday work?

(Andrea) 

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the nice things about being a nonprofit is we’re here to hold the space; that is our mission. We’re mission-driven, and we also get to be Switzerland, so we get to show up and say, this is a safe space to have these conversations. I mean, of course, we always have to be careful about talking about things like pricing, which we’re not allowed to do, but so many publishers just have their head down trying to get the next book out or figure out, you know, their distribution options, and they otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet with their peers, whether it’s virtually or in person. And so I do think it’s really important to be able to hold that space for folks and people just like being together, you know, they like coming together in community, which is a big part of what we do as well.

(Joshua) 

So let’s talk about some of the togetherness, the events that you put on. Obviously, the Publishing University is the big event every year, and if you’re listening to this podcast, it’s coming out around that time of PubU in May 2026, so tell us a bit about PubU, and also about the other events and other educational opportunities that you were mentioning before.

(Andrea) 

Thanks. Yep. So I’ll start with PubU, because it is coming up in four weeks, which is a little scary. This is, this is the big moment. These next four weeks are going to be a sprint, but the conference goes across the country. So every year we’re in a different location. Last year we were in the Twin Cities. The year before that, we were in Denver. We’ve done San Diego, we’ve done the East Coast. But this year we’re in Portland, Oregon, which is such a wonderful book city, and I’m really excited for us to bring PubU back to Portland this year.

It’s a three-day conference. We typically have around 350 or 400 people in total who are attending the conference, and there’s a variety of different types of programming. So on the Thursday of the conference, which this year will be May 14, we’re actually running an off-site event for established indie publishers. Last year was the first year we did this, called Think Tank, and it is about that peer-to-peer connection and problem-solving. So we have a track for executives, we have a track for sales and marketing folks, and then for editorial and production folks, and they’re just coming together in a room, and we’re facilitating conversation.

We’re also doing the PubWest design awards; it was a program we inherited. So we’re doing the award ceremony for the design award recipients in the lunch hour, and then we’ll all be at Powell’s in the evening. So I’m excited; we’re going to be doing a tour of the rare book room and having a cocktail hour at Powell’s. So that’s Thursday night.

Friday is the big day where everyone’s coming together. We do a keynote speech in the morning this year; it’s going to be Donald Miller, who is the bestselling author of Building a StoryBrand, who talks about—it’s just, I think it’s great for this audience, because it’s all about entrepreneurship, but also putting your reader, your customer, whomever you’re serving, in sort of the hero spot, and making them the hero of the story, and how you can really build your business around that. So I think he’s going to be fantastic.

We do breakout sessions around very tactical things, so building your sales and marketing plan, or how to work with your distributor, or understanding international licensing and rights, creating a contract. And then that programming is divided by experience and by publisher type. So we have a track for established indie publishers. We have a track for author-publishers, etc. And then in the evening, we do the IBPA Book Awards, which is a large award program that we run to celebrate excellence in independent publishing. This year, we had over 2,000 applications to the IBPA Book Awards, which I think was our largest pool ever, which is super exciting. So that gala is Friday night, and then Saturday is another day of educational programming, breakout sessions, etc. So it’s a lot of fun. And you know, I hear again and again, “Hey, the programming was great. I learned so much,” but really it was about the connections that I made. And I think at this moment in time, there’s something about coming together again in person and meeting new people and being able to just trade ideas. So a lot of folks come away with lifelong connections from the conference. We hear that all the time.

So that’s PubU. We also do quite a bit of virtual education. So we do a series of webinars. We have our own podcast that we run, and then we have these two new boot camps, which we’ve run this year. So there are a lot of virtual opportunities for education and community building as well. And we’re also experimenting with some partnerships this year. So we have partnered with Foreword Reviews at the American Library Association Conference (ALA), which happens in June, to do a day of programming bringing together indie publishers, indie authors, and librarians to talk about the library market and learn from each other about the library market and how they can work together. So that is called the Library Insights Summit, and that’s happening the Friday of the opening day of ALA, and I don’t know exactly what the date is on that. And then we’re also going to be at the U.S. Book Show this year, partnering with PW to do a couple of tracks there. So again, you know, I think in this moment in time, we talk about coalition building among publishers, but I also think the associations and the organizations that support publishing—whether it’s a service provider like Firebrand, or it’s a nonprofit like BISG—like we all have to be kind of working together to serve the industry effectively.

(Joshua) 

Yeah, I agree, and it’s so great that you have all of these different educational opportunities and ways for people to connect and ways for people to learn. That’s so important. And you’re meeting them—again, across the board, across this broad range of different types of publishers. But also IBPA has probably the largest list of member benefits I’ve ever seen from any association or organization. So I’d like to talk about that a little bit. About that a little bit. I mean, if you join IBPA, you’re effectively, very quickly able to pay yourself back whatever the cost was of your membership because of all the benefits and discounts that you get. So let’s talk a little bit about the ethos behind that, and kind of the process behind that, and maybe a little bit about what the—what that covers.

(Andrea) 

Yeah. So I think one of the things we didn’t talk about initially is like, “Well, what do you get with membership?” Obviously, it’s access to all of this great programming, some of which is free and some of which is paid. But to your point, we always remind our members that the member benefits will pay for the cost of membership almost immediately. And there are a couple of different ways that that works.

So in terms of our partnerships with third parties like Firebrand or a NetGalley or an IngramSpark, oftentimes there are discounts on a discrete service that that publisher partner might offer. And um, but then beyond that, it’s often that publisher partner coming into our community and also providing education around their area of expertise, but in terms of, like, actually paying for your $155 membership, if you go in and you take advantage of, you know, the FedEx discount and a couple of printing discounts and a few other things—you know, your subscription to Foreword Reviews or PW—you’re very quickly making back that $155.

I will say, if there’s one area we can definitely improve in, it’s navigation, so that we’re serving up the right benefits to the right member type, because you’re right. We have over 100 of those member benefits, and it’s really overwhelming to try to figure out where to start. So if you’re someone who is an IBPA member, or you become one, and you need to know where to start, you can always reach out to me or Christopher Locke, who is our head of membership, and we’re happy to kind of help you. We are launching a new website in the fall. Yeah, so that is the primary goal, is just to make it easier to navigate all those benefits. And then the other thing I often forget to mention, even though it’s probably one of our most popular benefits, is that we produce a print magazine—yes, still a print magazine—quarterly that we send out to members. It’s called the IBPA Independent, and that is a series of articles about things that are happening in the industry, or an educational material about distribution, or, again, licensing, or things of that nature. So that is also a benefit and a nice thing to get a pretty full-color magazine in the mail.

(Joshua) 

Yeah. So the last thing I want to chat about is the advocacy efforts that IBPA does. I know you guys do a lot of work trying to advocate for independent publishing in the broader world and also within publishing, you know, advocating for the independent voice and what it is that independent publishers need. So talk to me a little bit about that advocacy? How is it done within the organization? How do people get involved as members and want to be kind of make sure their voice is being heard in that, but also, what are some of the things that you’re doing that you think would be helpful for people to know that you’re advocating for right now?

(Andrea) 

Thank you for asking that question. I’ll say that I always think about the things that IBPA does for its members as a sort of three-legged stool. So it’s education, it’s marketing programs, and it’s advocacy. And advocacy is really something that we’ve built over the past, you know, five to seven years; we’ve gotten into the advocacy space more intentionally, because we’ve seen whether it’s advocacy on the level of someone needs to stand up and, you know, have a conversation with this particular publisher partner about unfair business practices because it’s too expensive for these publishers to be in the room. That is work that we do.

So I talk about that in terms of market access advocacy, which is one brand of advocacy. But then in the past few years, as we’ve seen more and more pressure among you know, creating visibility for titles in the market because of things like book bans and censorship, we’ve become more involved to try to combat the things that are happening that prevent our members’ books from getting into the hands of readers, which is really, at the end of the day, what this organization is all about is helping indie publishers to reach their readers and run a profitable business, and if the books aren’t on the shelves, that can’t happen. So we approach our advocacy work not from a political perspective, but more from a “we are here to support indie publishers to reach their end reader.”

And so as part of that initiative, we recently launched a new—a new committee called the Legislation and Standards Committee, which is run by one of our board directors, Kurt Brackob, of History Publishing Company, and we do a variety of things. Within that particular committee, we work on fighting legislation that makes it really expensive for publishers to get their books into libraries and then to not be compensated properly in terms of eBooks. So that’s something that we’ve worked on.

We recently launched a new program called “We Are Stronger Than Censorship,” which is all about helping to get books, again, from indie authors and indie publishers where they may not be able to reach the readers directly because of censorship issues—because those books have been banned, maybe one of their titles has been banned—and work with partnerships like EveryLibrary, to actually distribute books out into the market. And that’s a program we launched last year and has been really successful.

And then, you know, we’re always looking at things like this new bill that’s coming up in Congress, which is H.R. 7661, which is another book-banning bill, which is really going to inhibit people from being able to reach a children’s audience in particular. There are several organizations in the industry that have signed on to a statement trying to combat that. IBPA was one of them. But then we’ll also put a call out to members and say, “Hey, if this is something you’re passionate about, here’s how you can actually work to advocate on behalf of the industry as well.” So I would say, if there’s one thing I would love for our listeners to do, is to kind of go back to the IBPA website, look at some of the advocacy work that we do, and to help us in those efforts, because they really are important.

And finally, I guess the only other thing I would say about that is we do partner again, going back to coalition building, we do partner with organizations like the Association of American Publishers. We partner with the Media Coalition, and we partner with BISG and other organizations in a lot of these efforts.

(Joshua) 

That’s great. Yeah, it’s, yeah, it’s really great the work that you guys are doing. I really appreciate all the things that IBPA stands for and exists for. It’s—it’s so great to see so many people coming together, different publishers coming together, talking about the issues that they have, talking about the solutions to problems, and really building a coalition around independent publishing. And you guys are the key leaders in that. So thank you so much for sharing about what IBPA is up to.

(Andrea) 

Well, thank you again for inviting me here and giving me some time to talk about IBPA. I’m so passionate about this organization. This is kind of my dream job. And so if anyone who’s listening has questions, please reach out to me directly. My information is on the IBPA website, which is ibpa-online.org, so if you’re looking for more information on IBPA, that’s where you can find us. You’ll find my contact information there. I could talk about IBPA for hours. So if you want to hear more, just reach out to me.

(Joshua) 

That’s great. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you joining me today on the BookSmarts Podcast.

(Andrea) 

Thanks, Joshua. We’ll talk soon.

(Joshua) 

That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you like what you hear, you’re welcome to write a review and talk about us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. And also please share the podcast with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.