In this power-packed episode, we welcome back Nellie McKesson, founder of book design software Hederis, and meet Liz Gorinsky, president and publisher of Erewhon Books, a small indie press dedicated to publishing speculative fiction with a literary bent. We chatted with them about the challenges of building innovations from scratch in an industry with very traditional ways of doing things, staying afloat as a very small company during a global pandemic, and starting that small company right when the entire world shut down. We also talk about how both Nellie and Liz’s very different career paths prepared them for their current work, how software like Hederis can help publishers retain staff and offer personal attention, and why Erewhon has been the perfect partner for Hederis as they’ve used the software to build the first few titles on their list.

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Sometimes, when you're editing, you have to remind

yourself, like, Wait, slow down,

necessarily for you,

Emily, welcome to the hyper pub Scout podcast with me. Emily

einerlander and me. Corrine Pulaski, Hello. We are mapping

the frontier between traditional and indie publishing. Today,

we're speaking with Nellie McKesson, founder and CEO of

heteros and Liz gurinsky, President and publisher of

Erewhon books. You might remember Nelly from when we

spoke with her in Episode 26 and now that heteros software is

launched, we're happy to be talking with her and Liz about

how it's all been working out. Nellie McKesson has over a dozen

years of experience in publishing. She spent the early

years of her career doing hands on book production and layout,

and then moved into more technical and managerial roles

as the market for e books began to rise. She taught herself web

development and was an early evangelist for using web

technologies in the book production process. You may have

seen her speak at a conference about building automated book

production tools. Liz gurinsky started their editorial career

at Tor Books, editing a list that included popular and

acclaimed speculative fiction authors, Mary Robinette Cowell,

Lou shishin, Annalee Newitz, Nissy Schall, Katherine, M

Valente and Jeff VanderMeer. Books they've edited have won or

been nominated for all the major fields major awards. They've won

the 2017 Hugo Award for best editor long form and the 2016

Alfie award, designed and presented by George RR Martin.

They were part of the team that founded tor.com and acquired and

edited short fiction and comics for that site for many years.

Welcome Nelly and Liz, thank you. Thank you so glad to have

you back. It's great to be back. Yeah, thank you to have me on.

Oh, Corinne, do you want to kick us off? Sure, yeah. Okay, so

first question for Nelly, for those who haven't checked out

your interview in episode two, Episode 26 yet, could you give

us a little reminder about your background in publishing and how

you came to this work and Liz, then, could you trace your path

from where you started off to where you are in publishing,

too? So I

jumped into publishing just after I graduated from college.

I hate to give the cliche response, but I liked books, and

it seemed like something that I would be good at. I liked

writing. I'd always been good at proofreading. So I got my first

job at a tiny, tiny math journal publisher in Boston, and that

was actually my first introduction to automation and

publishing, also, because they use a lot of automated

technology to make their book layouts. So from there, I moved

on to this tech and reference publisher named O'Reilly, who

were also developing a lot of cutting edge, sort of automated

book production workflows. So that's where I really dove into

the tech side of publishing. I started out just doing hands on

layout. I became an InDesign specialist for a while. I saw a

lot of ways that InDesign was not great, and then I moved into

exclusively focusing on ebooks for a while. And then I took

both my ebook and print background and kind of merged

them together to focus on automated tool chains for both

both types of outputs. From there, I moved on to Macmillan

in New York, and I built them their first automated book

production platform. Funny. Funnily enough, the first books

that we used it for were tour.com books, although Liz and

I don't think ever actually met each other when we were both at

Macmillan, it wasn't until later that we met.

Yeah, I don't think so. I think we had some of that proto work

on the word style stuff that was being developed, but I was

unaware of your activities, but largely, yeah, yeah. So it was,

it was really funny how that worked out.

I left to found heteros around 2017

after having built this thing for Macmillan, which I thought

was actually very successful. But at the same time, I wanted

to go further with what I was experimenting with and what I

was creating and Macmillan, they're just not a technology

company. They didn't have the internal resources to support

the kind of thing that I wanted to create. So I left and I

started my own thing, and we officially launched our app this

past summer. At some point time has lost a lot of meaning for me

these days,

yeah, but Liz has been with us for a huge chunk of that time.

She.

Has actually been one of our main beta testers. We met

officially at the Kickstarter conference. I guess that was in

last year

before. Was it 2018 or 19? I don't remember,

but

anyways, yeah, so she jumped on board and has, has helped us

really kick the tires of the app. Well. And then, Liz, could

you give us a little bit of your publishing background? Yeah. So

I guess I first got into publishing when I wanted to make

comic books, and sort of at some point it occurred to me that

people did that. That was, that was somebody's job. And a so my

first publishing internship was a DC Comics and

from there, I was doing a lot of like comics volunteer work, but

then kind of accidentally tried to get other publishing comics

internships, and sort of accidentally wound up at Tor. I

was also really interested in science fiction and fantasy, so

just thought, Okay, well, I'll try this while I kind of figure

out my pathway. And then I just never left Tor, at least not for

a really long time. I was there basically a few months after I

graduated, I got a got a job there, and just went through the

editorial letter and

progressed to making a bunch of books at Tor. And so, yeah, I

don't have, I don't have as many branching pathways. Just

basically stuck with that for a long time, and at some point, I

think I just

the, I think the the cyclical thing got to me, and I was

attempting to leave and go freelance and

try some freelance editing, try some other things for a while,

and then I accidentally got offered the chance to start a

company. So we

which is, you know, pretty, pretty, pretty lucky pathway.

But basically, there was folks that were interested in funding

a new, independent speculative fiction company, and basically

just gave me the chance to, kind of like, decide what that would

look like. And that was an opportunity I didn't feel like I

could pass up. And I guess that was late 2018 started building

that. And, you know, we had a I guess, our first significant

step is that we signed on with workmen for distribution, and

just got started building our list according to their

schedule. And our first book launched in mid March. The first

week of the pandemic was in full swing, and we kind of

re rejiggered our summer schedule for a little while and

push some of those books onto fall. We considered some dates,

and

we've been so we know a second book came out, I think it was

last week, and we got another one in October, so we're

starting to finally get things rolling a little bit more. It's

a hard time to start anything. Yeah, not fun. Not that it was

fun for anyone. But you know, is that specific hard, hard time to

start anything, much less everything? Yes.

Okay, well, I you've mentioned that this process has taught you

both a lot about what it takes to make a book and that you've

had to sort of build the process from scratch as part of your

collaboration. Could you talk a little bit more about how that's

taken place? Nellie, maybe start with you? Sure. Yeah. So, as I

kind of mentioned in my background,

I've built a number of like, automated book production tool

chains. So I went into this making my own app thinking like,

you know, I know exactly what people are going to need for

that minimum viable product. I know like, exactly what like

subset of tools they're going to need to get their books out the

door. And then we got to Liz's first book in the pipeline, and

I will be honest, but it was a little bit of a disaster on our

end,

I think particularly once we got to the actual sort of production

editor side of things, where they're going through the line

breaks and the page breaks and trying to really get that layout

nailed down.

So what ended up happening was, I was like, G chatting with

Liz's production editor as she was doing her work. I'm like,

I'm like, jumping into the back end and making changes directly

in their HTML to make sure that she had everything that she

needed to get the book out the door. So it was a huge learning

experience. Definitely, through a lot of my assumptions about

what that tool set was out the window,

scrambled to make a bunch of new feature updates before they got

to their next book,

which which did go a lot smoother, still, a few bumps in

the road, but

way fewer than the first book, just being challenged by

really being a part of the book production process right from

the beginning, whereas, you know, at Macmillan or at

O'Reilly, I was really only focused on a certain a certain

aspect of the process within a workflow that had been nailed

down over.

Years and years and years. So they had very structured

processes in place. So I was kind of having to recreate a

solution for the problems that people had already solved within

their own organizations, for their own specific workflows.

Did you find it was easier to kind of work with someone who

was sort of in the earlier stages of building that company.

Yeah, it was, it was definitely easier to a certain extent.

You know, I think we got to collaborate a little bit more

than I might have with someone like Macmillan or Penguin Random

House, or someone on like, what, what Liz would need to do on her

side, and then what I would need to provide to her on my end

at the same time, I think there's an argument to be made

for you know, if we had been working with a Macmillan or a

Penguin Random House or something, their requirements

would have been so strict that would have been like, really

clear guidelines for me, of like, what exactly I need to

build.

So there's no pros and cons on both sides of things, but I

thought it was, it was fun to be able to build something for

someone like Liz and Erawan that I knew would work for more than

just Liz and Erawan, which is my whole goal to begin with, and

Liz. How did, how did working with heteros change the way that

you the process you had in your head, maybe about the book

production, yeah, well, first I'll say it definitely didn't

seem like a disaster from our end. But I think some of that is

that we were basically building everything from scratch from

from the beginning that

but like so I came from an editorial background, and that

meant that every other department and every other part

of the process, I kind of just had to figure out what we were

going to do when we when we got to that point, and so, and I

think that, especially in the production side, I, you know,

would clearly worked with that process from the outside a lot,

and I talked to people that had worked with it in a more

interior basis. But there's still kind of things that you,

you don't, you don't know where they are, because, like, people

don't think to mention that you're going to need, like, this

specific provision. So So I think that we, in some ways,

were, you know, until we were like, we're getting to the point

where we're like, sort of getting ready to put books into

production. But still, I think at the time we met at the next

page conference, we I didn't have a set solution in mind what

that would look like. I think still somewhere I was kind of

like, okay, well, we'll send this text out to a compositor,

and then I guess the it occurred, you know, occurred to

me by hearing your talk and hearing some of the ideas at

that conference that, like, maybe we wouldn't need that. And

it definitely seemed attractive to be able to build a process

around something that brought it more in house, gave us more

control, allowed us to do things faster. So at that point, it was

kind of like figuring out the details of our process became

geared a lot to what we could do with heteros. And, you know, it

was like, definitely clear that there were some things that were

that were shifting a little bit and that, like, but, you know,

it was also, I think, that there was, like, a lot of tolerance on

both sides in terms of, you know, that we were working with

a bunch of people that were doing, going through the process

for the first Time, and,

you know, and like, it's also definitely a rare gift to be

able to say, hey, like, but we would like this specific thing,

or here's what we're looking at. And like, here's a piece of

future that we don't have. Is it possible? Like, how do we do

that? And then often the answer would be, okay, well, we'll

build that. I definitely felt a little guilty about it at times,

but, you know, it, I think it often resulted in you, in Mel,

getting a sense of like, because I don't think that the things

that we were asking for were too unusual. They were just like,

this is the next thing to come up. Yeah, absolutely, I would. I

would completely agree with that. I think a lot of your

suggestions were things that I just hadn't realized were as

important as they needed to be, or maybe even things I hadn't

even ever thought of that. Once you set it. I was like, Oh, of

course, like that makes total sense. I should definitely add

that. For example, we are adding a watermarking feature for our

PDFs this weekend, so I know that's one of the feature

requests you made a little while ago. Smart.

All right. So you also both sort of, sort of started your

business from scratch? Would you mind talking about what made you

want to make that jump into entrepreneurship and what kind

of unique challenges you faced along the way?

I mean, I guess I touched on this a bit as I was doing my

intro, but it was really

just inspired by some of the roadblocks that I was running

into working at a big publishing company. They were great in a

lot of ways. They provided me a lot of opportunities, a lot of a

lot of places where I could kind of sandbox my ideas and build

some proofs of concept. But I just, I wanted to build

something bigger than what Macmillan could offer. I wanted

to.

Kind of take the things that I learned at Macmillan and at

O'Reilly and build something that could help more than just

like the big five publishers, you know, help all of the small

publishers who are just getting started, people like Liz and

Erewhon, who are looking for a way to make books

and confronted with this traditional workflow that's, to

a certain extent, an extent unsustainable. So I was hoping

that the company I could build would would pave the way for

that. In terms of actually building the company, it's a

little rough when you don't have a ton of funding right at the

beginning.

So a lot of it was finding people I could partner with who

believed in the same vision as I did, or who I could sell that

vision to, and who would be excited to work with me without

getting paid. And I was lucky to have a few people from that I've

met throughout my career who who were interested. And we actually

have brought on a couple new team members during the

pandemic, which has been a fun, exciting experience, very cool.

Did you, did you have trouble, like, did you go out and try to

find funding before you got started,

to kind of bootstrap it, or bootstrapped it to start, I did

a lot of consulting work to kind of build up the bank account a

little bit, I did find a little bit of funding.

I had one real meeting with an investor, and the experience was

so terrible

that I kind of sidelined all of that and just decided to focus

on building bootstrapping and doing as much as we could

upfront before tackling that side of things again,

right? So you have something to like show them, yeah. And also

it just preparing for those kinds of meetings and then going

to those kinds of meetings is just not something I'm super

passionate about. And I felt like it was really kind of

sucking the joy out of what I was trying to build for me. And

so I just weighed the weighed the options, the pros and cons.

And to me, you know, it's really hard to be working all the time

because, of course, I'm bootstrapping, so I'm raising

all of the money myself by doing side work and running a company

at the same time, but that was a more fulfilling proposition for

me than just chasing money from rich people all the time.

That's fair, yeah, it's like, how do I, how do I suppress my

disgust and present this thing to you?

I

wouldn't even say like

that. It's rich people themselves that disgust me. I

think the system of like, formal investment is very stacked

against people like me.

And there's sort of, like, this language that they speak that I

just don't speak. I'm not like a dude that they can go get a

burger with or whatever, right? So there's a lot of walls that I

was running into just right from the beginning,

and I just didn't want to fight that battle right then it was a

battle for a later time. Good, good. I want to know about how

Liz accident, accidentally became a publisher.

Yeah. So, yeah, I got really lucky from the funding

perspective in that there were, I think, far fewer strings

attached than there would normally be in the situation,

just like a few. I think that when the person initially

approached me that was looking for, like an editor to run this

thing, they were kind of like, we have this very unusual

opportunity. And it was definitely one of those things.

At first, I was like, this seems too good to be true. Do I what?

What is, what is the catch? What are the potential many catches?

And there haven't been too many, I think that there's definitely

a

i, i, and I think some of this is also that I was probably,

probably would not have been willing to do it if it hadn't

been the sort of the very easy end of things that I think, like

Nelly, I don't like the investment side of things, I

don't like, you know, kind of talking about it from, I, you

know, I Want to,

I mean it not to make money, but to make great books. Obviously,

you want the money side of things to be sustainable enough

that you can keep doing that. But if I had had to

look for money and pitch this as a money making opportunity, I

just wouldn't have done it. I would have found something else

to do.

And I think since then, we had to navigate a little bit of the

other side of, you know, from the beginning, when you're

starting publishing company, I think that there's you kind of

expect it will take a few years for this thing to get rolling.

That's book publishing is slow, that there's a lot of trial and

error. And I.

That it doesn't follow any of the conventional

things that would be attractive to most investors. And, you

know, I think that possibly in the in the beginning, when some

of this was kind of, I guess the person that was more directly

pitching this to to the investor, I I feel like probably

a notion was created that this would be a little bit easier and

quicker, and so some of our mediation has had to be look

like, not only like, here's what really is involved in this

process, and that it's not going to be victories all of the time,

but also, suddenly we have the entire world just changed

overnight. We're starting our company and like, so how does

that look for you, as a person who is looking at this primarily

from a from a monetary perspective,

and that's, I definitely haven't found that fun, pretty been

challenging an interesting way, because, like, I think it, I

guess, forces me to put on those, put on those goggles for

a little bit every once in a while, which is valuable for me

as a business runner.

It's just a necessary evil part of the job. So you don't have to

actually worry about money while it's happening. You can just

focus on the Making Art part of it. Yeah, well, I mean, there's,

there's only so many things that you can worry about, and I think

that there's a lot, there's a lot of things that are more kind

of, at least, like, when, you know, you've got kind of a

runway for a little while. There's a lot of things that are

more pressing day to day than being like, Okay, what is

immediately like, you know, the financial picture for the next

week? Like, it's more like, Okay, we need to build the, the

health and the strong basis of this company. Yeah, it's

interesting to hear you say that you you would have not done it

if it had been something that you had to pitch as a money

making scheme, which I feel like when you're when you're talking

about technology on my end, like, people immediately jump

to, like, is this a money making thing? Like, how? How can I get

to, you know, 10 times my investment in two years or

whatever. So the challenge on my end, just, I feel like that your

phrasing was just really highlighted the challenges on my

end of being someone in tech

who

is much more vision focused and sort of changing the world

focused then, then focused on money making, but being

confronted with opportunities where the money making side of

things is definitely the focus. Yeah, I think That's often why

we have other people in our organization that either like

ask for these things or organize them. I hate asking favors of

people, and I just, you know, would not do it if it if it were

up to

me. So it's a hard position to be in. And I think often the

tendency to kind of have the grand vision and the tendency to

like, pin down those practicalities are not always

encompassed in the same person. It's just hard to explain

publishing to people who want to make money too.

Yeah, I was, I've recently, I've recently, like, opened a self

publishing services like business, and I was trying to

explain to the banker who was helping me open up my business

account, like, how, how, how what I was doing worked versus

what, how traditional publishing worked. And I explained, like,

advances in royalty structures and the most basic way I could.

And he just looked at me like I was made out of 10, like, like I

had suddenly transformed into a mannequin in front of him. He

was like, How does anyone make money? Wait you give him money

before you sell any what?

How does that work? I was like, did you think people just like

gave, gave a million dollars to a publishing company and said,

publish my book like maybe you did.

Oh, my God. All right, yeah, that's quite a steep curve. Good

god. Okay. All right, so Nelly, could you talk about how you

wanted to differentiate heteros from other book design

softwares, and how that vision has translated into the real

world. Sure, that's a very big question, because there are a

variety of different book design softwares to address here. The

biggest one, of course, is InDesign. That's, I think, the

industry standard. So what happens, traditionally is the

editorial team gets the manuscript all up to snuff, they

pass it over to the production team and the design team, and

then the process kind of can go a few different ways here.

Either a designer will set up an actual book design in InDesign

and then put the manuscript into it, or they'll just put together

some specs and hand that over to a vendor who will put together

the actual InDesign template. So some of the

some of the problems that I saw with that process were just how

bottlenecked and siloed.

It could become. And then on top of that,

how InDesign was shifting more and more away from books,

really building out their tool set to tackle other types of

print media, which makes sense to me. You know, from

a business standpoint, of course, they want to grow their

profits,

grow their market share and expand beyond books, but the

problem was that that was making it harder for designers to learn

the InDesign tool set. And I actually experienced this a

bunch at a variety of publishing companies, where the designers

were so sort of confounded by all the changes that had

InDesign had gone through

that they were going further and further into just the marking up

specs and passing that over to a third party vendor to put

together the actual template. So

the problem of that, of course, for publishing companies is, you

know, if so much of your work is getting pushed over to vendors,

it becomes very easy to,

I guess, think about, think seriously about reducing your

internal staff and pushing more work off to third party vendors.

And that's something I definitely didn't want to see

happen. So one of the questions for me was, how can I make

something that is easier for people to use, sort of across

the publishing spectrum, help people, you know, keep jobs in

house, keep working house, have more ownership over their text

and their files.

So that was one of our goals, and something that I feel like

we're getting closer to. You know, it's been really awesome

seeing Liz and her editorial team actually jumping into the

app, making design changes, making text changes, right in

our app, which is something that would absolutely not happen in

an InDesign centric workflow,

you know, at a traditional publisher, that would all have

to go through, like you make the request to the designer, the

designer makes the request to the vendor, etc, etc. So that

was sort of the traditional side of things. And then you have the

pure automation side of things,

where the workflow is you have your word manuscript, it goes

through a

some sort of scripted tool, and spits out a laid out PDF and an

ePub file. That's a route a lot of publishers have tried to go.

That's the kind of tool that I built for Macmillan. The problem

with that one is that you really don't have a lot of control over

your actual final book layouts. So you you don't really have

control over all of your page breaks and all of your line

breaks and fixing boost lines and that sort of thing. And I

think, I think that was one of the big stumbling points we

actually ran into with the editorial team at Macmillan. Was

trying to convince them to kind of let go of some of those

standards, because it just was so hard to make those kinds of

changes. So I wanted to take both of these worlds and build a

tool that used the best parts of both things, but also solved the

problems of both things. So, yeah, I feel like we've gotten

pretty close, you know, it's, it's still fairly early days, so

it's going to take some more kicking of tires to really

smooth things out. But I think over the summer, we reached a

point where we were like, you know, this product has reached a

point of maturity where we're ready to actually feel

comfortable taking money from people for using it

good. I didn't want to, I didn't want to force the tool on people

that was just going to make their lives harder.

So, yeah, I'm feeling really optimistic about it. I also

constantly have to remind myself

I was at one of the creative pro week conferences, I guess, the

last in person conference. I can't remember if that was

earlier this year or if it was last year,

but they had a talk about the origins of InDesign. And one of

the speakers said, you know, no one used InDesign when it first

came out, because they were kind of in the same position as us.

They were sort of figuring out how they could make something

better than quark and migrate people over to it,

and get people to kick the tires and polish up their product. And

I think that's about the stage that we're at is polishing up

the product, getting more people in and really smoothing out the

process.

Well, it's good to know that someone else is successfully

replaced, replaced a former book production tool. Yeah, I use, I

use InDesign, InDesign process as inspiration a lot. You know

there, it's funny, they are kind of in exactly the same position

that quirk was in

when, when InDesign first entered the market. You know,

InDesign is now the,

what's the word? I want to say incumbent, but I feel like

that's, yeah, yeah, it they're the standard they're the

standard software now, and they have started doing a lot of the

things that I think Quark had done. Um.

Um, when they started losing their market share to InDesign,

which is sort of not prioritizing the features that

people are asking for, not prioritizing this book market

specifically, which has really opened the door for little guys

like us to come in and say, like we are exclusively focused on

books that is like our bread and butter. It's our passion, and we

want to make something that can really help that publishing

industry great.

I'm glad, because InDesign can be extremely frustrating.

Yeah. Liz, could you tell us a little bit more about what

Erawan is and what influenced and inspired it? Yeah. So we're

an independent speculative fiction publishing company, and

I think all the parts of that description are pretty

important. We use independent because we

sort of the ER, one entity is, we're a tiny company. We're for

four full time people at this point, and sort of independent.

Of all other publishing organizations that we do, work

with our partner Workman, who is also independent for

distribution, and we're using speculative fiction because

we're trying to focus on the space between, let's say the,

I don't necessarily like to use words literary, but let's say,

Like, you know, sort of the kinds of speculative fiction

that is, is really high quality, is the kind of thing that might

cross over to a literary reader, the things that we consider,

sort of the cream of the crop of the science fiction and fantasy

genre. So everything is a is a genre book has science fiction

or fantasy elements, but we are very specifically focusing on

things that we think a reader who doesn't necessarily identify

as a core reader will enjoy. And so we're doing, I would say,

mostly adult books, but also doing kind of why crossover

titles in the books that are YA books, but also we think are

kind of, like of central interest to to adult readers as

well. And, you know, I think in every one of our philosophies is

often anything that we're thinking of, we try not to have

the kind of like, okay, these are the books that are really

great, and these are the throw away books, everything that we

pick up we think could have the potential to be an award winner

in some sector of the field. So they're all like, you know,

really good books in and of themselves. And we're also

trying to kind of put a lot of focus on each book, aiming for

about a dozen books a year, or like, a dozen new front list

books a year. And that means that kind of, as if we stay

there for a while, basically everything is going to be the

focus at some point

that, you know, it'll be coming out, and it'll get its kind of

like own highlight when it comes out. And you know, ultimately

there, you know, are always going to be things that kind of

turn up being bigger hits or bigger successes in our list,

but they're all important. Would you say that the the more

literary speculative fiction bent is what separates you from

bigger players in that genre. I think the focus on that is,

yeah, that because I think that we've seen a lot of

many great publishing companies that kind of do the run of

science fiction and fantasy, but that kind of means that their

progression is anywhere from the these are kind of more

commercial, more like straight down the lines of specific

genres, epic fantasy, space opera and things like that. And

then we are increasingly seeing quote, unquote, literary

publishers that are publishing books that are speculative

fiction and and often do that without any connection to the,

you

know, science fiction and fantasy world. And so I, you

know, come squarely from, let's say, science fiction and fantasy

fandom. I love it. I, you know, love the conventions. I love the

people, but I think that so first and foremost, sometimes

you'll see somebody that kind of like is a writer coming from the

literary side of things, and sort of stumbles onto

speculative fiction tropes and but without awareness of the

history of the field. So we're kind of trying to unify both of

those things and, and I really firmly believe that something

can have speculative fiction elements but be a great work of

literature. So I don't think that there's,

I mean, yeah, like, I would say that there are, you know, a good

number of small and indie publishers that are doing that

in that are in similar spaces. I think small beer presses is one

great inspiration that they kind of exist in a similar space. And

we definitely have a similar ethos there. But there, I guess

we want to be one of those publishers that nobody knows

exactly what they're getting from us, but they know that they

can trust us as a as a brand, to some extent, that we're not

broken up. You know, publish things that we really strongly

believe in.

I like the that you mentioned, the bit about how you.

Literary authors don't always know the history of sci fi and

fantasy when they stumble onto the trope that was something

that I was talking about, like off air with a former guest,

it's like they think they invented something that Star

Trek thought of, like 60 years ago.

But would you say that you're just looking for authors who

already have that crossover, or would you say that there's an

educational element to what you as a publisher do for authors

and maybe readers who are kind of exploring sci fi and fantasy

themes? I think there's always an educational element, but I do

think it goes both ways that think anytime we enter a new

relationship with an author or an agent, teaching them about

what we're doing.

So you know, every everybody is coming from a different space,

and I think that I have a lot of conversations with, let's say,

authors who come from different places, who some of whom might

be saying, Okay, well, we're going kind of towards the

speculative fiction by publishing with Erewhon and some

people that are more coming in. Okay, like, you know, clearly

I've always been writing SFM have been on the kind of more

president and more literary side of things. But I think we're

also teaching each other in that we're looking for

maybe two components of that. We are especially fond of

publishing debut authors. We're new as well. And so we think

that in some ways, naturally, those are the kinds of folks

that are sort of willing to take the leap to work with a new

publisher. Might be folks that are, you know, don't yet have

connections in the field.

But also looking at, let's say, newer voices, people that are

bringing their own, their own identities, their own

experiences, to the field, and so they might teach us about,

let's say, organizations that work with a specific subgroup

that they're in, or maybe they have a specific scientific

expertise

we need to learn about that. Or, like a, you know, a political

emphasis to the work that we need to learn about in the

process of doing our best job publishing it. So it's all

teaching all the time, yeah, and a lot of learning going on with

everyone in this room right now.

All right, so how did the partnership between both of your

companies start and how has it grown over time? Liz, I want you

to start answering this question, because I feel like

you are the one who really initiated it at that conference.

Yeah, so I think you did a talk. And now I've forgotten what the

exact topic was, but it was like, definitely. But you know,

a thing where you were probably just like, pitching the basic

idea of heteros. And I was sitting in that room, sort of

thinking about, Okay, well, like, this sounds like something

that could work out. Well, I'd be curious and trying it. So I

think I approached you at that time, and we had some

preliminary conversations about, like you were, like, I think

specifically looking for a small publisher doing a few titles a

year to do some beta work with, which was exactly us. So at the

beginning, we were kind of feeling that out and saying,

okay, like, what would this look like to try it out? And so we

just kind of dove in, partially because we didn't have anything

else set up yet. So maybe the part of part of me was thinking,

Okay, well, we'll try this out, and there's always the

opportunity to try something else out if this goes

disastrously wrong. But you know, it definitely a lot of the

components of it were really attractive, both from the cost

center and the being able to do it in house. I know it's not

necessarily traditional for an editor and a publisher to to get

as involved as I'm doing, but with a company as well as ours,

that everybody is doing a little bit of everything, so

just it felt good from the beginning of like just be able

to

start from a manuscript and, you know, pour the text in and

suddenly, like, have something that looked quite a lot like a

book pretty early on without having to just, you know, in a

traditional publishing cycle, it might be eight months down the

road before you see something like that. So that was kind of

encouraging, and in that we were getting closer to a final

product. And I'll also totally cop to the fact that we're still

getting a handle on our scheduling, and we just brought

on a production manager, because it was sorely apparent to how

necessary that was, that the managing the schedules are not

necessarily the strong suit of myself or my co editor, and so

in the early days, the the notion of saying, like, Okay,

we'll have to send this away to somebody else, and then wait,

like, two months, or, you know, several weeks in between each

pass, that was scary and not something that we were we just

didn't have enough time to to work in.

Have as much padding as we probably should have, and we

hopefully, ultimately will have, but in the early days, you're

just kind of trying to do everything as quickly as you

can. Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head there,

sort of like you were exactly the kind of person that we had

been looking for. We, you know, posted some things on the

internet saying we're looking for partners, but when you

approached me at the conference and you outlined what you were

building,

you know, you're a small team. Your list is relatively small.

You're publishing primarily prose based books, so it's not

going to throw too many curveballs at us in terms of

what we need to build for you, it really seems like a perfect

partnership to me. And I will also say that we were, I was, I

at least, was constantly ready for you to be like, Okay, it's

not working. We're going to InDesign now

my greatest fear, and also something I was sort of trying

to get myself ready for.

Well, it sounds like there was a little bit more happiness,

out in the outcome.

Well, speaking of outcomes, so the outcome and the situation

that you are in has changed a lot from last year and what you

thought it would be. So since, how have things changed since

when you started working together and when the pandemic

hit? And how have your workflows changed? Yeah, I'll say on my

end, you know, Liz has brought on more people on her team,

which has been kind of exciting, sort of getting started working

with them and seeing from fresh eyes like how things are

working. They're obviously starting in the app at a very

different point than when Liz first started. Things are much

more established now

we have actual customer support tools built into the app, which

is not something we had when Liz first started. So it's been

great to see them, kind of learning the ropes. You know,

people who are coming from an editorial background and who who

maybe aren't used to doing these kinds of edits, and walking them

through how to do it, and seeing them learn how to use our tools

has been super, super fulfilling for me. We've also brought in

new team members on our end,

although I don't think that's affected Liz too much.

I think she and her team have become sort of a very special

have filled a very special position for us, and get a lot

of very personal contact for me,

which I'm happy to give. I don't, I don't mean to say that

that's like, you know, something that is undeserved. They've done

so much for us, and I really value our partnership, so I'm

happy to help them however they need help from me

in terms of pandemic.

Interestingly, I don't think specifically talking about our

partnership, I don't think that's affected our partnership

too much. You know, we were already working pretty

distributed, pretty remotely. The whole, the whole point of

heteros is that it's, you know, it's all in the cloud. It's sort

of a remote hub that anyone can jump into from anywhere.

You know, as long as you have a laptop and an internet

connection, you're all set. Definitely like some challenges

of, you know, some of Liz's team, you know, being in their

home offices, rather than their their office office,

and,

you know, maybe struggling with different equipment or different

connection speeds or something. But I really don't think it's

affected, affected those processes too much headers. As a

company sort of has always been remote and distributed. I think

for my goal, at least, is to always be remote and

distributed. I think it's a really comfortable, great way to

work,

and we have all the tools set up to do that. You know, we have a

Slack channel, we have our email groups, our shared Google Drive,

everything we need to to really collaborate remotely. And Liz,

how has that affected you as a new publisher? Yeah, I think

things have definitely shifted a bit more. But some of that is

more on the, I guess, the, let's say, post production side of

things. Believe when we started, we were just two people. It was

myself and like, sort of an assistant that would kind of

fill in and all the other spaces. And probably a few

months after that, we brought in a publicity and marketing

person, brought in another editor, and we were kind of

always just like in figuring out how we would expand, sort of

figuring out that,

you know, production would be freelance for a little while

because we weren't sure that we had enough work for it to be a

full time job, and so we've just very recently began. We started

with a production editor who works on a few of our titles,

and I mentioned we started realizing that we would need

somebody on the more managerial side. So she came in a few weeks

ago and is already, like, really helping.

Kind of like, think through

timing and processes.

And I think also we've got a kind of three more production

editors lined up that we'll work on, just sort of try them out on

individual titles. To start, we were able to kind of bear. So I

would say, like at the beginning, we were New York

oriented. We lived in New York. We had an office. We had regular

events, even before we started publishing books and and some of

the processes of, like, when we get to the actual we are

printing these books, we still had physical blues. We had

physical print proofs coming in. And so some of the things that

happened, like, basically, you know, once the final files are

done with heteros, we still needed to figure out how to, how

to adapt that. And so we, for a while, we were in the zone of

thinking, Okay, we don't like the fact that publishing is

centered in New York. It doesn't necessarily make much sense. And

yet, our core team members are here. But it was relatively

easy. And I think part of that was saying, Okay, well, we've a

lot of our production is in the cloud, so that does make it

easier to say, Fine, anybody that we bring on now can

relatively easily shift to being a totally remote employee

without too much difficulty. And yeah, I have, you know, felt

some guilt about the fact that we often do wind up build

bothering Nelly, because we started out in the space where

it was like just the two of us that were kind of working on

this, yes, no, but now that we are bringing on new people,

we're taking the opportunity to, you know, on our side, just like

working on training more ourselves, kind of building out

procedures and documents that are more geared to, you

know, teach, teaching people like, you know, basically to use

our internal resources first. So we'll probably set up a question

line and say, Hey, if you're trying to do this thing in

heteros, like, ask here first before going out with healthy.

Because, you know, at this point, have enough people that

have enough experience on the app that we can figure some of

these things out.

And, you know, hopefully, kind of centralized in that fashion

each other. Have you experienced unexpected complications working

with workmen for distribution? Um, I think it's not

complications, but I mean, they have been an amazing partner,

and we are super lucky.

It the background with them is that they, you know, have, you

know, fine publisher of both, like, a lot of kids books, a lot

of, like, really, you know, complicated books with a lot of

moving parts. And then their, their main fiction imprint was

Algonquin, and they did have Algonquin young readers, but

they, I think that they said that the last book that they had

done that had been a strictly science fiction and fantasy book

was good omens.

So definitely not their lane at all. And at the same time, when

we were describing what we were doing, they were really excited

to to say, hey, we, we hear that people want this genre. We'd

like to, you know, be able to expand into that area a little

bit. And the specific thing that we want are the kinds of things

that that do, that do hit those crossover readers. So, you know,

the people that we're working with at workman are not

necessarily dyed in the wall science fiction and fantasy

fans, but so many of them have really loved and are embraced

our books. And, you know, are sort of the perfect readers for

us, that the folks that

kind of are able to embrace that and like the experience, but

also their experience is selling to indie bookstores across the

nation who are not necessarily again themselves SF and fantasy

specialty stores. So they're helping with that process of of

communicating the, you know, basically that that the, I

guess, the, hopefully, the universalness of our books. If

there's difficulties, it's in that there's a lot of really

professional expectations, and we have been aiming from the

beginning to be professional, but there's a bit of a

difference in

sort of being professional when you are walking into a situation

where, let's say you're an imprint of a big five publishing

company, and you've got 100% 100 people working in support,

staff, In contracts, in legal, in HR, in your mail room, and,

like, all those things are already built for you, and that

you've already got a full, you know, sales and marketing and

publicity team. So we're kind of building those all with, like,

you know, a fraction of a person doing those things. And so

frequently it's kind of a scramble to say, All right,

well, we need to,

I would say my the the core team is really strong on the

principles of communicating about our books. But then when

we need to figure things out, like, Okay, we need to. We need

to make a catalog that looks good. We need to sort of make a

sampler. It.

It's all a lot of that was starting from, all right, we

have nothing. How do we get from nothing to a product that looks

as good as a maybe not as good as something like Algonquin,

that has been established for a really long time and has, you

know, dozens of award winning and really famous books, but

something that we can be proud to show next to their books,

yeah, also from the production side, like, kind of hooking into

what you said about workman being very professional.

They had, they had some file standards and requirements that,

you know, of course, were hard won over many years of, you

know, running into problems with printers and that sort of thing.

And so again, this comes goes back to some of the assumptions

I was making where, you know, we tested our files. We knew they

worked for for a variety of printer of printers, but or

ebook distribution platforms, but then workman would run them

through their own sort of validation programs and come

back and say, oh, you know the font encoding and this PDF file

is like, doesn't meet our standards or something.

And so even though I knew that the file would print fine, I

also know that those, those validation requirements, again,

are coming from years and years and years of like Battle testing

files and making sure that something works. And so it was.

It was informative and nice to get that kind of feedback back

from a team like the workman team,

who have all of this experience and can help me build something

that

can meet those kinds of battle tested requirements. What do you

see in the future of your two companies, both independent,

both independently, sorry, and as a partnership? Um, good

question. Um, I mean the partnership side of things, of

course, I hope that we get to work together for a long time. I

i don't really, I can't really, sort of forecast what is in

store for our partnership,

because that depends a lot on how each of us end up growing

with our individual companies.

You know, heteros, we have a lot of phase two, phase three, phase

four plans for our company in terms of what kinds of tool sets

we want to build out.

We never, we never started heteros as wanting to be just a

book production platform. You know, we wanted to be more of a

publishing platform. So, you know, I think we're at the point

where, while we're still trying to nail down and really perfect

that book production side of things, we're also starting to

ask ourselves, what is the next thing that people need most? Is

it an online galley review platform? Is it a book

distribution platform? What is that? Is it a metadata tracking

platform or something? So what is that next step that is really

going to build out the value that we can give to publishers?

That's that's still a question to be answered. You know, I know

that galleys have become a really huge deal right now, so I

think that might be a direction we go

again. Things are changing fast in the world, so we're trying to

pivot along with that.

So we'll see. Oh, I was gonna say, like, I am also hoping that

our partnership continues and, like, going forward. And, you

know, see no reason why, especially, like, you know, at

least for our books that are kind of similar to, like,

largely prose books that we definitely have, you know, some

things every once in a while that are a little bit weird

because of science fiction and fantasy, but I think that that's

hopefully fun small challenges to tackle, one at a time. And

the I guess the publishing growth once you've got things

started, is sort of like more of the same, but bigger. I'm not

necessarily oriented towards like, you know, doing any kind

of grand new inventions. I want to just, you know, find a lot of

amazing books and continue publishing them, and so some of

that is just going to increase our reach, increase our audience

for both ourselves and the books that we're publishing. Would you

consider ever tackling different possible? I mean, it like, I

think that I always felt super lucky that I got a chance to

work in science fiction and fantasy. It's, it's just what I

gravitate to in

a like, you know, but as a reader, as a fan of most things,

and a lot of my interests outside of that are really

oddball things, like experimental theater. But

there's a few hybrid things that I'm, you know, we we'd like to,

we'd like to play with, like, we've considered kind of things

that are nonfiction, but on related subjects to science

fiction and fantasy. I'm doing a game anthology, which might be

the one book that we kind of have a different production

model on, because it's going to be very layout intensive. And

like, I think the kind of thing that is not is not quite a thing

where we can use an automated tool set, but.

And, you know, I think I do want it to be a place where

we'll be editorially driven, and that, you know, once we bring on

an editor there, the things that they love will will guide what

they're bringing on, and that will shape the company. So we

get a lot of questions about, like, will we expand our age

range? It's possible down the road. But Sarah Guan, who's my

co editor, and I, we have quite similar tastes in not in a

monotonous way at all, but that we're both like you just want to

do really good books that are helping improve the world. And

so right now, most of the things that we have been picking up

have fallen somewhere within that universe. And do you have

any tips for aspiring publishers or publishing entrepreneurs? I

will say my tip is to be patient.

Publishing, as Liz said, is a slow process, and I think

publishing technology is similarly slow. There's a lot of

just the testing process can take some time. I've seen lots

of sort of little tech startups who expect that they're going to

be able to follow the traditional startup route of,

you know, building tons of traction really quickly, seeing

a lot of success, and then, you know, selling their company or

something. And that that does happen sometimes, but I think

more often, those kinds of startups end up running into the

slowness of the publishing industry and kind of giving up

because they hadn't anticipated that. So you just have to be

ready to

take your time really get it right. Publishers are also very

quality driven for very good reason. You know, books have

been around for hundreds of years, so our expectations for a

good book are pretty solidified.

And so you if you're going to succeed in this industry on the

tech side,

you have to be willing to take the time to meet those standards

and build something really solid. And one of the first

pieces of advice that

first trip tour was, don't do this unless you can do anything

else. And I don't meant in the sense think that almost anybody

that I meet is like very capable, smart individuals that

could work anywhere. But there's a lot of love that is required

to dedicate that time to books that it's both going to be less

of a sure money making opportunity than other things

that you could be spending your time on. There's a lot of really

slow, deliberate work. There's a lot of like, hand holding in all

parts of the process, the process. And if you want a quick

book, if you want to just, like, make a product, like, do

anything else

that it's ultimately, you know, I think that I've found the

problem solving and the challenge to be pretty

interesting over the past few years, and at the same time,

it's the rewards inherent in we're making this, this thing

that people are really connecting with, and that are,

you know, you can see it changing readers lives. You can

see people really responding to it, like, that's, that's the

thing that animates it.

But, you know, like, if you're not, if that's not the the

energy that feeds you, then this industry is going to drag you

way down. It's, you know, too hard for too little reward, so

you've got to love it. Yeah, I think that is in keeping with

the most poignant piece of advice I ever read when I was

first starting out my career, which was whatever, whatever

role you're in, whatever genre, genre you're in, find something

about it to love and be passionate about.

Because again, it's it's going to take a lot of slow days.

Yeah.

So where can people find you? And if you have, do you have

anything else that you would like people to check out? I'll

start because I feel like Liz has has better links that I

think are better for signing off the show with. But you can, you

can follow our company at heteros app on Twitter. We have

a wonderful marketing person who's great about tweeting about

things we're working on, new things we've added, and just

general publishing news. You can follow me personally at Nellie

McKesson, I am terrible at Twitter,

and I apologize.

And then, of course, we have our website, heteros.com

if you just want to see the app, it's app dot. Heteros, dot. I

think as long as you don't embarrass yourself, that you're

good at Twitter,

my best.

Yeah, so we are as a company. Are at Erewhon books. That's e r

e w.

H, O, N, B, O, O, k, s, and that's everywhere on Twitter,

Instagram, Facebook and the website. Is our one books.com,

personally, I'm at too much exposition with a two and then

m, U, C, H, E, x, p, O, S, i, t, i, o n, on Twitter, and project

wise, so I mentioned our second book, which is the scapegracers,

came out last week at the time that we're recording, and we

were really pleased that we wound up being an indie best

seller in our first week. So that was exciting. A lot of love

there, and you're also getting a lot of advanced love. We just

got a third star review for sale, Polk, the midnight

bargain, which is coming out in October. So just our first few

books out in the marketplace, but we if you like speculative

fiction, please check them out, and you can see on the inside

the really amazing designs that we developed in partnership with

heteros. Gotta do it. I will say they are pretty engrossing

books. It was hard not to get sucked into reading them as I

touched them. It happens.

Sometimes when you're editing, you have to remind yourself,

like, Wait, slow down,

necessarily for you.

All right. Well, unless anyone has anything else to say,

Corinne, you got anything, I don't think so. No, all right.

Well, thank you, Liz and Nelly for joining us today, and

congratulations on all the hard work you've done under such

mercurial circumstances. You can find us on Facebook at hybrid

pub Scout, on Twitter at hybrid pub Scout, and Instagram at

hybrid pubscout pod. Please visit our website,

hybridpubscout.com and while you're there, click join our

troop to get our new guide, the HPS guide to picking your

publishing path, and thanks for giving a rip about books you.