In this episode, we talk to Head of Publishing at Kickstarter Margot Atwell about why the community crowdfunding platform is tailor-made for authors and why more publishers should be embracing it, why the publishing industry model is broken and suggestions on how to fix it, and why decentralizing the industry is key to making sure that more perspectives are represented in both the industry and the books it produces. (I mean, do we really need any more books about twenty something Brooklyn hipsters and their trust funds?) We also talk about the process of creating a campaign on Kickstarter, and how it helps authors find their audience BEFORE their book comes out.

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Welcome to the hybrid pub scalp. Hybrid pub Scout

podcast with me. Emily Einolander and me,

hello. We're mapping the frontier between traditional and

indie publishing, and today's guest is Margot Atwell. Margot

Atwell is the head of publishing at Kickstarter, where she helps

authors and publishers build community and find support for

their creative projects. Previously, Margot was publisher

at Beaufort books, an independent publisher of fiction

and nonfiction books. Her first book, The Insider's Guide to

book publishing success, was published in February 2013 in

2014 she raised almost $10,000 on Kickstarter to launch gut

punch press and fund her second book, Derby life stories, advice

and wisdom from the roller derby world. She sends out the on the

book, substack newsletter about money and publishing, and is

currently writing, don't steal this book. Why paying for words

is radical and necessary. Welcome, Margot, thanks so much

for having me on here. Yeah, thanks for being here. Really

excited to have you on. Since I went to that the next page

Kickstarter conference, I was just like, I really want to talk

with you about this sort of thing.

Yeah. So Corinne, you want to Oh, sorry. Oh, I was just gonna

say the next page was a really fun event to put on, and I

learned so much from all the amazing people who spoke. Are

you going to do any more of them?

I think it's still an open question. It was not originally

intended to be an annual thing, although I think every time

someone does something, it feels like it should be annual.

I guess if at a point in the future, I feel like there's a

lot more to say that we could help people say I would consider

it, but

for now, I'm putting a lot more of my time into helping other

people run events and conferences. Excellent.

So let's, let's talk about roller derby. Yeah, let's okay.

So our first question is, tell us a little bit about your

experience with roller derby, which you have written an entire

book about

in 20, I'm sorry, 2005 I had just graduated from college, and

my mom gave me a newspaper article in The New York Times.

It was talking about roller derby, and I thought she was

suggesting I play roller derby because I used to play ice

hockey, and, you know, I skated a lot growing up,

she wanted me to see it because a Smith alum, which is my alma

mater, was mentioned in the article. But, yeah, so she

accidentally, my mother accidentally recruited me to the

sport of roller derby,

and I started learning to skate in 2006

because I had been a rollerblader. I'd been an ice

skater, but quad roller skates, which is what Derby has played

on it, they're very different. That's actually what is kind of

like taking off on Instagram and Tiktok right now is old school

quad roller skates. Oh, cool, yeah. So I started playing in

2007

and then joined Gotham girls roller derby in 2008

I skated for over a decade with them, on teams basically at

every level of the sport, including the All Stars, which

is Gotham girls roller Derby's internationally ranked team

overachiever.

And then I retired as a skater about two years ago, and I'm

still involved on the board of directors as a coach, and my

wife still plays, so I still got to skate in, yeah, that's,

that's awesome.

Go ahead. You know, I was just gonna ask, so what was when you

were trying out for the team? Like, what is that sort of like,

audition process, like, or whatever.

So I tried out twice for Gotham, and it was, it was a little bit

different. The first time

they had actually lost their space, their skating space. So

the original tryout was at Empire roller rink, which is the

birthplace of roller disco. So a bunch of us showed up there, and

I had been learning to dance skate there, so that space felt

really comfortable. It had these beautiful wooden floors, and

then by the time callbacks happened a few months later,

which normally doesn't take a few months, but they had their

own warehouse, and so I showed up there, and I had never skated

on a sport court before, which is a really slick plastic

surface, so that was a surprise. I didn't.

Get that first time, but then I went and skated with a league

that was starting in Westchester called suburbia roller derby,

and when I came back the next year to try out again, I was a

lot better at my skates under me.

But the second time, Gotham had realized that it's very hard to

learn how to play roller derby if you don't have anyone

coaching you. So they did a few,

a few sort of like one off skate sessions, teaching people the

skills that you had to demonstrate in the in the

tryouts. Because back when I first skated like you kind of

just showed up and you were good enough, or you weren't, you

know, you may be like I was roller skating on the cracked

sidewalks of Bed Stuy and, you know, learning how to do

turnaround toe stops by like watching myself in a van. It was

very, very DIY

and then, but over time, the sport has gotten more and more,

I say, professionalized, because it's gotten much more advanced,

but it is still not a professional sport. Everyone

pays dues to play. So now Gotham has three levels of basic

training. So you learn how to skate, then you learn how to

do contact, and then you learn actually how to play the sport

in these three different levels. So it's, it's really come a long

way in since I've discovered it, like, I don't know, 14 years

ago. Wow, sounds like it's really friendly to people who

want to learn.

It really is. I think in some sports cultures, there's a

culture of hazing. And that's it's completely the opposite. In

Derby, I feel like the sport itself is such a hazing process

that people are always so generous and welcoming to new

skaters. Oh, that's great. What was your name? M, Dash. M, Dash.

Oh, that's

the most publishing person thing. I was

really pleased when I came up with that one. How exactly did

that go? How did you come up with that name?

Well, I was an editor at the time, and I was pretty fast

because I had this old hockey background,

and so I liked, I liked the sort of like speed punctuation.

Girl's name, triple pun, yeah, yeah, you're speedy, and your

name starts with an M, and you're an editor. Like, it all

comes together. It all makes sense.

The the

miscommunication with the mom thing happened to me recently

because Corinne, you and I were watching, we were doing a co

watch of the new Suspiria movie. And mom's like, what? What are

you guys doing right now. And I was like, Oh, we're watching

Suspiria. It's like a bunch of witches at a ballet school. And

I think she had this idea that it was like Harry Potter for

ballerinas,

I know, but it's, you know, very not. So I caught her before she

went and watched. I was like, actually, it's a bloodbath. And

she goes, Okay, never mind.

But all right, so, so um,

leading to, leading back to the editorial experience. What made

you want to get into publishing in the first place

so as soon as I could read, I was a die hard reader, and I

started writing when I was very, very young.

And then at a certain point in like middle school ish, high

school, I realized that there was someone between the writer

and the reader, and that that was a job with a salary. And so

I was like that, that's it.

I want to help make books. I want to read books. I want to

write books. I've always been extremely single minded in that

area. So,

so yeah, I was involved in lit mags in high school. I co

founded one in college, and then

I barely ever looked at any other field.

So do you prefer more literary writing?

Or do you have genre favorites? Or, yeah, I do. I am. I mean, I

studied poetry, so I really love poetry. I like a lot of

different types of fiction, but if you were to look at my

bookshelves and pick out the genre that's most represented,

it would be sci fi and fantasy. Oh, great, I love it.

Corrine, all right, so you began your publishing career at a

literary agency, so what skills that you learned there have been

particularly useful as your career has kind of grown and

changed.

It was a really, really great introduction to how the book

world works. So I would say that the fundamental understanding of

just how books are sold has been really helpful. And also the

fact that

the book publishing is a business, you know, that sounds.

Silly, but I think, you know, I was graduating, and I was very

lofty, and I wanted to edit the great American novel, as so many

people do, and

then just approaching it from the agent side, where your job

is to sell the book, and you have to understand how to take

what's amazing about a 300 page novel and boil it into like a

single page or even a single sentence, and then tell people

about it. That is a skill that I started learning there, that has

been with me in everything else I've done in publishing, just

the idea of taking something huge and sprawling and nuanced

and turning it into an idea that someone can grasp in an instant.

I'd say that's a real key, like, to publishing, like, yeah, the

core of what you're supposed to be doing,

yeah. And also you said that you were single minded when you were

talking about going into books and publishing. But, like, I

went into publishing because you can be single minded, but also

you get to kind of try everything, if you really want

to. And from looking at your resume like you've really done

all kinds of different areas of publishing, and that seems like

a lot of fun.

Yeah, I've covered a lot of ground. I'm someone that really

likes learning and trying new things. So I have, I have gotten

involved in a lot of different elements of publishing, and it's

one of the reasons I really like my job at Kickstarter, is I get

to play a tiny role in hundreds of different projects coming to

life. And, you know, do something that's super helpful

to the publisher or the author, but then they have to go off and

do all the hard work.

So how many forms of publishing Do you head at Kickstarter?

So I oversee publishing, which is a category that has about 17

subcategories, including literary journals, zines,

podcasts and radio, children's books, ya, so many other things,

academic translation. I also oversee comics and journalism.

So basically, if it relates to words, I probably have worked on

it at Kickstarter. That's a lot. That is a lot. I'm gonna say 17.

Oh my god. And podcasts and journalism and comics and like,

do you ever get overwhelmed?

I do. I

I really like to help people, and I really believe in the work

I do. So one of my biggest challenges always is, how do I

say no to some things so that I carve out space to focus on

areas that are really important to me. And I think,

I mean, most people, I imagine, have that problem of of having

too many things to work on, but that that focusing and

saying no to someone that's really hard to me? Yeah, I think

we all struggle with that a little bit, especially as people

who like want to make other people happy and like work with

them to see that their work is elevated and like shown to

everyone.

But what are some of the most unusual and fun or memorable

projects that you've worked on.

Oh, gosh, how long do you have

as much time as you want to give us? Yeah.

So

one of the sort of career divine defining projects I've gotten to

work on is in 2015 Copper Canyon got the right to publish about

20 previously unpublished public Neruda poems. Oh, wow. And I'm a

huge Neruda fan. I took a Neruda class in college,

and so I reached out to Copper Canyon cold just having read

that they were thinking about crowdfunding in the newspaper,

and I spent a few months convincing them that Kickstarter

was a good thing for them to try out. And so then I worked with

them on this project, and they raised over $100,000

for a poetry project from over 1400 backers from around the

world. And that I mean getting to work on new poetry by Neruda,

like I didn't think that would be possible no matter where I

worked, so that was really amazing. And the folks at Copper

Canyon are so professional and passionate and just really kind,

so they were great to work with. Oh my God, that's yeah, one that

I'm working on right now, which is sort of the other end of the

spectrum is

Brandon Sanderson. Is a best selling fantasy writer. He is,

in part, famous for finishing Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time

series. So he has been writing and publishing books for 20

years. He's been publishing them for 20 years. He's been writing.

For longer, and he has started doing these leather bound

editions of his work. So he ran a few pre orders for leather

bounds on his website, and then he wanted to do the Way of

Kings, which is a really long book. It was going to be two

volumes, and he just decided that he wanted to do a real pre

order and make sure he had enough money to cover it, rather

than just like going out on a limb and trying it. So I've been

working with him and his team since December, January, and

they just launched a project to make this two volume, $200

leather bound edition of Way of Kings for the 10th Anniversary.

They launched that on Tuesday, and it broke the all time

publishing record in less than 10 minutes. Oh, my God, what?

Yeah, the previous most funded project was the second goodnight

stories for Rebel Girls a few years ago, and they were, I

think $866,000

this one has passed $5 million on Friday. So, holy shit,

that's incredible. Wow. Yeah, it

in some ways it's really it

feels like it has been a long time coming, and I'm hoping that

this is something that the publishing industry at large

sees and realizes the potential.

One of the things I've been talking about, writing about,

you know, doing this book about, is basically the

publishing industry model is broken.

It was designed at a very different time. It does not take

into account all the realities of today, and running a pre

order campaign in a manner that puts the money first is a huge

benefit to publishers and to authors and to readers. So

I would like to see a lot more publishers thinking about using

Kickstarter as a way to raise money at the beginning,

but also as a way to connect more deeply with their authors

fans and build a stronger fan base, because that reader

connection is something that publishers left to booksellers

for years and years and years, which made sense, but the world

has changed, and publishing has changed slower.

So can you break down for maybe people who haven't really been

paying attention, like the different steps and the process

of running a campaign for a book on Kickstarter? Sure, one of the

reasons I like Kickstarter for publishing most is that the

steps to run a project really fit into the process to publish

a book. So for example,

I typically encourage people to run the project when they need

the money, so when they have to pay an editor, when they have to

pay a cover designer, when they have to pay for a print run,

ideally, you do as much work as possible, finish the manuscript,

edit it a couple times yourself, have a beta reader, basically

get it as close to publication as possible, because that means

as little work is left to do for you after the campaign,

and that makes everything a lot easier. So Kickstarter is an

online platform where you bring you tell the story of what

you're making. You can use a video. You can use text, images,

GIFs, audio,

and you tell the story, you know, Hi, I'm Margot Atwell. I'm

writing a nonfiction book about roller derby. I'm the perfect

person to write this because I've been playing for a million

years, and everything I do is roller derby.

Here's how far I am with the manuscript. Here's my plan for

it. Here's when you'll get your copy. I hope you'll pledge for a

copy, share with a friend and join me for the ride.

That right there could have been my video. So you put that up,

and then you offer people rewards. Mostly the rewards

people want are a copy of the book you're making, ebook,

print, signed,

if you're an artist. Sometimes people offer original art.

Sometimes people, especially in the fantasy and sci fi space,

offer tuckerizations, where basically they write you into

the story, or they let you name a character, which is really

cool. That is really cool. Wow. So that's the kind of thing that

like for a huge fan, like, you know, getting to be literally

written into someone's universe is

it's not possible through traditional publishing. It's

something where it really connects you with the with the.

Writer with the publisher, etc. So you set your financial goal.

Say, for one of my projects, I needed $7,000 to pay for art,

editing, printing, etc. So I say I need $7,000 if you all pledged

$7,000 in the next 30 days, it'll be amazing. I'll get to

make my book, and I'll send you your copy. And then people start

pledging. They have that 30 days. It could be 15, it could

be 60.

You get to decide. And then if people pledge as much or more

than your goal amount in the time allotted, then everyone's

card is charged. You get the money, and you get to go out and

make your thing and then turn that around and send it out into

the world. And if not, if you don't make it, if you don't

reach your goal, nobody's card is charged. You're not on the

hook to deliver your rewards. And that's actually

Spike Trotman, who runs Iron Circus comics says a failed

Kickstarter is a dodged bullet, because previous to Kickstarter,

you could still self publish, and maybe you would print 2000

copies. You'd put it on your credit card, or you'd save up

money for months or years, printing 2000 copies, you put

them in your garage, and you would sell 10 of them.

And so Kickstarter learning that you have not figured out

precisely how to reach your audience or how to sell your

story before you print it, that's a huge benefit to a self

published author. And it's also, you know, if a publisher thinks

they've got a huge hit on their hand, and then they just like

miss the mark with their campaign, then they realize they

need to do more market research. They need to do more audience

building. They maybe need to change the format, the price, et

cetera. But it really is good market research, and then you

can come back to Kickstarter and try again once you've sort of,

like, built a bigger audience or retooled your, you know, your

format, or whatever else. And we do see that people are very

likely to succeed when they run it a second time. Makes a lot of

sense. I used to not understand the not getting to keep the

money thing, but you've really explained it well, I think, in a

way that benefits the person running the campaign. Yeah, we

see that all or nothing funding, which is what we call our model,

is a lot safer for both the backer and the creator, because

if I ask for $7,000 and promise you a nice,

300 page, you know, perfect bound book that's well edited

and all that. And then I get $3,000

how do I make up that extra $4,000 so either I have to save

money out of my own pocket, I have to go and chase down

additional money, or I have to give you something that is worse

than I promised you. And so none of those options are great. So

that's really why we believe in the all or nothing funding

model, and we also see that it works. So I think that the the

all or nothing model is really scary for a lot of people, the

idea that you could put work in and not get something back. But

we see that there's a huge gulf between people who launch a

project and like really haven't understood the system or done

the work, and then people who launch a project and succeed in

the publishing category. For projects that have at least 25

backers, 80% of them reach or exceed their goal. Oh, wow. So

if you do a good job telling your story, and you start

telling people about it, and you, you know, get the word out

to your followers, your readers and your friends. There's a

really, really high chance that you'll meet your goal or even

exceed it.

Oh,

Corinne, do you want to do the next Oh, sure, I actually have a

question before our next question. So and now

so after your success with working with Copper Canyon, do

you feel like other publishers attitudes are sort of are they a

little more open to the idea of crowdfunding, or do you still

feel like it's kind of a hard sell for them?

I definitely saw that independent publishers started

to change their opinion after the Copper Canyon project, and

I've worked with a lot of others since then,

milkweed ran a project to start a bookstore, and has run another

project since then.

Actually, Tupelo press is an amazing poetry project. Live

right now,

I could be listing amazing publishers all day. But, yeah,

so, so I would say that the perception of crowdfunding has

really changed over time, and I think that is partly the model

of the people who are trying it. And

I think back when I started at Kickstarter in 2014

people saw crowdfunding and they thought.

It was like begging for money on the internet.

And so I've really worked to help people understand that it's

a great way to tell your story and connect with your community,

and that you don't have to say, help me. I desperately need your

money. You can say, I'm doing something super cool. Come be

part of it, and I'll send you a copy. And I think that that

second message resonates so much more. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so as you said earlier, to traditional the traditional

publishing model is broken in many, many ways. So what do you

think sort of is the most pressing issue facing the

industry right now, and you notice that any progress is

being made,

so I'm gonna cheat.

So when I ran the next page, which is a free digital

conference that that we hosted at Kickstarter, that's actually

still up on Kickstarter, I can share the link later.

We had four main conversations, which were my perception of the

main issues facing the publishing industry. So one of

them was diversity and inclusion, one was money, one

was technology, and one was community. And

I think that

diversity and inclusion is extremely visible right now as

an issue, but it's been extremely visible as an issue

for quite a while without us making major strides, I am

cautiously hopeful that some real change will be made as a

result of the attention and

and sort of focus that people are putting on it this year, but

in 2015 when the first Lee and Low diversity baseline study

came out,

the whole industry understood At that point that we were so

white, the industry really privileged people from upper

economic backgrounds, and

it was very straight, it's very CIS, it's very abled.

And mostly what has happened since then has been lip service,

or else it has been people of color doing the work until they

can't be ignored anymore. And

people, there are so many black women, people of color, of all

genders, who have done phenomenal stuff. But it

shouldn't be on a marginalized community to gain access to a

space. It should be on white people to say this is broken. We

need to fix it, and we need to invest in it. So I think that

diversity, inclusion is one issue, and I would say,

I'd say we get a D plus for the work we've been doing, and I

hope that I can give us a c plus or a B plus by next year.

And my Oh, I'm sorry.

Oh, no, that that has a lot to do with another question I'd

like to ask. But if you want to continue on your path right now,

then we can talk about later, sure,

another major issue in publishing is money. It's who

gets paid, how much they get paid, what they get paid for,

and how the economic system of the industry works. So

I think most people don't understand that every dollar

paid by a reader, how small a percent goes to everyone who's

doing the work, and how large a percent goes to, most often

Amazon or Ingram or Barnes and Noble

and

God, I could talk about the problems the financial problems

in publishing all day, but basically, I think that we need

to design a new system based On the realities of 2020, and 2030,

and 2040

and just kind of like undo all of the problematic economic

choices that the industry made literally 100 years ago

and that we've sort of carried forward

hung on To, no matter what.

So going back to the diversity inclusion piece, and also, kind

of folding it in with Amazon, when blackout the book blackout,

the bestseller list was trending. I noticed, you know,

we're extremely critical of Amazon, all of us here,

I noticed there were several self published black authors on

Twitter who said that because they've been marginalized from

traditional publishing so long, there were many people who are

on Amazon solely and that people saying, don't link to Amazon at

all for blackout the best seller list were excluding them once

more from the.

Movement, so kind of keeping those two things in your head at

once, like, what,

what might help that going forward to like, both divest, I

guess, from Amazon, and also support authors who have been

ignored by the traditional system, particularly black

authors.

It's a huge problem. And full disclosure, my book, Derby life

is up on Amazon through print on demand.

So

Amazon has gained so much market power that if your book is not

on Amazon, it's as if it doesn't exist. I do work with a few

publishers who don't use Amazon, but they've had to build up

their own systems, and that is expensive and time consuming,

and it doesn't work so well. If you're just a single book author

or a single author selling a number of books, it's a lot

harder.

So there's like individual issues and systemic issues, and

what an individual could do would be potentially diversify

their book and make sure that they're selling it through

Ingram as well, because that gets them into other channels,

including bookshop.org which

is a growing company, but but they donate money to independent

bookstores, and also independent bookstores can put up a

storefront on bookshop.org so that they get a larger portion

of the revenue.

That said that's still filtering a lot of money directly to

Ingram, which doesn't really have any competitors at this

point, which is a huge problem, right? In a systemic issue, we

need 10 more bookshop dot orgs. We need so many more

competitors, because

Amazon has been able to gain the power they have because, well,

I can't even

that's a moneylessness,

right?

Because they undercut other players in the business, because

they were willing to take a loss for a really long time to gather

up market power, because they understood the potential of the

internet way earlier than a lot of book publishing did,

and now they own so much market share that it's hard for someone

to compete, whether they be an independent brick and mortar

bookstore or chain brick and mortar or a website or anything

else,

but we could, as an industry, say that we want to divest from

Amazon, we just have to create alternatives, and that's

something that's bigger than one individual author. So I I think

we need to

to balance these different ideas, and we also have to

understand that there's not going to be any solution that

doesn't harm some player, because selling books on the

internet can cut out independent bookstores, and selling books in

independent bookstores makes it harder for indie authors and

small publishers without distribution. So

I think that sometimes we flatten everything into like

evil and good, but it's a lot more nuanced and complex than

that.

We were talking about on one of our recent episodes, we were

speaking to a couple of children's book authors who were

talking a lot about being able to hold two thoughts in your

head at once and being able to change. And it sounds like what

I'm hearing from a lot of our guests is, is the concept of

decentralization that you're talking about, where we need

more competition, we need more places for people to be able to

go, to get books.

And yeah, I think it's interesting what you say about

how someone gets hurt, whatever in whatever you're doing. So

that's that's a tough pill to swallow. But yeah, I think the

challenge is we need to do a lot of things to pull to sort of

get rid of our addiction to Amazon. One of the things that

we'll have to do is be willing to pay more money for books, and

that's really hard, I think, especially when the book that

you buy from Amazon looks like the book you buy from bookshop,

looks like the book you buy from word bookstore down the street.

You know, it's a lot easier for,

you know, if you're buying an heirloom tomato at a farmers

market, you get to, like, see the farmer, and it's in a

prettier, you know, like an earthy package, and you just,

you feel very virtuous for it.

So I've always wondered, like, Can we do something like that in

publishing, like artisanal publishing? What would that look

like, and you get to see the farmer smile? And

I think part of that is demystifying.

Publication process, because since every, every, you know,

perfect bound paperback basically looks the same whether

it was print on demand via Amazon or Ingram or, you know,

published by a big five publisher,

you can't instantly tell, you know, you don't have the markers

of, oh, well, this was small batch, and this is not but I

think that some of the same language and showing people like

how it works and where your dollar goes, that kind of

storytelling could help us shift the audience a little bit,

because the same way that people Will, you know, prioritize

locally grown fruit, and,

you know, smaller, non chain coffee shops and pay a little

more for it, you would think that those people would be able

to to

find it in their budget to pay a little bit more for a book, if

they understood the harm that was caused by their discount.

Okay, so you think it's, it's education for all about how

everything works. And like you were saying earlier, how little

money trickles to the people who are actually working on the book

when it goes through like those larger outlets. I think that's

certainly one, one angle we have to approach it with.

Yeah,

I'll take the next question, yeah. So it's some of the

writing that you've done. You've been really transparent about

how poorly the publishing industry pays. What can people

who work in book publishing do to try to improve those

conditions?

I'm not going to be flippant and just say, pay people more,

because I understand how complex that is.

Well, one thing that would really instantaneously help, and

that I think we are super positioned to do right now,

decentralize the book publishing industry and pull it out of New

York. You know, I say this as a New Yorker who has lived in New

York for over 12 years, who was born in Manhattan.

But there's no reason in this age where we're all sitting in

different places having this live stream conversation or this

video conversation. There's no reason with the amazing tools

that we have that everyone needs to be in the same room. And if

I'm making an entry level salary of $30,000

that goes pretty far in some cities in Ohio, it does not go

very far in New York City. So the same salary, if you're able

to live somewhere else, could go a lot further. And I think that

that also starts to get at the question of diversity and

inclusion,

because

having having more earning power is going to help people who, for

example, had to take student loans

and being able to work somewhere outside of New York City. You

know that that pulls in different perspectives that are

currently really underrepresented in the

publishing industry, like, I think publishing publishers and

a lot of books about New York City, because a lot of us live

in New York City, and I think that a lot of people who come to

books are looking around, but they don't see themselves. And

that would be one area where we could expand the pie for

everyone. Is if people are seeing themselves in books again

and again and again, they're going to buy those books and

they're going to come back for more and they're going to

recommend them to people who are like them.

So speaking of work, workers being paid more, you just went

through, well, I guess, gosh, how long ago was it? Kickstarter

went through the process of unionizing, right the workers at

Kickstarter? Can you talk about how that worked and what, what

effect that's had on both Kickstarter and then the, you

know, the people who work there, sure I can talk a little bit

about it. I was classified as a manager,

so much of the actual unionizing effort I've heard about

secondhand, but basically starting in 2017

people started talking about unionizing even that far back.

And then in 2018

there's a real Flashpoint within Kickstarter where people started

to realize that they wanted to have more of a voice in what the

company was doing, and they believed that the only way to do

that was by creating a kingdom. So

I would say, like fall of 2018

through

late 2019

was an extremely drawn out unionizing effort, and

Kickstarter CEO said in I think May of 2019 that he was not

going to recognize the union. So when workers unionize, they can

say we would like to be recognized.

Worked as the union of Kickstarter, and then the

company has two options. They can voluntarily recognize them,

in which case the bargaining starts right away, or they can

say, No, you have to go through

the National Labor review board and do an election and have it

certified and make sure that the majority of workers truly want

this. So

after May ish, when the CEO said, No, we won't voluntarily

recognize then it was a very long public campaign trying to

get critical mass of people who

who said that they wanted to be part of the Union, and they

would vote yes. And the election was

January 2020

the results came out, February 2020 and the majority had voted

to unionize. And

within about two months, Kickstarter went through a

pretty big round of layoffs, and the union before they've even

negotiated a contract, their first negotiation was severance

and terms around the layoffs, and so the union was able to

negotiate really favorable terms for severance, for continued

health care, especially in light of the pandemic, and

a few other terms, such as recall rights, where if

Kickstarter wants to hire someone with a certain job title

in the next year, they have to offer that position to the

person who had that job title first. So

it's not

great. Layoffs are always terrible and hard, but I feel so

much better that my colleagues who were laid off have enough

money and time and health insurance to get them to their

next step, versus what might have happened if we didn't have

a union. Wow, that came down to the wire. Yeah, yeah, it's

intense, wow. Well, I mean, I'm glad to hear that that happens

sometimes, even when you have union, it doesn't work out very

well. Pals,

that's my opinion. One of my colleagues, Oriana leckert, who

was a huge

supporter and advocate within the union had gone through. Had

used to work for Powell, so she really had that in her head as

she was going through all of this. Yeah, I can see how that

would like teach you a lot of lessons. I only worked at

Powell's for like, three months, but you know, your first day you

talk to your union rep, they're like, let's give you the entire

history. And it's like, wow, I had no idea that this was so

complicated,

but that's we're talking about Kickstarter.

Yeah? Like, what do we have left?

Well, tell us about signs of change? Sure. Yeah, so signs of

change is a sort of open call for projects that I originally

came up with. I've been thinking about something like this for

years, but originally I started working on it last August, so

almost a year ago, and we're inviting people to make

broadsides, zines, posters, basically any kind of ephemera

where you share your ideas with an audience, with the world,

etc.

I knew that this summer and fall, we would be seeing a lot

of political activity. I did not understand how urgent and

important it would be, I thought it would be quite important and

urgent. I didn't realize it would be literally life or

death.

And so we're inviting people to come to Kickstarter to to run

just really small projects, you know, maybe enough money for,

you know, like a long stapler and a pile of paper and some

money to pay some contributors, or, you know, for time on your

local like VanderCook printer or something like that, if you're

in a place that is open enough for you to use that. But

basically, yeah, it's just a way to create something and share a

message with other people and raise enough money that you're

not going out of pocket on it. So I'm really hoping that people

will participate, whether it's, you know, a zine about backyard

gardening, whether it's a poster about black lives matter,

whether it's a broadside of their poetry, like

there are so many different ways to participate in this,

yeah, uh, countless ways. I've just, you know, listing in my

head everything that we're seeing every single day that

just, you know, it's always something new. But that's, it's,

it almost seems like you're

it.

Like, you can do a grassroots campaign in your own town, like,

based on on Kickstarter, like, it's like the centralized thing

that kind of goes out into all these different communities.

That's really neat. Thanks. And what's the, what's the timeline

on that again? So it launches tomorrow, July 13, and it runs

through the end of the summer. But honestly, the reason I'm

doing this is just to show that you can bring a really small,

focused, short project to Kickstarter. I think people

think that you have to be doing like a whole novel, or like an

illustrated comic, or, you know, a drone or something, but

Kickstarter really is like a community powered platform for

spreading ideas. Awesome. Corinne, do you have any more

questions? Um, the you know, the last question I had actually,

was something that I feel like we used to ask every guest. But

what are you reading right now?

What am I reading? I'm reading chilling effect, which is going

to look up the author, because

Valerie Valdez, I hope I said her name right. It is a really

amazing space opera heist situation. It's basically like

Firefly plus

Hitchhiker's Guide, plus a little of cat Valenti, space

opera.

It's amazing. It's it's really funny and gripping, and I read

half of it yesterday, so, yeah, wow. Once we hang up, I'll just

go back and read the other half.

Wow. Corinne, what are you reading? What am I reading? I'm

reading my god, now, of course, like I feel like I prepared an

answer. Now, that's fine, just blank. I read. Oh, I'm still

reading. So you want to talk about race, so I'm almost done

with that one. And then I'm reading the Underground

Railroad, which has been on my bookshelf for a couple years,

and I never got around to reading. And I think, Emily, I

think Emily, I think you loaned that to me, actually, didn't

you, so I should probably give that back to you eventually.

I've read it before. Yeah, I won. You don't need it back.

Well, I went to, oh, what was that? What?

Which conference did we have in Portland last year?

AWP, that was, I want a copy from pen America, signed copy of

so that's why I just, you can give it. You don't even have to

give it back. It's yours. Okay, pass it on to someone. Yeah,

Emily, what are you reading? I'm still reading braiding

sweetgrass, because I didn't.

I always get this thing in my head where I have to, like,

finish the book. Like, how long is it going to take me to get

through all these pages? It's like, I don't have to do that. I

can slowly. And if there's any book, Robin wall Kimmerer is the

author, and if there's any book that I want to slowly work my

way through, it feels like the right book. Just every chapter

is a beautiful essay about, like, the natural environment

and indigenous like botany, and I love it. It's it's just a

great experience. But I have been reading it for like, three

months, which is kind of a long, stretched out time for me to

actually finish a book and not just abandon it. So that's what

I'm doing.

Margot, is there anything else that you are excited to talk

about, can you tell us a little bit about your next book before

we sign off here? Sure.

So it's called Don't steal this book. Why paying for words is

radical and necessary.

And it's been something I've been researching and writing in

fits and start for quite a long time. I think I've been

researching it for five or six years, and really just started

writing last year.

And basically I'm talking about

so everything I was talking about here is how problematic

the way money works in publishing is, and how we can

change it, and how, you know, individuals, readers, writers,

publishing and society at large can take steps to change it

awesome. And where can people find you? Online.

I'm on Twitter as at Margot, Atwell, M, A R, G, o, t, a T, W,

E, L, L, and I write a newsletter. I sometimes write a

newsletter called on the books, which is on sub stack. And

that's, that's the best, best place to follow me if you really

want to find out more about money in publishing. I really

liked, I think it's the latest one that was up there was where

you pretty much break down the what you were paid in publishing

and the way that you lived on as you went through your career. I

think that's really eye opening for people, especially when they

do want to get into publishing. So that's that's a good one. I

recommend people read it. Thanks. Yeah, I think when

you're getting into publishing, you hear, Oh, it doesn't pay,

but you don't understand what that means.

Especially if you have been living at home or living at

school and you're surviving on loans. You really don't

understand what that means until you see all your bills and see

what your rent is, especially in New York, and just how far that

money does not go. And honestly, when I was doing research for

that piece,

I was appalled to see how little the entry level publishing

salaries increased in the decade since I made one.

They were bad back then, and they're really bad now. And I

remember that discussion on one of the panels that on the next

page too. So that was the one that Don Juan and Joe Biel were

on right we've had both of them on our show, so that's nice,

yeah, yeah, so I'll link to that as well in our in our show

notes, all right. And you can find us on Facebook at hybrid

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

hybrid pub Scout pod. Please visit our website, hybrid pub

scout.com and while you're there, click join our troop to

get our new guide, the HPS guide to picking your publishing path.

Margot, thank you so much for being on our show. Thank you so

much for having me. This is lovely, and thanks for giving a

rip about books you

you.