We were lucky to catch up with Tina Beier recently and have shared our conversation below.

Tina, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with something countless entrepreneurs have had to figure out on the fly – how have you dealt with the rise of remote work?

When my business partner Alex and I first started our business, we had never met in person. We met online during our Grad Certificate program in Creative Writing through chatting about freelancing, and eventually came to the idea of making our own publishing house. Remote work is perfect for Alex and I because our schedules and time zones are very different – we don’t even live in the same province. While sometimes planning a meeting with outside parties can be challenging, the benefits to remote work outweigh that considerably. Not only does remote work allow us more flexibility (it allows me to pick up my kids early from school if they are sick, for example) and we don’t have to pay for an office, but our business’ workday is elongated (I start 3 hours earlier than Alex and she finishes 3 hours after me – this means if issues arise one of us is normally still working to deal with it). We have had struggles with misinterpretations over email, but we just have to trust each other that we’re doing what’s right for our company. You can’t be a micro-manager when you’re working remotely with someone – you have to trust them.

Tina, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Our business is Rising Action Publishing, a small women-owned and operated independent publishing house. We are a traditional publisher, meaning we only publish books that are queried to us and we don’t charge the authors anything to publish with us. We are hoping to help diversity the publishing industry by seeking out novels from people of color, marginalized groups, and/or LGBTQ+, as well as producing top-quality thrillers, fantasy, and women’s fiction. We also publish select non-fiction, horror, and romance. As we are Canadian, we also publish at least three Canadian-authored books a year. We also have a partnership with Blackbird Books, South Africa, to sell a selection of their titles in North America and are partnering with Legend press in the UK to re-release one of these titles jointly in July (Invisible Strings by Naledi Mashishi). We are very proud of the authors we have on our roster and our fabulous covers. Our recent book, domestic thriller We’re All Lying (by Marie Still), was a Buzzfeed Most Anticipated Thriller, and our first Canadian book, The Things We Lost (by Maggie Giles) recently won a Distinguished Favorite – Independent Press Award.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

Distribution was one of the biggest learning curves for us. Given we didn’t have any connections going into the business, we had to learn by trial and error (more like trial by fire!) how to sell our products in all the major retailers. When you don’t have a distributor doing this for you, you have to find a printer for your books, learn Amazon’s KEP program (which is different from KDP, which most self-published authors use on Amazon), learn to navigate ISBNs and barcode and cover specifications, understand metadata, and, most dauntingly, jump through dozens of hoops to get your books into the major distributors, indie book stores, and libraries (and each country does it differently). Given there are a lot of small presses and millions of self-published authors, retailers are very specific about who can even pitch to them, so after about two years building our brand and showing consistent quality and growth, we’ve finally reached that stage. Luckily, I have a great deal of experience in the physical creation of a novel and Alex has a sales and marketing background. As such, while we have made many mistakes, we eventually reached a level where we understood not only what we were doing but how to do it effectively. If I could describe our business model in one word it would be: agile.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I’ve had to pivot a lot in my life. At the start of my career, I worked for ten years (as an editor, people manager, and project coordinator) at a reference publishing house. After I returned to work after maternity leave, I was laid off, told that there wasn’t a role for me anymore due to a reorganization. I wasn’t overly upset, as, luckily, I have a partner to support me (and I got a severance). He was even more supportive in encouraging me to attend a program I really wanted to take – a graduate certificate in creative writing. After this, I decided to go back into the workforce and try something new: painting. I’d always enjoyed that craft, so a friend got me in touch with a local painter. I worked there for only three months when Covid-19 hit. I was also pregnant again, so painting had started to become unsustainable physically (climbing ladders and bending over). As my toddler was home from daycare during Covid, I couldn’t really work anyway (my partner, being in construction, didn’t get to work from home during the pandemic), so I did freelance editing when I could. When my second daughter was three months old, I started to think about what I would do when she reached a year old and I was due to return to work. I didn’t have anything lined up, so when Alex and I were joking about starting our own publishing house, there really was nothing to stop me. And I knew I had the skills and background to make it work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.risingactionpublishingco.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/risingactionpublishingco
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/RAPubCollective

Image Credits
Cover Designers: Nat Mack (We’re All Lying, IRL, Burlington, Twisted, The Roads We Take, The Return Trip) Jon Stubbington (Perils of Sea and Sky) Princella Seripenah (No Be From Hia) Ashley Santora (The Things We Lost, (Not) Your Basic Love Story, Beverly Bonnefinche in Dead) Nuno Moreira (Sweet Medicine, The Broken River Tent, Nethergeist)