Getting set up as a book publisher

Platform discussions
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Hello, I am part of a small non-profit book publisher that makes educational books about life skills for kids and we just signed up for the Pro plan.

Our organization’s big “departments” are book publishing, grants/funding, marketing, distribution, finance, and general admin.

We are a very small team (under 5 people) who handle all of the tasks. The same two people handle most of the tasks and projects across all these departments and need to be able to see a bird’s-eye view of all the things happening in all of them and the progress of the tasks’ completion. We also hire external freelancers and contractors that would not be users on the platform but we need to track their progress ourselves.

Does anyone have tips on how we could set up most efficiently? Here are the objectives to start so far:

  • Keep track of the progress of all books that are going through the publication process (the book pipeline) in a single view – schedule their deadlines for finishing editing for example, and what date they are slated to launch
  • Keep track of the progress of each book individually, which includes many tasks, such as translation, editing, design, illustration
  • Assign and keep track of tasks both individually and as a team (I have my own tasks that I want to be on top of, but I also want to assign tasks to others and see their progress)

Questions:

  1. Should we use a separate workspace for each department, or just use one workspace for the organization, with a board for each department?

  2. Books: Should we use a separate board for each book we are working on publishing, and its various tasks divided into groups? eg. Little Red Riding Hood Board, a different group for Editing, Design, and Illustration. OR should we use a single board for all books, with each book having its own group inside that one board? I need an easy to way to keep track of and assign different tasks pretty granularly, but at the end of the day I want to be able to see how all our books are doing in one overview.

  3. I see that there is a feature on the enterprise plan (which we can’t afford) called Project and Project Portfolio which seem to be very useful – how realistic is it to accomplish what we want to do without upgrading to Enterprise to use this?

  4. Can I assign tasks to non-user people? Eg. The book design is being done by a freelance designer, who is not on Monday.com

  5. If I use multiple workspaces, is it possible to have a single dashboard that shows me boards or tasks from several workspaces? Eg. I do design and editing, but also handle admin and IT and Marketing, each in a different workspace. I want to see all of my tasks from all my workspaces. Is that doable or do I need to look at each workspace one at a time?

  6. Is it possible to have a single list/view of the tasks assigned to a certain person, that is populated automatically by the tasks assigned to that person across the various boards, workspaces, groups, items, tasks, etc?

Any other things I am missing are welcome, regarding automations or anything else.

1 Like
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Here’s what I recommend

Master Publishing Board: Treat each book as an item/row, and use columns to track key phases like editing, design, translation, and launch date. You can use status and date columns to reflect each book’s progress at a glance.

For more detailed tracking, use subitems under each book for tasks like “Edit Draft,” “Create Cover Art,” etc.

If you prefer managing tasks on separate boards, create a separate task board for each book (or department) and use the Connect Boards + Mirror columns to pull key info into the master board.

This setup gives you:

  • A centralized view of your full publishing pipeline
  • The ability to assign and manage tasks at a detailed level
  • Clean separation of task-level detail without cluttering your high-level view

Feel free to reach out with more questions!

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Hi YC,
Your post caught my attention because I’m wrestling with the exact same questions. Just signed up for monday.com. Small, non-profit, book publishing, wondering how to best manage our book projects. I’m curious if you decided how to set it up, or if you are willing to share what you learned? Not sure how this community space works…and whether you can send a direct message? stevo[at]radosnavijest.com, Thanks!

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Hi there,
We did not have the chance to fully implement yet, still working on it. Have you?