Hello,
I am hoping to find guidance on the appropriate calculations and/or percentages to to use to accrue bad debt in the publishing industry. Maybe it's the same for all industries?
Thanks!

There's actually more than one way to do bad debt, based on either your aged receivables, or as a percent of sales on credit. I would base it on my own company's past history of collections, but if you really have no history then you have to have something to go on, and industry averages is a good place.

So I just did a quick search for "bad debt publishing." (Your question came up as the first hit. LOL.) And I found one source stating that 1/2 to 1% of credit sales is standard for the industry. The article is on managing receivables and is here. The figures I found were on the 4th page.

http://www.thefishercompany.com/articles/article2.pdf