How to Start a Publishing Company

The answer could go either way, depending on how big you plan to grow your company and how well you are able to work from the home.

For most self-publishers, all you will need is a small room in your home, where you can sit at your computer and type up your manuscripts, type-set the book layouts, etc.

If you are going to go small press and seek out outside submissions, than at first you can work out of your home, and if you stay small, say less than 10 books a year, you shouldn't need to move out of your home office.

If you are someone who is easily distracted by home and family, and such things as TV and internet, than you may want to rent out an office space just so you can get your work done. Many writers do this.

What matters most is, that you do what works best for you.

Is self-publishing the same as working at home? Yes it is. You own the company and you run it out of your home. Self-publishing is a home business.

Doing both is not recommended, as being a small press publisher is a full time job that will not allow you the time to write and publish any books of your own. Whereas being a self-published publisher is also a full time job that will not allow you the time to focus on publishing books for other people. So your first step is to decide wither you are starting your company to publish books for you and your family or are you going to put out a call for submissions from strangers? I know that you can not do both, because when I first started, I tried to do both, and found that in the end doing both meant having no time for either. I was forced to make a decision, and in the end I realized that my goal was to publish my own books, so I closed out the call for submissions and stopped accepting work from writers, so that I could focus full time on self-publishing my own books instead.

The most important part of starting any business be it a restaurant or a craft shop or a publishing house, is to have a business plan. If you do not have a plan, than you could easily get side tracked from your original goals and lose your focus. So step one is to sit down and write up a business plan. This is easy enough to do.

Business plans will vary, but most will include a list of the goals you want for your business: immediate goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, yearly goals, and at least one goal that says where you plan to be 5 years down the road. Once you have decided on your goals, next you need to make a plan as to how you should try to reach those goals.

Some businesses have a short five or ten page business plan; others may write up 30 or 40 pages, some may just have a one-page list. The length of your business plan is not important. What is important is that you have a plan that tells you where you want to go and how you will get there.

This step is all too often over looked by new business start ups and can quickly result in your down fall if neglected. First off, know that you cannot please everyone, you cannot sell to everyone, and not everyone is going to like you or your product. What you have to do is decide who your ideal customer is. Let's look at three big names in the fashion industry for an example: Wal-Mart, Macy's, and Nordstrom's

Wal-Mart focuses on the average income family of a $20,000 to $30,000 income and a family with an average of four children, who live in an apartment but saving for their own home. Their ideal customer shops on a budget and is looking for a bargain.

Macy's focuses on the high-income family with a housewife whose husband brings in an income of $75,000. She is the mother of two teenagers or college students. Their ideal customer now has more time to spend shopping for herself than she did a few years ago so she wants to splurge.

Nordstrom's focuses on the elite high income business couple. Both have jobs paying over $100,000, they have no children and live in a penthouse and attend high-class business-cocktail parties on a weekly basis. Their ideal customer has money to spend and wants one of a kind fashions straight from the Paris runways.

Each of these three company's caters to a different type customer. They are successful because they focus only on that one customer. If they tried to cater to multiple customers, they would quickly fall and go bankrupt. Learn from the big companies and focus only on your ideal target customer.

In publishing, you need to do the same thing. Do your research and find out who reads the type of books you plan to sell. What is their income? How do they live? How much can they afford to spend? How much are they willing to spend?

This will change over time and should be rewritten at least four times per year (quarterly). You need to plan a marketing campaign if you want to be a successful publisher. Knowing your ideal customer is not enough; you must plan how you are going to get your business out there for them to actually become your customer. Research what other publishers are doing. How do they advertise their business? What bookstores carry their books? How did they get their books in their customers reach?

What is in a name? Everything! A name can make or break your business. One of the biggest mistakes a new publishing company makes is not choosing a name. Sounds silly, but it is true. Most publishing company start-ups just use their own name: John Smith Press or Jane Doe Publishing House. Ask yourself, would YOU buy a book from a publisher called John Smith Press? Go to your local bookstore and take a look at a few of the publishing house names. What do you see? Bantam Books. Scholastic Books. Twighlight Manor Press. Firebird Fantasy. Story Press. Writer's Digest Books. You get the idea right? Sit down and really think about what image you want to present. How do you want customers to see you? Than brainstorm names until you find one that fits.

If you are starting a self-publishing company, than you will be doing most of the jobs yourself. However, if you are starting a small press company, than you will need to hire staff: editor, graphic designer, font setter, layout manager, accountant, etc. Someone has to read the submissions coming in. Someone has to proofread the galleys. Someone has to edit the manuscripts. Know that one person cannot do all of these jobs, and often you will need three or four people for each of these jobs.

As silly as it may sound, this is a step that many publishers overlook until the last minute and than they panic when they realize their local print shop cannot handle the job. Most new publishers assume that any print shop can print up all the books they will ever need. Truth is, very few print shops are able to handle a full print run of books. Most are only accustomed to printing up 16 page brochures. You may have to have your books printed up and shipped in from two or three states away. If you plan to do hardcover picture books, you should also know that there are only about a dozen print shops in the USA that have the equipment to do so. If you live in Maine, you could find yourself having to order books from a print shop in California, and the freight shipping charges could be higher than the actual cost of printing the books. Do your research and be sure that you can find a local printer that can handle your expected print loads. The printer will be your most expensive part in starting your business. Plan on $20,000 to $40,000 to print up 3,000 to 8,000 copies of your book. Make sure you see samples of their work before you dish out that kind of money, as most print shops do not accept returns or issue refunds.

One option you might consider is to hire a POD (print on demand) printer to print your books up for you. The cost of POD is more per book, but you do not have to dish out more than a few hundred dollars at a time. While there are several out there, the only one I can honestly recommend as being a high quality reputable printer, is LuLu.

Most publishers are not equipped with the ability to hire a sale representative to travel across country to visit each of the 100,000 plus bookshops and peddle your books to them. This is where a book distributor comes in. Distributors, take sample copies of your book and head out to shops promoting your books. There are dozens of book distributors out there. Some are huge national groups, other deal only with local bookshops, some deal only with libraries, while others deal only with schools. Your job is to research each of the distributors and determine which one is best suited to promoting your line of books.

The sheer cost of the ISBN frightens many new publishers into thinking they can go ahead with out them. Not so. There is no bookstore online or local that will carry a book without an ISBN, and only a limited number of libraries will add a non-ISBN book to their collection. If you chose to go without the ISBN, know that you can than only sell your book via tailgate. Be prepared to go to local beaches, fairs, and craft shows, and sell copies of your book off your tailgate and be prepared to go out of business in your first year. No ISBN equals no sales.

If you want to be taken seriously as a publisher, than be sure that your books LOOK professional. There is no bigger turn off to a buyer, than to open a book and see that there is no copyright page, no dedication page, no about the author page, no LCCN page, no ISBN, no table of contents, hard to read fonts, and a sloppy layout.

My advice: buy copies of today's best sellers: Harry Potter, Stephen King, etc. and do not read the books, but instead look at the pages. How many blank pages are at the beginning and end? How are the first 13 pages set up? Did you notice that there are always at least 13 pages of information before the book even begins? What do the margins look like? What font was used? What color is the paper? Is the paper smooth or grainy? Forget about reading the story; really get to know the book itself.

If you are going to self publish than you are going to have to learn the art of editing manuscripts. This cannot be overlooked.

Editing manuscripts involves a lot of patience and a lot of time, often much more time than someone new to publishing could even imagine. If you plan to accept the work of outside submissions, than you can plan on spending 5 to 10 hours per day, doing nothing but editing manuscripts. When it comes to editing, it may be best for you to take on employees, as editing is a really big job, one that a single person can not do on their own.

Editing involves, first of all reading everything that gets submitted. At first, this may not be very much, but once you have got a following, you well quickly become swamped by the much feared and often dreaded slush-pile.

The slush-pile is a publishing term for the hundreds upon hundreds or thousands of manuscripts that sit in a big pile, waiting for the editor to find enough time and sanity to read them all. Once you started getting enough submissions to have a slush pile, than it is time to hire at least 2 or 3 more editors for your staff.

After the editor has read the manuscript, they must next decide if this is a manuscript they want to see published by their publishing house. For most manuscripts the answer will be no. When the answer is "no", it is the editors job to write a letter to the author, explaining that the manuscript was rejected, and detailing the reasons why the manuscript was rejected.

If, however, the manuscript is not rejected by you the editor, than your next job is to convince first the editor-in-chief, and next the publisher/owner of your convictions that this manuscript is worth their time and money.

If you are a small press editor, chances are, that you are the slush-pile editor, editor-in-chief, and the publisher-owner all rolled into one. If that is the case than you can skip the part of groveling to them to convince them the manuscript is worth their time, because you are them, and you have already decided you wanted to publish it.

Once the publisher-owner has given the good ahead, than your next step is to actually edit the manuscript. This mean reading it again, this time using a red pen to correct all the grammar errors. Than reading it again, using a red pen to correct all the spelling errors.

Your next step is to have this corrected version typed up. If you are the only editor in your small press, than it'll be your job to type up the corrected version of the manuscript.

After typing up the corrected version, you must go through and read it again, to make sure you did not miss any mistakes.

Finally it is your job as editor to submit the final edit to the printer, so that the printer can mock up a galley for you. Once they have printed up a galley, you must now read this and do the final edit, in red pen, directly on the pages of the galley. Depending on the print shop you are using, you will either retype a new manuscript from this galley or you will send them the galley itself and they will retype it. Be sure to ask your printer how they handle galley corrections, before hand, and do exactly what they tell you to do.

While you are doing all of these steps, you are also, at the same time, in contact with the author of the manuscript that is being edited. You will write up the contract and mail it to the author. (NOT EMAIL! REAL PUBLISHERS DO NOT EMAIL CONTRACTS!) The author reads the contract and may or may not agree to the terms. If they agree, they sign the papers (often as many as 10 or 12 sheets) and mail them back to you. If they do no agree they tell you so, possibly via email, and you take up their disagreements with the publisher-owner.

And all that, in short, is what an editor does.

If you cannot take the time to do all of this, than you MUST hire either an in-house editor or an outside editor.

While this is by no means all there is you need to know about starting your own publishing house, it will certainly help get you on the right track. It is a lot of hard work and can be quite stressful at times; but it is not a hard thing to do, if you have the patience and persistence to keep on plugging and never give up. Remember that it is a slow business to gain a footing in, and be prepared to live off of your savings for at least three years. Once you do have a firm foundation and are making a profit, remember too, that the average income of a small publisher is less than $30,000 a year. This is not a career for anyone seeking to get rich, but rather a career of love. You become a publisher for your love of books not for your love of money.

I hope that you have found this information helpful in starting your new career. Best of luck to you.

Starting any home business should be fun. Should be, doesn't mean it actually is, however. Starting a home business will more likely end up become one of the most stressful things you will ever do. Studies show that 7 out of every 10 small or home business start-ups shut down and go out of business in less than three years! What you want to do is to be on of the 3 in 10 that stood strong and made your small or home business last for years to come.

Starting a home business is not easy. Well, it can be easy, but usually it's not. It's long hours, and scraping up pennies to make ends meet, and pulling your hair out as you try to find time to squeeze everything you need to do each day into less than 24 hours. In other words it's stress, stress, STRESS!

The most important thing you need to remember when starting a home business is this: Take a break once in a while. Relax. Enjoy life!

Your business is not your life. You must control the business. Do not let it control you. Remember to give yourself time off. Don't trap yourself into working 7 days a week, when you really only need to work 4 days a week. Don't work 15 hours a day when you only need to work 6. Do not push yourself to the limits. Stop. Smile. Smell the roses. Kiss the babies. Take your family out to McDonald's and a movie at least once a month. Relax. Breath. Read a book. Watch the sunset. Give yourself time away from your business. Do not let the stress of running your own business take over your life, and you will find yourself running your business 10, 20, ever 30 years down the road.

The true secret to business success is to love what you do, and don't let what you do control you.

The content of this lens was created by Wendy C. Allen compiled from posts on EK's Star Log, the official blog of author and artist Wendy C. Allen, a.k.a. EelKat. Reprinted here on Squidoo with permission.

EK's Star Log Copyright © Wendy C. Allen 2005-2007. Star Log, Space Dock 13, The Twighlight Manor Press, Moonsnails, Buried Treasure, Copper Cockeral, and Xavier's Nest Copyright © Wendy C. Allen 2005-2007. Twighlight Manor, EelKat, White Rock Asylum, Planet Ptarmagin, Crystonite Chronicles, Etiole, Sir Roderic, The Swanzen Family, and all other related characters, info, writings, names, images, and content Copyright © Wendy C. Allen 1978-2007.

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