Starting your own indie publishing company
By Paul Biba
This is a 3 part series. I missed the first two and just found the third part today, so I went back and read the whole thing. Very interesting stuff. Here’s an excerpt from part 1:
If you’re a writer, you probably spend a fair amount of time complaining how hard it is to get published. (It’s in our job description, right?)So over the years, conversations in my lunch-bunch of writer friends eventually progressed from whining to full-on fantasizing. “Someone should start a really cool indie publishing house,” somebody said.
“Yeah, we’d publish all the good stuff that New York ignores because we live in the South and we’re not hip or famous,” someone else added.
“Yeah!” everyone agreed.
“But we’re writers. We don’t have any, you know, money.”
This conversation repeated itself many times, starting back in 1999, when I was part of a small-but-feisty band of writers who set out to empower and raise the profile of our literary community in Charlotte, N.C., despite our lack of resources, benefactors or any expertise whatsoever.
Three of us researched small presses around the country, networked like crazy (difficult for us introverted writers, so we told ourselves it was investigative journalism), and scribbled on yellow legal pads in an attempt to come up with something that might one day resemble a business plan. It was hard to get our minds around such a large, complex and changing industry. But we worked at it for a year while doing our freelance jobs.
One day everything fell into place when we realized that most traditional trade publishing entities (non-self-publishing) can fit into one of just a few categories.
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