New Enterprise a-Bornin’

Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It must be an addiction: I can NOT stay away from entrepreneurial schemes. So…okay, here we go again: I want to found an e-publishing house. It would be an enterprise of The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.: a sub-entity, as it were.

Actually, what I have in mind is a micropublishing house. It will be designed to put my own golden words in front of all three readers who’d like to see them and also to publish editorial clients’ work in e-book and PoD formats.

Friend of mine has drifted from IT work to e-book formatting — he can do a down-and-dirty Kindle format direct from a Word file, if the file is simple enough and light on graphics. But when you look into it, you find that several programs exist to convert from Word or Pages not only to .mobi but to Epub and even to LaTex(!). Most of these programs are cheap, though they all have a learning curve. Naturally.

At any rate, so my friend and I get up to attending meetings of a local Romance Writers of America chapter. To make a long story short, what we discover is that, contrary to officially accepted opinion, it in fact is possible to make a modest living by self-publishing one’s own maunderings. To our amazement, we learn that a number of such Successes concur in thinking that the tipping point from a hobby to a decent side gig is eight (count’em, 8) e-books self-published to Amazon.

I’m listening to all this palaver and tracking down studies and thinking about it…and wait! Right this instant I have three potential e-books in the can. Friend is working on one of them as we scribble; two others are waiting in line for formatting.  One of these books is the first volume in a planned series of speculative fiction tales. I’m six chapters into the second volume in that series. Meanwhile, residing on the hard disk are several book-length nonfiction squibs, things I’ve used for courses and that I used to sell, through the campus bookstore, to my students.

Clean them up and format them and…voilà! EIGHT E-BOOKS! The very magic number, itself. It takes nothing for me to dream up subjects for another three totally unwritten but easy to produce tomes. Soooo…what we have here are three books in the can, four in draft and easy to produce, one in progress, and one a scintillating figment of my imagination. That would be nine potential books, at least four of which I should be able to get out this year. If I dedicated a certain number of hours per day to this enterprise, I could probably get another four out by the end of 2015.

Place this in the back of your mind, and move on to…

Bowker. I’m at Bowker registering an ISBN for the book my friend is formatting in .mobi, and I’m also at the US Copyright Office filling out forms for a copyright registration.

I’m registering the S-corp as the publisher, because of course I want revenues to flow to the corporation. One of these sites asks if The Copyeditor’s Desk is publishing the book under an imprint.

Say what?

What’s an imprint, and do I have to incorporate it or can it be part of the existing entity?

I ask some knowledgeable friends in publishing; they indicate this is a pretty casual appellation. Next I inquire of ex-DH, the corporate lawyer, who happens now to be with a large firm one of whose specialties is media law. He reports that you can “do business as” XX or YY imprint, that it can be a dba function of your existing corporation, and no, you surely do not have to incorporate the proposed sub-entity.

Well. Hell. Can you or can you not sense the possibilities here?

In the first place, right this minute I have two clients working on projects that lend themselves to self-publishing. If I have a subcontractor who can do the necessary conversion work and another who can do PoD (“publish on demand”) book design (such a person, mirabilis, I just do happen to have…), there’s no good reason we couldn’t offer to take clients’ projects through the editing process all the way through to electronic and print-on-demand publication.

Holy $h!t.

I could use an entity like this to publish my own books, of which I already have enough to create a respectable “backlist” (I know: it’s arrogant, but it’s the term all these folks use), and assist clients to get their work before the public with the least amount of hassle possible for the client.

In other words, I could take an “imprint” and build it into a kind of virtual publishing house. And I’ll betcha I could make money on it.

Further discussion with the corporate lawyer reveals that pricey trademarking through the federal gummint isn’t necessary; one can stake one’s claim by registering the trade name with the Arizona Secretary of State.

Well. This looks pretty intriguing. In fact, it’s intriguing enough that I’m raring to go and chomping at the proverbial bit.

I’ve not created a new business plan, because a) the thing would be a subsidiary of The Copyeditor’s Desk, which has its own formal business plan, and b) because start-up costs would be funded by The Copyeditor’s Desk, which has more than enough in the bank to jump-start this scheme. In lieu of a formal business plan, I’ve tricked out an informal strategic plan.

Since the trade name is not yet registered, let’s call it XYZ press. Here’s what its goals and strategies look like:

XYZ Press
An Imprint of The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.
Strategic Plan

Mission Statement: To publish books on Amazon and CreateSpace, in e-book and print-on-demand formats; in the future, possibly to provide this service for editing clients.

Goals:

• To publish 3 books by the end of first quarter 2014
• To publicize these books on websites, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook, and analogue media
• To publish a total of 4 books by the end of 2014
• To publish 8 books by the end of first quarter 2015
• To build a clientele of people who are willing to pay for editing, layout, and book uploading to Kindle and CreateSpace
• To net enough by the end of 2015 to replace teaching income, $7,680
• To net enough by the end of 2016 to replace editing income ($8,000) and teaching income (total revenue goal by December 2016: $15,680
• From 2016 forward, to publish at least one vh novel/year and at least one vh nonfiction book/year
• From 2015 or 2016 forward, to publish at least one client book/year and collect a fee from it, causing XYZ Press to function like a subsidy or vanity press.
• By mid 2014, learn and download Scrivener and use it to create a book. Scrivener can be used for several platforms. Ask Ken why he’s not using it, since it converts not only to .mobi but also to ePub. It apparently also can be used to make camera-ready art, but evidently CreateSpace has templates for PoD books.

Strategies:

 3 books by the end of first quarter 2014, or by April 30

• Get Gary to finish artwork for Fire-Rider
• Register copyright and ISBNs for cookbook and Fire-Rider ASAP
• Have Ken convert all three books to Kindle forthwith
• Learn how to create layout and PoD in CreateSpsace
• Create websites for XYZ Press and for each publication
• Download Pages to create layouts for PDFs to sell on websites

 8 books by end of Q1 2015

• Revise and develop existing “tight writing” book
• Develop “how to edit your own stuff” book or revive CAP seminar
• Collect FAM idle essays
• Write a schmaltzy dog book based on FaM and Corgi posts…need some kind of unifying theme
•  Publish at least one vh novel/year and at least one vh nonfiction book/year
• Continue writing XXX Chronicles and start YYY saga, producing one piece of fiction per year
• Be alert to and active in developing ideas for short inspirational and how-to books – these can actually be quite short

Publish at least 1 client book/year

• Recruit Ken and at least one other Kindle conversion guy
• Recruit editors who can quickly clean up bad copy; establish fair rate of pay
• Establish minimum quality requirements; i.e., do not accept copy that’s a tangled mess!
• Learn to lay out and publish PoD books in CreateSpace
• Develop several packages of services
• Build a contract wherein CEDesk engrosses some part of the rights and gets pay from Amazon sent directly,  forwarding royalties to authors or paying them as subcontractors
• Build a clientele of wannabe Writers, possibly by building writers’ groups and sponsoring a writer’s conference
• Join RWA – but look into the Scottsdale group and see if it’s better than the one on the Westside. It would be good to avoid showing up with Ken at every damn meeting, and possibly best if one of us was working the Eastside group and one the Westside.

 Function like a real publisher

• Join New Mexico publisher’s group
• Rejoin SSP; budget funds to attend meetings of these outfits
• Develop a set of packages and be sure to have vendors who can do these things at short notice and who are willing to provide a discount or charge a low enough fee that you can scrape off a finder’s fee.
• If it’s not difficult to do layout for CreateSpace, build simple templates that can be used for fiction and nonfiction. These should be uniform in appearance.
• Have Gary (or someone) make a logo, if only just a couple of linked letters.
• Publicize the service with students
• Rejoin Local AZ and SHOW UP!
• Join North Phoenix CofC
• Join RWA – but first check out the Scottsdale chapter
• Describe the business as a micropublisher that offers editing, text conversion and publishing to Kindle, and basic layout for PoD on CreateSpace.
• Get on radio talk shows here, regionally, and nationally
• Show up at AHC book fair
• Show up at writer’s conferences
• Speak at writer’s conferences and local groups
• Once a presence is established, revisit SP Program and also GDU’s MFA people and PC’s writing program, if it still exists; also contact Lois R-D

 Learn to use Scrivener and CreateSpace

• Download Scrivener free trial and put one of the books into it.
• See what it can do and what’s involved in uploading it to Amazon
• Find out what’s involved in publishing a book to CreateSpace—use the Adjunct book

Net enough income to replace the present tedious jobs

• Do all of the above, religiously and effectively
• Develop and publicize book websites aggressively, with shopping carts and contact pages
• Get on forums, develop a presence, and hustle books there in low-key way
• Use LinkedIn to publicize new books and news on existing ones
• Use Twitter, FaM, and  Corgi.com to publicize
• Recruit people to read and review books, by using giveaways and by hiring people to do so. Pay people to read and review; pay more to buy the book and post a review I’ve written.
• Ask fellow bloggers to review the books.
• Farm e-mail addresses from all blogs; proactively send notices of new publications

So. There’s an outline of what to do next. Looks like a lot of work. But it could be fun. And if the optimistic reports from e-book publishers are even remotely true (one doubts it…), it just might be possible to replace the present piddling income with a similarly piddling but adequate income from my own creative work. Rather than from editing Chinese Ph.D. dissertations and teaching, that is.