Does a publishing company make an author or is it the other way round? To be honest, it’s a mutually fulfilling relationship where both the author and their publishing company complement each other. But if you are starting about thinking of starting a publishing company, you may have to be dependent on your authors. This is not a line written on stone and with the right kind of strategy, you can start attracting authors. But it will take time for you to attract those celebrity authors (Chetan Bhagat et al). They already have multi-million dollar contracts with the biggest names in your domain.
It’s in your thought
Starting a publishing company is same as starting any other business. The first requirement is that you have the correct mindset of an entrepreneur. You should be passionate about starting your business and must have weighed the pros against the cons.
Get a name
The greatest bard of them all may have said, “What’s in a name?”, but it certainly doesn’t apply when you want to start your publishing company. And along with your name, you should have your company colours and logo finalized. Make sure that all the stationery including the business cards starts bearing the name, the colour(s) and the logo.
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Your business plan
You cannot run a business without a plan. A robust business plan will attract investors and help you stay on course to make a great beginning and continue on to create a solid base for your business. Use the resources found online on how to create and write your business plan.
Get the legalities completed
Find out how to incorporate your business, how to apply for ISBN and how to apply for copyrights of manuscripts. You must look through information available online and also hire an attorney to handle the legal matters.
Get your team in place
As a publishing company, you will need a lot of people – someone to attract authors; someone to market your books; someone to liaise with the distributors; someone to proofread manuscripts and someone to design the graphics for the books you are about to publish. This is, of course, a small list. Your business plan should tell you who you should hire.
Start manuscript submission services
Since most of the new authors struggle to find publishers, there is a huge market to dip your beak into. You should start advertising in the market and coax authors to submit their manuscripts. This is important because you also need to take the distributors in your stride.
Publish and market
Once some manuscripts have been identified for publication, make sure the publication is completed. A more critical activity follows and you will need to spend time on marketing these books.
While you should have, by now, got a fair idea about how to start a publishing company, the actual ballgame is different. We would repeat that at the end of the day, it is your zeal and passion to succeed that will carry you through.
Image credit: alisdair on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Profile_Pic_Moumita.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Moumita Goswami is a full-time homemaker and a passionate writer. She stays in Pune with her husband and daughter. After giving up working, she started writing about five years ago and can now be seen using her computer keyboard almost all the time. An MA in Psychology from Calcutta University, Moumita has spent time in Kolkata, Delhi and now Pune. For Moumita, writing started as a sudden chance but she soon discovered her likeness for it. And now she has developed a passion for writing and hardly any day passes without her scribbling a few lines. She dreams of publishing her own book one day and is working towards it.
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