How to Start a Publishing Company in 2023
I personally would advise against it for several reasons. One is the internet, the second is the declining number of people who read books & publications anymore. There are r, but those are the two most overriding salient reasons.
Just Do It!!!! Anyone that is savvy enough to follow a dream has my full support.
My only help to you is to note there is already some publishers you’ll be competing with:
https://www.naset.org/about-naset/naset-sponsors/products-and-services/special-education-publishers
Be aware that almost 20% of small businesses go bankrupt in the first year.
Classic MBA advice—how well do you know your market and competition.
Who else is doing what you are doing?
Are they successful?
Is there a real need for additional participants in the market?
What are you bringing to the market that they cannot produce?
This is the moment in your life for brutal honesty and intense research.
There are a few more red flags.
Most new businesses fail—usually within a few years.
The most common reasons for failure:
—They run out of cash
—Partners fight among themselves
—The market is not there—it cannot support high enough pricing to make the numbers work
—External factors (economy, home issues etc) disrupt the business
The best way to minimize the likelihood of failure is to have deep pockets that can outlast the problems.
As Dave Ramsey says—If you have a business that does not make money you have a hobby. Hobbies are for rich people. You are broke.
:-)
I am told by my 20-year-olds that very few of their generation read, they prefer videos or podcasts.
Go to the Small Business Administration web page. Review their Business Plan model.
It will force you through the steps you should be doing. While the format is for getting a loan, it details the things every small business must consider when starting.
Management, Finance, Marketing and Legal (especially important in publishing) can be daunting. Get your ducks in a row before spending your own money.
Consider sole proprietorship as when I had a company with two partners, things were not exactly as smooth as I wanted even though I was the president. If I ever open another company, I won’t have any partners. If you will have a partner, document everything: salary of each person, bonus payments (that is pay you and your partner an average wage and then take any additional profit as a disbursement to lower your taxes vs having a higher salary and little to no disbursements). Duties and work share documented - don’t assume what the other person will or will not be willing to do. Don’t hire family for essential work. You need someone to stock the shelves, fine hire family. You want someone to be the admin for accounting and benefits, payroll, make it an outside hire who answers to you and who you can fire with no issues or strain on the partnership if you need to and not someone you have to keep because it it your partner’s spouse or kid. Plan on a lot of hours (like double time) the first couple of years - 40 hrs of work plus 40 hrs to run the company since it sounds like you will be small business. Understand how an LLC operates to protect your assets separate from business assets in case you get sued. Study lessons learned from other small business owners (web is full of info on Reddit and other places for the good/bad/ugly of running a business). Not to talk you out of it as it is rewarding to be your own boss, but know your limits. If you are the subject matter expert / creative person, then your partner needs to be business savvy as two creative types without experience running a business is just going to overwhelm and frustrate both of you.
Publish on Amazon.
See if anyone buys.
Figure out how to market.
If you make a profit, publish another thing.
Track results.
Spend as little as necessary.
Start there.
John D. Rockefeller once said that “a friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.”
Do you need your proposed partner for this business? You can’t do this yourself?
I’ve seen quite a few people start up businesses with friends, based on the initial excitement of an idea or friendship, but then things change when real life gets in the way.
But if you already have reference material - books, manuals visual aids, etc you might look into what it takes to form an LLC in your state to handle the business and tax aspects, and then learn how to place these products on Amazon
I know, I know....but they DO seem to have the whole payment processing and product distribution thing worked out - complicated and absolute business killers when done wrong - and you can see which of your items can take advantage of getting e-book formats and 'print-on-demand' - even less effort on your part for those
You should just need a website to describe and promote your material that then just links to the associated Amazon page for purchase
One page on your site should be a blog that you post helpful info about your topics - on at least a weekly basis - to help keep traffic/potential customers coming in and that search engines will see as current info
Good luck!!
I say do it, without hesitation. I would strongly advise, however, against a partnership. It is a defective, rotten, fetid form of business organization that is inflexible and rarely if ever successfully or satisfactorily is able to change with changes to the individual partners. If there is some way that you can agree with your prospective “partner” how any income might be shared on one particular project, in other words, on an ad hoc basis, that would be OK. Otherwise, if you have never handled money versus work ethic or business involvement with this other person, suddenly operating as a partnership will educe the differing conceptions of the work ethic, the probable investment you may have to make, and the differing levels of dedication. Or they suddenly have to take care of an elder parent, so their time becomes more valuable, more scarce. Partnerships SUCK.
Think about the results of going out for a meal with a “friend”. There are some people who will resent the idea that your meal cost $16 and theirs cost $12 and so you should leave the bigger proportion of the tip. Or they paid for parking and you didn’t, so....Or you took food home and they didn’t so you should pay more. It is those types of niggly, annoying things that almost inevitably pollute a partnership, which are universally started with the purely optimistic idea that everything will be rosy and “we’ll split everything”. Nowhere do partners ever conceive of a circumstance where crap goes wrong. You absolutely do not know how other people regard money and their time and their effort relative to yours.
Back in the 80’s I was engaged in buying and selling pretty expensive video gear. I had a very good friend in exactly the same business with whom I did many, many deals, but never for a minute did I (and probably not he) consider being “partners”. For one, he was a corporation, I was a sole proprietor. He had a physical store with the accompanying overhead and employees. I worked out of my house. We would go buy $80,000 worth of equipment and split the profits, item by item. Of we might go in as partners on only one piece of gear. It worked great. At a certain point, I myself bought a pile of gear and got a request to rent out that gear. I had to float that gear, charging up my credit cards to the max and eating spaghetti and peanut butter for two months, but it turned into a spectacular deal. We could not have done that deal as partners; He didn’t have the credit, he didn’t have the maintenance response required, he had a family and could not respond to an 11 pm trouble call. Partnerships SUCK.
Focus on the actual business and production first and foremost, not the trappings of the business, of thinking of yourself as already a business before you are.
If you have savings and loans to start the business with don’t make the mistake of enjoying spending them fulfilling an image of having a business in your head or you might find that you breezed through all that money and are sitting in a comfortable empty office with all the trappings of a business while realizing that you never actually got it off the ground with the nitty-gritty dirty work of focusing on nuts and bolts first.
Don’t seduce yourself into spending all your money and enjoying the ego feel of it all only to find yourself a year later falling to the statistic of the failure of new small businesses, focus on the production part, not the fruits of your labor parts, if there is a year two, perhaps then you can think about better office equipment and a nicer office chair.
The most important thing is getting in the habit of keeping meticulous bookkeeping, and ensure you pay all your taxes. Check with small business owners in your area for what taxes and fees you will be responsible for.
Failure to pay taxes, or get all the permits you need, WILL shut you down quickly.
Pay any sales taxes or employment taxes on time.
Million dollars companies have been forced to shutter for not remitting taxes paid by third parties like sales tax or employee withholdings.
Get a good lawyer and form a corporation (such as an LLC); get good insurance.
Let me give you a little advice from someone who has already published one book, and I am currently in the process of writing two more. ME!
No one reads books.
If I sell 100 books in one Month via Amazon, my book will moved up to the top 100 over all sales category.
That is overall sales.
Now, if you break it down by categories, depending upon which it belongs to, a mere 5 books sold can put you in the top 10.
Considering Amazon has over 50 million different published books they sell, that says a lot about how few books are being purchased these days.
Trust me, NO ONE is reading books these days.
Unless you are a well known author and can get huge national publicity, you will not sell many books.
Just me, but it does not sound like an industry I would want to waste my time, money, or energy on.
Yet, good luck, because you never know Americans could decide to toss their smart phones and turn off the computer and start reading books again, but I doubt it.
We have entered the era of ignorance, where even the most intelligent American cannot get their nose out of their phone.
My tip
Find a need and fill it (your niche) Be different.
Your product should create value, something people want to pay for.