I want to start my own on-line publishing company any suggestions?

Question

I want to publish electronic books in the fiction genre. I have all the software I need and I have decided on the three formats I want to use.
I need authors . And I need to get a standard contract for publishing. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Each year, the writers guild of America publishes a book with boiler plate contracts. You can find it at your local book dealer.

As far as electronic publishing, there are a lot of electronic publishers out there already. Most do a piss poor job of marketing their writers. I published a sci-fi novel online a few years back, and had to do all of the marketing myself. Except for the fact that I was able to say that my book had been picked up by a publishing house, i may as well have self-published.

If you are going to do this, contact the library of congress and arrange for a block of ISBN numbers. This will make it easier to enter into cross promotion programs with warehouses like Ingram and distributors like Amazon. Also, it's not a bad idea to offer desktop publishing in a trade format to compliment the e-book format. The harsh reality is that e-books have not taken off, and most likely never will.

Depending on how serious you are about this, I might consider moving my book from the current publisher. I only had a one year contract and have reserved the right to regain ownership at any time now. I also have a novella mystery novel that I want to give to the same publisher which you could use as a give-away to lure in customers.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

In addition to what the above poster said, you will need to speak with an attorney knowledgeable in the publishing business and figure out what type of contracts you need, what kind of a business structure you need to set up, what type of liability insurance you need to carry. Then you will need to hire a marketing consultant to come up with a marketing plan for you to use to promote the site. Expect to spend a lot of money to get up and running.

Lulu may be a successful self publisher, but the authors who publish with them are anything BUT successful. I have run checks on sales of some of the books they "feature" on their site only to discover the books had sold three copies.

There will always be a market for self publishing, but to be honest, that is because there will always be books turned down by traditional publishers. Anyone who would choose self publishing or e publishing over the traditional "book on the shelves in bookstores" publishing is nuts. I sure wouldn't. E publishing is never going to replace that.

Pax - C