How would one start a publishing house in two-thousand-twenty-six? Is it even possible to compete against the "big five" or is there still a chance for the little guy
What kind of publishing house do you have in mind? One that mainly finances and publishes modern authors or one that reprints older works (like Reclam)?
>>25085842Reprints, since I am not wealthy.Thinking of buying a domain name and basically just coping Reclam outright. Yellow covers look nice with black type. Keep everything under $10, free shipping over $100. Seeing how publishing houses are phasing out mass market paperbacks, and how amazon is just selling poorly made reprints of scans, seems like there could be some potential here.
>>25085848You'd be competing with ebooks at that point. Reclam is a private GmbH so they don't publish finances, but by all accounts they're struggling themselves.
>>25085848If you have zero money and capital don't you basically need to be able to have a company that holds zero assets so you can just go under and reopen as another entity when you're inevitably sued? Isn't getting sued an inevitability in today's world?
>>25085861Damnit you might be a genius.
>>25085835I really like that yellow color, their old (or new, I'm not sure) yellow was better, the one they used on the last three books
I have friends who opened their own labels. They started by crowdfunding books and offering special editions with add ons like ecobags, shirts etc with unique artwork in bundles with the books itself. One went to the indie foreign books route. The other went with the classic releases with luxury binds and novelties like dual language books, illustrations, notes.First friend is in a niche market with virtually no competition and benefits from that. He also poaches authors from big labels that let them out of stock or put communication through their grunt workforce because authors care a lot about labels that they think value their work even if they are small companies. This came later though. The downside is that he has to read a lot of foreign books to decide what he will try releasing and has to have a curated list of good translators because the people who buy this kind of book doesn't tolerate half assed jobs.The second has an easier time choosing titles and a larger addressable market but has higher production costs like art, binding and printing. He also has a lot more competition and margins are slimmer.Both only have one type of book for each title and both only sell hardcovers. The paperback and cheaper segments are too cutthroat with big labels sometimes even selling at a loss to gain market share. You can survive with preorders of 150-200 units but you NEED to sell on Amazon as an official supplier sooner or later because Amazon will often buy 5x what you sold at preorders to put on their platform.Marketing these days is key and best platforms are instagram and TikTok. Having your printing done in time and with quality is also key as you can get away with one mistake or delay but not with two. Supply chain and who is going to print the books are not afterthoughts to be figured out after launch.I'm not in the day to day but I'm an angel investor in both so I know a bit about how they do it.
I think /lit/ could really be a place to start a publishing house which is somewhat transgressive, at least in respect of how it goes about distributing books, marketing etc. The books themselves IMO would be short (short stories, poetry, novellas) and carefully edited, the covers would be fairly plain and uniform with deviations for each book based on its contents, and would only be released periodically. The novellas would be distributed to anons and part of the responsibility of each anon supportive of the press would be to then leave the book somewhere in their local area where it would be likely to find another reader, or put up a poster or stickers advertising it (these could be distributed free to interested parties along with instructions etc). These "release events" could then become something of an online phenomenon, and these books would be collectibles due to their limited release number. Anons would be given a code upon purchasing a copy which guarantees them a limited edition copy (for the first x amount of copies sold) and these copies would be held in reserve like gold or whatever and the anon could either redeem it right away or simply hold onto it, see if the book gains a wider readership, and then redeems it at a later date if only for online cred, or just gets it right away. I guess the series would begin with a novella or collection of short stories focusing on the internet or something contemporary like that, maybe a book of short stories wherein each anon is paid with a code to redeem a first edition copy or a limited edition one or something, just in the tiny chance it goes viral. I think it could be a punk experiment. It would be interesting to go to a restroom in some college bar or whatever and see a sticker reading "READ [TITLE]" and to think some /lit/izen lives in your locale :)
I don't know any of how it works on the inside, but from the outside, it looks like small presses can do fine if they get some kind of subsidization and get distribution from one of the big ones. Helps if you have some kind of major author or untapped niche or a stylish packaging that consumers might like. Successes seem to be Europa Editions and Deep Vellum. On the side of stylish books as collectible art objects, I've been seeing stuff from Mandylion Press getting carried in big stores, pic related.
It might be kino to appeal to the autistics by making the books collectible in some way, i.e., by having every copy in the series form a picture when placed together or something, like a jigsaw.
>>25085968>deep vellumThat malnourished drug addict is a trust fund baby
>>25085993Don't fucking start with this, schizo
>>25085994Truth hurts, druggie?
>>25085960Does having inventory actually benefits them? Why don't they use print on demand? Seems to me having no inventory cost, risk, capital tied up might be better for smaller publishers. Print runs should be saved for titles they already know are going to sell.
nobody reads books. Reading is dead
>>25085835There are a bunch of small fine presses now. Both reprinting public domain shit like Weird Horror (Lovecraft and friends), and making licensed deals to publish niche authors (fantasy and sf are big but also general classics). Some do only novellas, others do huge books. Trouble here is you have to know something about design, hiring artists for custom bindings, farming out work to bookbinders, letterpress printers and organize all this to sell 100-1000 books ideally in multiple states.
>>25086242Most of these places use print on demand. Only a few don’t and it’s obvious when they don’t
>>25086155They don't have it. Inventory is a lot of money and there is a very large risk you don't sell it all. Printing on demand is also a lot of money for launch events.They design the book and take it to a printer to get quotes on how much it will cost to print different sized batches, say 50, 100 and 150. Then they price the book to cover the smallest batch and use a system of all or nothing preorder/crowdfunding. If it doesn't reach the minimum order size they don't print the book.When they started supplying Amazon, they have quotes of prints of like 100-150 and 500-1000 because Amazon will order another 500 copies if they have 100 preorders. The inventory then is Amazon's not them as they already sold it to the company itself and Amazon pays upfront. It took a couple titles for them to figure out more or less how much Amazon is ordering because they won't know until preorders are all shipped.The books they sell post launch on their own website is actually not much and those are on print on demand deals and consequently priced higher so they don't have to hold inventory.They are launching 2 to 3 books a month and eventually they will reach a catalog size large enough to have a constant income of past titles covering their operating expenses, even if they don't sell that much individually. New titles will then be cash in their pockets. Both labels have the same break even model despite the different content.They also realized that traditional labels have shit cost control and that's why most of them are unsustainable. Both of them are running everything, from sales planning to dealing with printers, with teams of 3-4 people plus themselves and a couple founding partners each. Keeping a small team and not deviating from their respective niches is what makes them viable.
>>25085967I wish we had irl /lit/ posts in the restroom at my wagie job instead of church invite cards that just get pissed on
>>25085835ask teddy spaghetti the scifi bioinformatician
This started out as such a nice thread
>>25086244No buddy I’m talking about fine books. They are not print on demand.
>>25085835If you have to ask, don't bother.
>>25085835>Is it even possible to compete against the "big five" or is there still a chance for the little guyThe little guy does not need to compete against the big five, just the other little guys. Learn to think.
>>25085835Get money to buy printing machine, find rights, get material, print then ship to willing buyers
>>25087466Thanks for agreeing with me.
>>25087522Nonsense. The money is tied up in a handful of dinosaurs with no institutional memory, passion, or ethos beyond maming more money. Why waste time with small creators when the glory lies elsewhere?
>>25087987If they're such dinosaurs then why not be the tiny mouse that survives the meteor?
>>25085835I like the underground approach, eliminating the overhead of Amazon publishing through something like Lulu which has API integration for your website. I'd recommend this route, but gathering traffic and sales is, of course, an entirely different matter.
>>25085967We tried this already and, as expected it evaporated after infighting. I can't remember what the magazine was called.
>>25086258I'll write some in your honor when I next visit a toilet stall, how's that?
On that note, indie music publishing is booming, granted it's a bigger market, but if their success is any indication, then the future looks good.
>>25085968You made me check this publisher's website and their marketing strategy is making me physically ill
>>25089980It's by and for women, and women run the world anon.
I'll invest my life savings in your publishing house if you vow to never use shitty laminated cover stock that peels after 2 weeks of handling.
