Question for any anons knowledgable about the publishing industry. What would be the constraints to begin an imprint or publisher or like the NAL (New American Library) or Anchor Doubleday mass market paperbacks for put of print history, philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology, humanities subjects ect? Time and again do I come across a book in a bibliography that I’m amazed it’s gone out of print, and, desiring to read it, am relegated to reading a digitized version.
>>25163217This is the kind of undertaking someone/some entity who already has money and doesn't care if they make more with this would start
>>25163219fpbp>>25163217>why is this obscure treatise on a little-known historical event that uses a theological approach that was abandoned 50 years ago out of print? it just makes no heckin' sense! I'm amazeballs! lol>I know! I'll reprint them as mass-market paperbacks! then people will line up out the door to buy them!LOL
>>25163219Definitely. Finances would be the greatest hurdle to overcome. Reprints of non-fiction work for a generally well educated, but not scholarly, audience is just hard to come by. University presses do oftentimes reprint works from their back catalogue, but price limits the distribution to a niche minority.
>>25163229Great strawman, but it doesn’t negate that there are a lot of books that could be insightful to our current era. Actually just shows how hollow of your understanding of books is. Pic related comes to mind, was published once in 1935 by Johns Hopkins, then republished in 1963, never to be reprinted thereafter. It’s can be connected to Donald Trumps iteration of the monroe doctrine.
>>25163249bait
>>25163254No, I’m just pointing to the utility of older works for new readers. Anyone who’s read older classics like Gibbons Decline and Fall can attest to the work having correlates to our own time. History is fluid, it’s not static.
>>25163264OP you were asking about why works like that, some of which are obviously insightful, are not being published and if there is anything you can do.Why are you being paranoid now that we don't think those works are insightful. Nobody said anything about that, we're answering your question about the financial and publishing aspects of it>history is fluid, not staticthanks dork
>>25163217It is mostly a lot of work when starting out and getting established, not bad if you can afford using a distributor but you are very unlikely to be dealing with large enough quantities to justify that expense. The cheap route is learning book design and prepress, have or rent space for storing books and shipping supplies. Do lots of market research to find book sellers and reviewers suitable for the material you will put out. Find a good small print shop that will suit your needs. Learn to make press releases so you can send it and a free copy of the book to the stores and reviewers you found. Find a lawyer if you want to print anything not in the public domain. Learn to not mind spending hours packaging and mailing books.Doing as much as you can on your own, you can probably get going for ~$10k but you will make no money for quite some time, all profits will have to go right back into the business until you have built up a decent enough catalogue to have a steady cash flow. At the start you really want to release books as frequently as you can manage, build that catalogue.
>>25163274I’m not being paranoid, but am certainly concerned, and not about any anon in particular, but the amount of authors that are being forgotten, and the practical utility there works could bring. Wether any of the specific books I claimed were insightful is unimportant, for I was only trying to provide an example of how older works can have modern day utilities.
>>25163303>a polite schizophrenic
>>25163285Thank you, anon. This is really helpful and practical advice. I appreciate the effort. Did you yourself ever attempt to self-publish or work in publishing? You seem to be quite informed.
>>25163310I started up my own publishing house and ran it for a decade.
>>25163285This + On Demand + researching most common non-fiction undergraduate assigned reading, then ye olde translations to undercut newer ones (properly typeset ones are the issue; e.g. Hegel's lectures) + crowd funding campaigns for art books (you do a couple and you'll get the feel for what sticks).
>>25163444+ keeping the public's interest daily while you are interested in profit
>>25163444POD only works if you are exclusively selling direct and OK with little in the way of profit. Saves you from having to store and ship books but that is not that big of a deal when starting out, a storage space for the bulk goes a long ways and by the time that becomes impractical hooking up with a distributor will be viable. Professors generally stipulate what editions to get for assigned reading and students often get discounts on these books.
>>25163217Check if it's copyright or in the public domain. If it's public, you can reprint it.
>>25163354What was your reading to get a grasp of book design? Or did you just learn mostly on the job. I’ve read Hugh Williamson’s “Methods of Book Design”, which is quite outdated in its design and manufacturing techniques.
>>25164287My high school had a two year graphics design program that covered most everything a graphic designer does and included the entire process to final product so we ran presses and did screen printing, published web pages, made rubber stamps, etc. It gave me enough knowledge to muddle my way through it all and figure out the rest as I went.
>>25163217not sure how helpful this is because it's a different world, but there are a ton of small presses printing stuff like "alt comix" or graphic novels that might be helpful to look into. The people I know who do it use risographs which maybe isn't the best option for books of just text, offset printing seems to be the other option I hear about the most in this world. I don't know shit about printing myself, I just know a good amount of people in this scene and that there's a ton of small independent presses operating successfully in it. The key to the success might just be that the product is small/cheap art objects and that there's a decent sized scene for it, but maybe some of the process/technique could be applied to printing novels.If this is interesting to you, I know of a few conventions around the US centered around this stuff, three in Chicago are called CAKE, Chicago Zine Fest, and Pretty Good Fest, I know there's one in Seattle called Short Run, and one in Toronto called TCAF. Maybe you could go there and talk to people, dunno, but in any case looking at the vendors for those events should guide you towards some indie presses
