Planning for success

Any would be publisher is usually exhorted on the various discussion lists to "do a business plan".

I've sometimes joined that exhortation but it isn't long since I told my co-author of Success in Store: How to Start or Buy a Retail Business, Enjoy Running It and Make Money that I've never had a business plan.

He then took me through how I'd started a couple of businesses, and justified his own "always have a business plan" position. He claimed I'd had quite a detailed plan in each instance -- it was just that I had not written it down! So, as a writer, the one thing I've never written down, is my plan for success. However, more of those businesses have gone according to plan than those which have not.

The one example when you will need a formal plan is if you are going to borrow money. However, even then a business plan can be drawn up on the back of an envelope.

A very nice restaurant I go to occasionally has paper tablecloths and marker pens in a glass on every table because the owner says her original business plan was drawn up over a meal in another restaurant and she had to appeal to the manager of that restaurant for some paper to write it down.

It also helps to include, in advance, what you will consider to be failure. ("I will have failed if I do not publish two books in the first six months, sell 1000 copies or not be within a few hundred dollars of breaking even in the second six months").

Too many people struggle on because they attempt to justify the changed cicumstances.

There's no reason why a "business" plan can't be that within 12 months "I will have published Uncle Joe's memoir, sold 20 copies and he'd added me to his will".

You could probably carry that one in your head.

What is a self-publisher and why?

Why would any self-publisher go around saying they are a self-publisher unless he or she has no intention to ever do more than publish one book and disappear? (And there is nothing inherently wrong with that!)

"Small publisher" includes everything from one book upwards. Surely that single book is just the first book, and if you've found out how to do it and done it successfully, is it not likely that you may then do the same for an even more struggling author?

I'm not even sure I like the term "small publisher" except that it does distinguish us from the big boys in New York who try to rule the world of books and do it so badly. In that sense small publishers include firms employing hundreds of people, firms I'm proud to be numbered among, firms like the publisher Lonely Planet built in this same city by two people who wrote, edited, laid out and hawked their first travel guide and which is now a world-wide employer.

I do it differently -- my business is me alone, working from home, but giving employment to others via contract work, and I'm proud to be among other home workers such as the magazine publisher couple I know who turn over close to a million dollars a year from four titles. We (and I do have a tendency to use the royal 'we') have eight current book titles and five authors.

Step one in publishing is to divorce you the author from you the publisher. I don't mean hiding that you are both, but, with all that effort which has to be put into publishing a first book, some of that effort should be put into building a publishing name that can be used in future.

I have sympathy for the reviewers who won't handle "self-published" books. Even if the quality is reasonable, it still says "I don't really know what I'm doing". There is a big difference between self-published and the first book published by a new publisher owned by the author.