micro publisher

My Top 7 Tips For Authors Who Want to Evolve into Book Publishers

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This post by Joel Friedlander originally appeared on his The Book Designer site on 1/19/15.

I’ve had a long love affair with book publishing. At this point I can’t quite put my finger on when it began, but growing up in a printer’s family probably didn’t hurt.

When I first moved back to New York City after my youthful travels, I started planning a series of cookbooks based on public domain works that I was going to sell through classified ads. Don’t ask me where I got this idea, but looking back, it’s probably better that I never got very far with it.

But eventually life and opportunities lined up with what my work made possible, and I published my first book in 1986. By that time it was more feasible to start publishing, since I was working for a book publisher, and had spent years in New York’s graphic design industry.

So, yes, I knew how to make a book, what goes into it, who you need to help.

I’ve told the story elsewhere about publishing that book and what came of it, so I’ll try not to repeat myself.

But one of the other results came a couple of years later when Jill and I started our own publishing company, based on our experience with that book.

Making the Leap from Author to Publisher

There’s an astonishingly huge difference between publishing your own book, and taking on other authors and trying to make a profitable business out of publishing their books.

As the indie publishing field matures, we’re starting to see more authors attempt this leap. Others are forming publishing cooperatives, and still others are acting on plans to create small presses.

These are all positive and expected evolutionary changes, as simple organisms develop into more complex ones, creating new opportunities for all concerned.

But even in the era of the 72-hour ebook (“Write it on Day 1! Prep it on Day 2! Publish it on Day 3!”) there’s a whole lot involved in making this transition from author to publisher.

So if you’re one of those authors who has caught the “publishing bug,” if you think you can take your success to the next level, here’s some guidance from someone who’s been up on the shore.

My Top 7 Tips for Going from Author to Publisher

  1. Get help—Although many authors do just fine as self-publishers by doing virtually everything themselves, it’s rarely a good idea to run a publishing company without help. What kind? Start with an author’s assistant or virtual assistant (VA). Pretty soon you will have many administrative chores that take up valuable time, and which could just as easily be done by your assistant. And you’ll be glad every time you launch a book that you’ve got help with the crushing weight of tasks that pile up around your launch. You can also have your assistant filter your email inbox, do basic research, and a myriad of other things that will help you in your publishing venture. Take this seriously.

 

Read the full post on The Book Designer.<

 

The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur

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This article by William Deresiewicz originally appeared on The Atlantic on 12/28/14.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it?

Pronounce the word artist, to conjure up the image of a solitary genius. A sacred aura still attaches to the word, a sense of one in contact with the numinous. “He’s an artist,” we’ll say in tones of reverence about an actor or musician or director. “A true artist,” we’ll solemnly proclaim our favorite singer or photographer, meaning someone who appears to dwell upon a higher plane. Vision, inspiration, mysterious gifts as from above: such are some of the associations that continue to adorn the word.

Yet the notion of the artist as a solitary genius—so potent a cultural force, so determinative, still, of the way we think of creativity in general—is decades out of date. So out of date, in fact, that the model that replaced it is itself already out of date. A new paradigm is emerging, and has been since about the turn of the millennium, one that’s in the process of reshaping what artists are: how they work, train, trade, collaborate, think of themselves and are thought of—even what art is—just as the solitary-genius model did two centuries ago. The new paradigm may finally destroy the very notion of “art” as such—that sacred spiritual substance—which the older one created.

Before we thought of artists as geniuses, we thought of them as artisans. The words, by no coincidence, are virtually the same. Art itself derives from a root that means to “join” or “fit together”—that is, to make or craft, a sense that survives in phrases like the art of cooking and words like artful, in the sense of “crafty.” We may think of Bach as a genius, but he thought of himself as an artisan, a maker. Shakespeare wasn’t an artist, he was a poet, a denotation that is rooted in another word for make. He was also a playwright, a term worth pausing over. A playwright isn’t someone who writes plays; he is someone who fashions them, like a wheelwright or shipwright.

A whole constellation of ideas and practices accompanied this conception. Artists served apprenticeships, like other craftsmen, to learn the customary methods (hence the attributions one sees in museums: “workshop of Bellini” or “studio of Rembrandt”). Creativity was prized, but credibility and value derived, above all, from tradition. In a world still governed by a fairly rigid social structure, artists were grouped with the other artisans, somewhere in the middle or lower middle, below the merchants, let alone the aristocracy. Individual practitioners could come to be esteemed—think of the Dutch masters—but they were, precisely, masters, as in master craftsmen. The distinction between art and craft, in short, was weak at best. Indeed, the very concept of art as it was later understood—of Art—did not exist.

 

Read the full article on The Atlantic.