Friday, August 21, 2009

Another Look Under the Hood of the Startup: “More Than A Feeling” Edition

Written by Don Linn

It’s been a while since we updated you on what’s going behind the scenes at Quartet Press. While there’s obviously been lots of news and publicity lately, we promise we haven’t been spending all our time marketing. After all, as some have pointed out (and correctly so), in the end it’s all going to be about the books and the quality of reader/author/community experience we deliver. And as with so many things in life, quality comes from an obsessive attention to details. Here are some of those details we’ve been sweating over the past couple of weeks:

Distribution Because we want to make our books available in as many places as possible (so you can price shop and deal with the e-booksellers of your choice), Kat Meyer has been working with over a dozen online booksellers to arrange to have our titles available at their sites. While it sounds relatively simple, each site has different requirements about formatting, minimum numbers of titles, metadata feeds, uploading and reporting, discounts, payment terms and a host of other items.

One of the more interesting things we’ve come across is that certain resellers insist that the books have their preferred DRM to be eligible for sale in their store. We find that odd, since it’s our intellectual property and we’re looking for solutions with those (large) resellers. Some may give; others may not. What we can assure you is that the copies you buy from our own website will be DRM-free and that we’ll push to have as many of our resellers as possible do the same. It’s a philosophical thing for us.

Author Toolbox Along with distribution, Kat’s been working on what we’re calling an Author Toolbox of helpful tips, tools, contacts and marketing wisdom so that our authors won’t have to reinvent the wheel each time a book is released and so that less experienced author/marketers will be able to hit the ground running. While Quartet/Quench will be taking the lead in marketing and publicity, we think it’s critical for authors to promote as well and we want to make it easy for them

Formatting One of the biggest challenges facing ebooks today is the multitude of formats required for the multitude of reading devices currently in or soon-to-be on the market. Kirk, with the help of Liza Daly at Threepress, Joshua Tallent at eBook Architects and others (including “our man in Ireland”) have been addressing format issues to be certain that finished manuscripts turn into attractive books that work on as many devices as possible. We hate that many ebooks don’t flow properly or render poorly and we’re committed to doing better.

The Quench Romance Website Ah, if the walls could talk. Website design is both art and functionality and finding the balance with four hardheads like us, has been quite an adventure. We think we’ve got the content and basic functionality in close to final form and have selected a very versatile and user-friendly e-commerce platform (because we hope you’ll buy from us), but the overall ‘look and feel’ are still very much up for discussion. We want it to make you say WOW, and we’re not yet in agreement on that. Stay tuned.

Title Acquisition, List Planning, Editorial Quality Control Kassia has been furiously reviewing submissions and gradually adding to our initial list and to our schedule of titles to follow the launch. It’s a lot of work (because we’re seeing a lot of good stuff). Now that Angela’s joined us, we expect the pace to pick up dramatically. We can’t tell you when we’ll be announcing the first list because we don’t yet know for sure, but you’ll know as soon as we do, and we hope you’ll agree that whether or not everything on it is exactly to your personal taste, it reflects a unique editorial voice. Another area where Angie’s expertise is being put to use already is building quality control checks throughout the workflow…from author to editor to copyeditor to final page proofs.

Accounting, Finance, Legal Since we last updated, we’ve finalized our Author Agreement (modifying it to remove the ‘option clause’ based on feedback from authors and agents). I’m spending a good chunk of my time building back-end accounting systems with a particular eye toward ensuring that reported sales from our own site as well as those from resellers find their way quickly into our royalty payment stream. Along the way, I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to know about the concept of ‘Nexus’ (not the Henry Miller novel…a nasty little tax concept) and am making sure that bills are paid, procedures are followed, insurance is in place and so on ad nauseam. I’ve also been active making sure the company is adequately funded for both good times and bad (it is).

We could go on (and probably will at a later date) to cover topics including The Great ISBN E-Book Controversy (one per format…really?), metadata management, rights reversion, our great partnership with Firebrand Technologies, the many conferences and panels we’ll be participating in and much more.

Let us know if you want to learn more about any of these topics and we can flesh them out a bit; or if there are things we haven’t talked about yet that you’re interested in, let us know about those, too.