Monday, June 29, 2009

A Million Little Pieces: Getting Started with the Startup Edition

Written by Don Linn

If you’re wondering what getting a real company started from scratch is like, think about this:

Do you remember the first time you got your own apartment or house and realized that the downpayment or deposit plus first month’s rent (which seemed massive) were just the beginning of the list of things you needed to actually live there? Who knew houses didn’t come fully-equipped with garden hoses, laundry hampers, shower curtains and doormats? So you headed off to Target/WalMart/HomeDepot/Lowe’s/Bed, Bath and Beyond et al and spent enough to require a second mortgage before you got the last boxes unpacked.

That’s a lot like what’s going on at Quartet now, only with more zeroes on the checks being written. The ‘house’ is our Big Idea, which we’ve described at length elsewhere on this blog. It’s nice; we like it; we think we’ll keep it. Now we need to furnish and equip it to make it comfortable for us and (more importantly) for our guests from the reading and writing community.

One of the things we decided early on was that Quartet was going to be organized as a real business with the goal of being able to grow profitably and to scale up as we grew and added more titles, imprints and community members. We’re true believers in what we’re publishing but we also believe that authors, customers and readers are best served by having a successful business model that can be sustained financially and managed well as it grows. What a concept in publishing, huh? What that means in practical terms is building a business infrastructure and partnering with advisers, software and system vendors and others so the business works as well with hundreds of titles as it does with the initial offering this Fall.

A peek at the list of just the major activities we’re all knee deep in right now gives you an idea of the considerations involved, the efforts (and funds!) expended and the complexity of building a sustainable business. These are just a few of the items on our current to-do list:

Organizational, Legal and Financial:

• Establish LLC and create bylaws and policies
• Pass appropriate corporate resolutions to allow business to be transacted
• Obtain business licenses
• Establish banking relationships
• Select and set up accounting software
• Select and set up royalty software
• Select intellectual property counsel and develop author and freelance contracts

Workflow and Conversion to e-formats:

• Iterate on EPUB XSLT re: covers, TOC, etc.
• Coordinate EPUB to mobi/Kindle conversion
• EPUB to PDF conversion
• Develop and document standards for editorial – Word mark-up, style sheet usage, etc.
• Develop Word template for editorial QA testing format/process/device capability

Editorial:

• Develop and refine submission and review policies and procedures
• Build team of freelance editors, copy editors, designers, cover artists
• Build authoring tools to streamline editorial and conversion processes

Marketing/Sales:

• Define Corporate and Imprint PR and Marketing Strategies
• Determine distribution options and establish relationships with major sales outlets
• Create community engagement strategy
• Create tools for author marketing training and support
• Create online media kit

Website and E-commerce Development:

• Website content production and copywriting
• Technical specifications and requirements
• System design and implementation
• Select and modify e-commerce platform for multiple format downloads
• Web host selection and integration

Other Publishing System Requirements:

• Title and metadata management
• Digital asset management and distribution
• Version control
• Web content management (CMS)

And these are only a few balls we have in the air. Add that matters as mundane as ordering business cards (and fighting over their design) to as grand as determining pricing strategies and you (oh, that’s “WE”) have a full plate of things that we think have to be just right to accomplish what we hope to accomplish with Quartet. So far, we’re very happy with our progress and have had to good fortune to select (and be selected by) some unbelievably smart and helpful partners and advisers including the thoroughly knowledgeable and irrepressible Laura Dawson of LJNDawson.com for overall systems advice, the brilliant and hilariously funny Liza Daly of Threepress.org who’s helping us navigate the wiles of epub file conversion, and the very talented Josh Tallent who’s lending his advice and services in  our Kindle formatting. Our approach has been (to borrow from Jimmy Carter) “Why not the best?” and we will have several more key partnerships and relationships to announce in the near future.

These and a million other little pieces are what we have in the works…all with the intention of creating a remarkable experience for readers, authors and others in the bookish community. A solid business plan and excellence in execution are not mutually exclusive with great books and we hope this overview (and others to follow in the coming weeks) sheds light on the process and puts to rest the myth (that Kassia’s addressed in a response to a comment here) that anyone with a computer and an internet connection can be a digital publisher.

Continue to follow our adventures and most of all, keep telling us what you’d like us to be when we grow up. And for heaven’s sake, tell us if we’ve forgotten anything important!