Building an indie press
What we're reading, learning, asking
Dear Friends,
This is our second installment of the Galiot Press newsletter and as you can see we have migrated from Mailchimp to Substack, which is better suited to creating community. (View our introductory newsletter here.) We would love to hear from you as we take you along on our journey to launch Galiot Press.
To that end, would you please fill out this reader survey? We are gathering input regarding people’s reading and book-buying habits, so that we can deliver to readers the types of books and experiences that you really want. This survey will really help us. We’re hoping to get at least 250 responses by Friday February 17th, at which point we’ll do a drawing for the respondent who will win a $50 gift certificate to Bookshop.org. Please forward the survey link to your networks and communities.
Meantime, we’ve been speaking to many people in and out of the publishing industry to really grasp as fully as possible what happens at each stage of the publishing process, and to test some ideas. We are thrilled at everyone’s readiness to chat with us. We want to learn where we can innovate with a completely different approach, and where we will have no choice but to operate, at least for now, within the existing Publishing Machine. (We have what we feel is a super-creative–dare we say disruptive?–idea that we are hoping to implement.)
Publishing fact: Did you know that for every copy of a paperback sold for around $18, the author usually gets only $1 or so? (This is for books published “traditionally,” i.e. not self-published.) We are trying to develop a model that will change this, where the price the reader pays remains similar but the author gets a larger share.
The consistent feedback we are getting on our venture boils down to these three points:
This is ambitious.
This is needed.
This will be hard.
You can do it.
As a result, we alternate between panic and exhilaration. Between believing we can really make a difference and worrying that in order to do so we will have to give up more of our lives than we can handle. So we are trying to be very realistic. To remind each other we still want time and brain space to write our own books, to spend time with family, to travel. The big question is: is the minimum amount of work necessary to make this a successful venture more than we are willing/able to put in? So far, we believe we can do it! But we want to be transparent–with each other, and with you–about all that we are grappling with as we move forward. And we are working on a Founders’ Agreement to make sure we don’t succumb to the possible pitfalls of friends starting a business together.
We are also reading: books by others who have started publishing ventures, books on entrepreneurship, books on women leaders (yeah!), and more. Do you have recommendations we should take a look at?
(Those of you in Boston, check out all these new indie bookstores opening up all over the place.
And we are playing with numbers. Spreadsheets all over the place. Profit and loss sheets for books, balance sheets, budgets, timelines. Which will lead us to the next (daunting) phase: how to fund the launch of this company. We’ll be showing our preliminary calculations to our mentors at the MIT Venture Mentoring Services program, who no doubt will poke many holes in them. But hey, we knew entrepreneurship was not for the faint of heart. If you know anyone with a financial background who might be interested in joining us further down the line, please let us know.
In a couple of months, we plan to unveil our logo. But before then, we’ll keep you posted on our discoveries from the survey, so please do take a few minutes to fill that out–and be in the drawing for the gift certificate to Bookshop.org!
Anjali and Henriette