How We Got Here

Plus, LLCs, EINs, and the alphabet soup of starting a business

We’ve been busy this past month, making progress on several of the necessary steps towards launching Galiot Press as a new and innovative publishing company.

We are now officially Galiot Press, LLC, and we have obtained that holy grail of business set-up, the EIN. With an EIN, we can now open a small-business bank account—at a bank that’s minority-owned and community-oriented. With our account in place, we can start raising money to put in the account. Hence the crowdfunding campaign we’re beginning to plan, as we embark on the first phase of our fundraising. Meanwhile, we’ve also been gathering proposals from logo and website designers/builders and we’ll be making our choice soon.

Photo by Surendran MP on Unsplash

In our reader survey, one respondent had this question: “When/how are you selecting/announcing first titles?” Here’s our timeline.

• September: Galiot Press website goes live

• March, 2024: Galiot Press opens for submissions

• Spring 2025: first Galiot Press books launch!

Stay with us as we keep plugging away to get things up and running. And if you have any industry professionals in your networks who would be willing to chat with us as part of our information, let us know!

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But before we go on, it occurred to us that, while most of you know a fair bit about what we believe in and what we want to accomplish with Galiot Press, you may not know how we got here. I’ll start, with my story (this is Henriette), and you’ll hear from Anjali next week.

How We Got Here: Henriette’s Version

When I left academia to commit to writing, I set about to educate myself on this industry I was planning to be a part of as a published novelist. I learned the basics and thought I was prepared. And while I have to say I had a good experience with my debut, I took note of a few things that seemed baffling.

First: timing. From the sale of my debut novel to its publication date took 2 1/2 years. That seemed weird (there had been recent reshuffling at my publisher and the transfer of one imprint’s lists to another, blah blah), but ok, the book came out and I loved my agent and publisher and it was a good experience overall. But as I became more and more immersed in Boston’s writing community, I saw how much truly excellent work was not reaching agents and/or not reaching editors. I saw how the buzz about a book and the sales often didn’t match up. I learned how my own 2 1/2-year publication process wasn’t that uncommon—but was it necessary? I learned how hard it was for authors to earn out, to earn a living, to plain-old earn.

From time to time in those years, I would say, to heck with it, I’m starting a publishing company. Then I started to say, sort of as a joke, “when I have my publishing company, I’m going to do things differently”. Then I started to come up with ideas for how to improve the system. When I was nearing 60, I began to say—with more seriousness now—that when I was 70, I would start a publishing company. I figured that I’d have enough books behind me by that age (or not!), and would be ready for a new professional phase.

One day, I made my usual declaration at my writing group, and Anjali said “If you’re really serious, I’ll do that with you. I mean it.” We agreed, then, that when I was 70, we would do it. For real. Then we entered into what I think of as Phase Two. We’d be standing at a book launch or a party or any gathering of writers, and invariably the frustrations would come up in conversation. We would look at each other and say “when we have our press, we’re going to do things differently.”

But then some time later, in response to yet more news of writer frustration, Anjali raised the very good question: “Why are we waiting? We need to do this now.”

Dear Reader, I am not yet 70. I am not even 65. But we are doing this now. . .

Next week: How Anjali came to join this enterprise