On sustainability and multiplicity
Ingredients for our dynamic press
Dear friends,
We are chugging along! We just selected GoodGood, an interdisciplinary, women-led design firm to create our website. Their storytelling approach and their focus on social impact won us over. By September we should have a splash page (doesn’t that sound great, making a splash?) and by February a fully functional site. We’ve kicked off our logo design process with this firm, and are excited to see what comes of it. Fingers crossed we can reveal our logo by summer’s end.
Meantime, a strategic marketing consultant, Stronghouse, has been generously advising us on branding and positioning, and all this work is in turn informing the logo and website design. She ran us through a series of questions, and when she asked how we want our company to sound, we answered: Exciting, inventive, rigorous, thoughtful, trustworthy, efficient, groundbreaking, and accessible.
When we discussed our values, we included the word sustainability, and at first the consultant wondered just how much of a difference we could make on the sustainability front, and perhaps we should take that word out given how common it has become. But we pointed out that we see sustainability as an important value beyond environmental impact. We want our model to lead to a sustainable work load for us and our future staff, to prevent the burnout that we see in the publishing industry. We want our model to lead to a sustainable career for our authors, so they can spend more time and energy on writing and creating meaningful connections, and less on busywork and worrying about sales figures and finances. All of this is in addition to the environmental sustainability of a model that cuts out excessive print runs, shipping, warehousing, and destruction of excess inventory.
We’ve had another session with our mentors from the Venture Mentoring Service, and received feedback on our pitch deck. We are now refining it and creating two versions: one to send out, one to use in verbal pitches. Pitches for what, you might ask. Well, for one thing, money! Although we are trying to be as lean and just-in-time as possible, we do have start-up costs: the web site, filing fees, professional development (attendance at conferences, for example), legal advice, accounting assistance, industry membership fees, and our time. (A big thank you to those of you who have generously pledged donations here on Substack. We see you, and are humbled by your enthusiasm. We’ll be turning on optional paid subscriptions soon, but will always continue to offer our content here for free.) We’re also working on a pitch to potential sales partners as well as potential members of an advisory board.
As always, we are thinking about ideas from other industries that we could apply or borrow from. We’ve realized that bringing together concepts from different fields, different perspectives, different cultures, even different languages, is an intrinsic part of who we (Henriette and Anjali) each are as individuals, and of what we each do. It only makes sense that this approach should extend to Galiot Press.
Can you guess which of these is NOT an industry we are considering (yet)? Tell us in the comments!
Fashion
Cooking
Architecture
Gardening
Automotive
Music
Sports
We are still going through the questions that our survey respondents raised. Here’s the next one:
“I’m curious how you think you can build a press with higher royalty going to the author. It sounds like maybe you are going to make authors work extra for it?”
The short answer: No, we will not.
The longer answer: Authors already work extra, even those who are with traditional publishers. We don’t know any published authors who aren’t putting in hours and hours of unpaid time promoting their work, organizing events, writing and trying to place essays and excerpts, and paying out of pocket for related expenses–including freelance publicists. So no, we shall not be making authors work more than this! In fact, our hope is to lighten their load and support them more, including through coaching and mentorship.
The key to the higher royalty going to the author will be our print-on-demand model for paperbacks and our emphasis on direct-to-reader sales for all story formats. By cutting out some of the middle people, and sidestepping the massive discount to some retailers, we will receive a greater portion of the sales revenue, and therefore be able to pay out a higher-than-traditional royalty rate. (More direct sales will also mean more insight into who is buying our books, and how to market directly to them. This is information that is difficult for traditional publishers to obtain, and completely unavailable to their authors.) The flip side will be that we will not be able to offer high advances. But this is part of our general strategy to reduce Galiot Press’ upfront financial risk so that we can take on a variety of projects and treat them equally. Everyone will get the same, modest advance.
Meantime, in the larger publishing world, there is a lot of turmoil. Massive layoffs and “buyout departures” are taking place at Penguin Random House, including some big name editors. The Authors’ Guild has received thousands of signatures by authors on a letter calling for artificial intelligence (AI) industry leaders to protect writers. And the strike by the Writers Guild of America, joined by the Screen Actors’ Guild, continues apace as they fight for better working conditions and compensation structures. More evidence that “traditional” models are not sustainable! Let’s make some changes where we can. (And here are some ideas for how to support the strike. Note—we have not vetted these ourselves! Just passing along what we’ve found.)
Anjali & Henriette
Your combined sustainability is inspired!