Know 7 essential steps to undertake in the publishing sector. Keep in mind that each one of them is important to determine the success of your company, so follow them with discipline and materialize your idea.
1. What is your idea?
The first thing you have to do is be clear about what kind of publisher you want to create and what kind of books you want to publish. That is, answer these questions:
- Who would be the target audience?
- What genres would you publish?
- In what language would you publish?
- How would your editorial be different?
- What is your goal with this editorial?
2. Analyze the competition
Once you are clear, what is the idea of the publisher touches the second step; analyze the competition. Which means that you should take a look at publishers that have a similar idea to yours, study their operation and structure? You can ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- Do you have a website and social networks?
- Are they on all social networks? Nope? Why?
- What is your editorial design strategy?
- What is your publishing business strategy?
- Do you send books home?
- Do you have slogans? Which are?
- How often do they post?
- In which bookstores are your books?
- Do you also sell through the Internet?
All these questions will be useful for you to know how to create your own editorial and differentiate yourself from the others. The ideal when doing this type of analysis is to think about what the competition lacks or what they fail at, and what we could contribute that is different. The same would be to do a market study to determine our audience and the objective to follow.
3. Choose a name for the publisher
Once you are clear about what you want, you will need a name for the publisher. This is very important, since choosing a name is not easy. In addition, there are more and more publishers and independent companies, so the choice of name is something that is increasingly limited. Keep in mind that the name you choose will be part of your brand, so do not choose just any name.
Remember, when you are clear about the name, the name of the publisher must be registered.
4. Publishing business plan
Once the previous steps are done, we recommend that you start to make a publishing business plan. That is, consider and determine the following points:
- Type of books you will publish.
- Marketing strategies.
- Book distribution routes.
- Budget.
5. Create the publisher’s logo
After having the name and the brand strategy or editorial business plan, it is time to choose a logo. It is recommended that you go to a graphic designer for this task, since the logo: must convey many things, it will be something that will completely mark the personality of your company, so you should turn to a professional for it.
eye! Think about the logo at this point and not before because it could be a bit disastrous and incoherent without knowing the name or the books you would sell, or what your brand would be (by brand we mean everything, your editorial strategy, your editorial voice … all).
6. Design the website and make a presence in social networks
It is important that, once you have the logo, you start spreading it on social networks. You don’t need to have a list. Nor is it necessary to be on all social networks, but you must be yes or yes on Facebook and Twitter. By doing this, future customers will start to get to know you.
To create the web page, you can build it from scratch or take a WordPress template. However, it will always look more professional if you create it from scratch. A web designer can help you with this.
7. Hire staff
You may not be able to afford this at first, but it is important that you at least know what kind of positions would need to be filled in a publishing house:
- Correctors.
- Designers.
- Publishers.
- Translators.
- Illustrator.
- Professional readers.
However, we know that initially it is most likely that you will play the “conductor”, that is, assume all those editorial positions yourself.
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Some advices
- Select the type of editorial that suits you best. Creating a self-publishing editorial is recommended, since you do not need to have a financial cushion to start. In the case of digital publishing, it has the advantage that you would save a lot of costs, such as printing and physical distribution.
- Create a cover letter for booksellers. That will make them more predisposed to sell your books.
- Contact bloggers and send them free copies of your books so they can review them on their blogs.
- Do the same with the media. It is very important that your book echoes on the Internet.
- Know the laws of publishing so as not to breach them at any time, especially when making contracts.
- Make contacts, these can open many doors for you, and in the publishing world they are very necessary.
