It is not an exaggeration to say that book publishing is one of the most lucrative of all businesses today. Depending on the genre you have chosen to publish, you can generate streams of income for yourself and your organization for the rest of your life. The first and second parts in the series have highlighted some of the requirements you need to meet as you set up your book publishing firm. These include, registering your business name, choosing one or two genre that you will be publishing works on, and getting experienced writers.
In this third part we will be looking at some of the important steps you need to take after you have found effective authors for your firm.
Get Seasoned Editors
Writing is tedious and mentally tasking, but the work of a writer is incomplete if there is no one to edit it. Even if a writer is considered very skilled, printers devil may not be preventable. Some publishing firms get between 10-20 editors for just a book. This is a form of gate keeping exercise that will prevent errors at all cost. It is a measure put in place so that if one or two people miss an error in punctuation or other things, the other editors will be careful enough not to miss it.
An Editor's work is sometimes referred to as thankless job because readers out there do not get to appreciate their effort in making a complete book. All they see is the interesting narration of an author, oblivious to the rigorous exercise required on the part of an editor to make it readable. Even if they will be working at the background, how can you get the best of editors for your publishing firm?
To simplify your work, you can follow the same step you adopted when looking for writers. As noted, you can do this by announcing, by getting them through referrals, by looking out for existing editors that are with publishing or media houses. Your budget will go a long way to determine the level of skill you can get for your firm.
Test Their Competence
It is not enough to rely on their resume when you are hiring editors for your writers, it is better to give them on-the-spot test to know their level of competence. This is needed when such editor is referred or when you contact them through announcement.
You don't have to be a professor in the language you are publishing with before you can do this. You can get to do it by consulting other professional editors who may not be inclined to work with you, but can still spare time to set test questions for you and be the examiner. The little or much they will be charging for this service will be worth the as you recruit editors.
Testing the competence of editors should not be a one off thing, constantly repeatedly examine your editors to see if they are sticking to professionalism. Since their name is not attached as editors, the tendency is there for them to be lazy and veer away from professionalism as they do not have any image to be soiled.
Set Targets
After you might have decided on who the people you want to employ as editors for your publishing company, it is important that you draw out legal agreements between your company and them. This must include the amount of articles, books or pages they are expected to write in a given period. Failure to do so may encourage waste of resources by your company.
You can decided such targets by making inquiries from the editors you have consulted and others too. At any rate, the more professional your authors are, the less work they give the editors working in the firm.
Recruit Graphics Persons
Irrespective of the genre of writing you have chosen for your publishing company, you will always have need for graphics artists. Even if the book is modern day fiction, the back illustration will require the expertise of a graphic artist. Professional materials too will require some level of graphics. When writing on statistics, you will need to go beyond detailing numbers in writing, you will need graphical illustrations as charts to make your readers understand what you are talking about. This is where graphic artists is important.
Even when they are not designing, you need them to do the layout for your books. Children and educational books have special needs for graphics persons. Never make the mistake of publishing books meant for children without adding enough pictures.
To get the best of graphics person, you can carry out the recruitment and testing on your own. Get an illustration (not pictures) that appears complicated and as the artist to replicate it on the computer, on the spot.
Each Book Needs ISBN
ISBN means International Standard Book Number. It is the identifying mark of each book. A book without such number is considered no book. Each country has a body tasked with the approval of materials and assigning of numbers. Some countries refer to them as national libraries, others simply refer to them as ISBN agency. Make inquiries in your locality and see what it takes to give your books the number.
The next and last part in this series will detail the other requirements that a publisher must meet before he can consider himself an established publishing company. Please read it.
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