Starting Up A Publishing Company (Particularly Graphic Novel Focused)
As of right now, this is just a drawn-out shower thought. Not yet an actual "I've invested my entire future in this" idea.
But I've been relatively dissatisfied with my current career in higher education. Low pay, miles of red tape, and practically no limits on job duties. I've gotten burned out fast. I've been a hobbyist writer for a while, with nothing published, but a while ago, I thought of a few things:
1. I love graphic novels and manga.
I would love to eventually be able to publish my own works (comics and prose).
I would love to try to license overseas titles that have either been overlooked or dropped for various reasons.
I want to help indie talent find an outlet for publishing, especially when their style (let's just say manga-style for reference) doesn't necessarily fit the mold of DC, Marvel, or Image.
So I started wondering about starting up a publishing company. And I've done a little research into starting up an LLC, overhead costs, etc. But one of my main questions is this, and it seems paradoxical:
- How do you hire staff to work on licenses (both overseas and domestic) if you do not yet have any licenses? And conversely, how do you make licensing deals if you have no staff? It feels like a chicken or the egg situation. If I hire staff first, I'd have little for them to work on other than web design or potentially assisting with contacts. But I feel like it'd almost be impossible to make a deal for a license without having the staff backbone in place (plus some example sales of previous works to predict costs and profits). So I'm wondering if anyone has any tips on how to navigate the startup of a publishing company.
Again, this is just me brainstorming for now. Not planning to make any definitive move or transition yet. But I'd like to try to gain a firmer grasp on how this sort of company works from inception to execution.