Rocket Bomber - article - publishing - business - Illustrated Empire: Head Count

I’m posting this as part of my series on how to run a start-up publisher [see part 1, part 2] but the points I make today could easily be extended to any start-up [tech or otherwise] and of course would be an obvious extension of my “rethinking the box” posts about bookstores: for any small independent, of course you rely on key booksellers to help with the important buying decisions that might otherwise be made by “corporate” – an added layer whose “benefits” you cannot “enjoy”.

[Rethinking the Box – Previously:

Study your History. Recognise your Motives. Location, Location, Location. Know your Customer Base, and your Staff. Hire folks who love books. Find your Niche. Consider your Product Lines, Stock Your Shelves, Set your main-aisle displays, consider Alternative display strategies, take a second look at What the Customers Want and Why Even Annoying Customers are Important. Answer for yourself whether raw dollars or customer service is more important to your store, and its future. Stare again in dismay at the Profit Margins. Try calculating your upper-limit affordable rent and affordable salaries along with revenue from inventory (with a side of coffee) and compare your numbers to average industry per-storefront sales.

Unique Bookstore Experiences: Zero – Intro – 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5

Chronologically: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 13 – 14 – 15 – 16 – 17 – 18 – 19 – 20 – 21 – 22 – 23 – 24 – 25 – 26 – 27 – 28 – 29 – 30 – 31 – 32

yeah… I’ve been at this a while]

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Let’s say there’s a local college library; they have many resources you could use, and some you might want to use even though you don’t need them every week, and certainly there are some archives you don’t even know about yet — but for the most part you just need access to one archive of one particular academic journal.

It’s a private college, so you can’t just flash ID at the library door to get in; they reserve most of their collection for current students, faculty & staff, college alumnae — and donors.

For a single, sizeable yearly donation, you could have access to the entire library and all it’s collections, but since you think you only need the occasional citation from this one particular journal, instead of becoming a benefactor of the library, you work out a deal with one of the reference librarians – once a month or so you submit a specific request, and you get a single file folder with just the information you need — or at least, the pages you asked for, as the librarian feels no need to go outside your request.

[this is an extended metaphor, folks, I know libraries don’t work this way]
[speaking of metaphors…]

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Let’s say between you and your printer, there is an apple farm — and going the long way round, miles out of your way, there is a toll road — but you have to take the toll road because you can’t cut across the farm. Even though it adds a couple hours to your trip, you always take the toll road because, well hell, you only make this trip once a month or so.

You have to get to your printer, because it’s the only way to get your books printed.

Of course, you could bribe the apple farmer to let you cut through the orchards. As a bonus, you get free apples, whatever you can pick up along the way. The thing is, the apple farmer wants a steady payment, once a month: you get the shorter route to the printer but you’re stuck paying the farmer all the time, not just when you need to get to the printer.

The toll road ends up being more expensive, per trip, but you do the math and you figure, no, I don’t need a shortcut. We’ll keep driving around the apple farm.

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There’s an amazing database of cheat codes, shortcuts to get you through most—if not all—video games. You desperately need a code to get you past the final boss of this one game you’ve been working on for months. You could buy access to the whole cheat code database, but they only sell monthly subscriptions – not single-day passes. You contact the folks who maintain the database, and they agree to sell you the one cheat code you need, but for $100. You could buy 10 months of access for that much, but once again, you only need the one cheat code, right? to get past this one boss, and finish the game. You know it’s going to save you a hell of a lot of time, so you pony up the $100. After you buy it, though, you still can’t clear the boss.

Oh hell yes you go to complain. You raise all holy heck. You threaten and cajole and start badmouthing this site everywhere you can think to post…

…and it turns out you were using it wrong. Once you’ve been corrected [condescendingly] you finally get the code to work, you clear the boss, you win the game.

But you’ve burned bridges, and now you’re banned. Where once, you could have been a monthly subscriber, with access to the member forums, with the ability to ask questions, and seek clarification, and get support for all sorts of games — now you just have a $100 cheat code you got to use once, and a whole bunch of experts who actively hate you.

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[I mentioned these were metaphors, right?]

You’re a college student. You could sign up for the meal plan, at a significant per-meal savings, but you like fast food and pizza too much [it’s just so tasty, even though it’s a bit empty nutrition-wise for the calories]

You figure, heck for as often as I use the dining halls, I’ll just pay a la carte — so you do, which means when you go for dinner, you pay per plate for salad, sides, a main dish — & maybe you skip dessert.

Instead of eating whatever you want whenever the dining hall is open, you pay for a box of cold cereal on a Saturday morning, and pay extra for the 8oz. carton of milk. It’s not quite enough milk, but you make do. You congratulate yourself because you didn’t ‘waste’ money on the meal plan, and you try [but fail] to ignore the smell of bacon and butter and syrup from the guy eating a pancake breakfast next to you.

And since you ‘saved’ so much money, not buying a meal plan, well now you have the priviledge of spending $23 a pop on pizzas, or $7 a meal going through the drive-thru — twice a day.

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The bookstore offers a member card, $25 a year but you always save 10%.

You think, what a rip off. I don’t spend that much money at a bookstore — besides, why don’t they just discount the books for everyone anyway? Why pay for a coupon?

And maybe you don’t spend enough on books to make the discount card pay for itself.

But you buy magazines once a month… $10-20 worth. didn’t figure that into the total.

And you buy CDs and DVDs — well, at least for as long as the bookstore carries them. Sure, you might get them cheaper from Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t really discount the BBC stuff — Inspector Morse box sets are still $70 each, and hell, that’s the same price you’d get at the bookstore with the discount card. Hm. And you’d get to take them home the same day, watch ‘em that night.

And by the time the holidays roll around and you’re shopping for Festivus and Yule presents [or whatevs] and you find yourself spending $200 — you could save $20 just that day! — you still talk yourself out of buying a discount card ‘cause it means an extra $5 on today’s receipt, and you still can’t justify spending more — you’re just not in the bookstore that much.

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Sick of the metaphors yet? Have you figured out what I’m driving at?

No matter what business you’re in, you can hire talent, have it in-house working for you 5 days a week (plus the occasional weekend, if you pay well enough) and have guaranteed access to those skills, that knowledge base, that experience set — to say nothing of one more creative brain actively working with you to solve problems…

Or you can hire consultants & freelancers.

Sure, any freelancer will perform to specs and deliver what was ordered. But only what was ordered: if you didn’t think to ask for it you’re not getting it. And if you are hiring someone short term for open-ended projects that might require creative solutions or additional freelance work to exhaust all possibilities: you’re going to be charged a really ridiculous rate.

Less than what you might pay someone in yearly salary and benefits, but you’ll be paying through the nose for this one project — so your brain-dead mechanical accountant says: “Pay the freelancer. We don’t have the budget for that, in house“

But gods forbid you have to run more than one ‘major’ project a year, or you have to go back to a consultant for another ‘fix’ on something they did years ago — even if they are still available [not a guarantee], even if it was their mistake [and not your mistake, when you set the scope-of-work], well, you’re going to get charged more anyway.

Go ahead and buy the talent. Buy the short cut. Buy the cheat code. Buy the meal plan. Sign up for the year-long discount.

It only seems like more money. I’ve said it before, employees are an investment and in the end, they’re going to be the only investment worth having. Find the best people, get them to ‘buy in’, to be invested in your company and what you’re doing.

Say I ran a manga publisher, and all of a sudden one of my best clients decides to pull all their licenses to publish direct to the North American market on their own — I know, it seems so unlikely — but if I had good agents negotiating on my behalf in Japan, a solid editorial staff to translate comics, and capabilities in-house to do my own art adaptation, formatting, & printing — I don’t think I’d sweat it. We’d get started on new books. Maybe we have to look further afield — say we hire folks who know the Korean market, or we hire folks fully conversant with the dojinshi circles so we can find artists willing to work to spec on our scripts

Or say we contract with creators direct — put them on payroll for a set number of books, or option a first look at their work for a small sum, with an advance on royalties for anything we do decide to print.

[If we hadn’t burned our bridges with domestic comickers by offering a really bad deal a few years back, compounded by no marketing and mid-series cancellations, why, there is a lot of work to be done right here in North America on original comics that has nothing to do with manga or asia or licenses — I’m just sayin’]

There are many examples of comics imprints that have failed: CrossGen, Tokyopop, CMX, Broccoli, Aurora — and each failed for different reasons. Many over-reached and overspent. Some suffered from too little capital to begin with, or corporate overlords that refused to market the books, expecting that comics would somehow sell themselves just because they are comics.

Your first sign that a publisher is about to face significant challenges [up to and including bankrupcty and going under] is they fire staff. The deeper the cuts, the more experienced staff that they lose — the better the chance that their days are numbered.

You just can’t get that back. Even if you recover, and re-hire, it will be very rare that you’ll improve on the staff that you lost. One can come back from the brink, but never quite to the same heights.

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Maybe it’s just me: I have always felt that payroll, the right people in the right jobs, is the only investment that pays off in the end. Freelancers are fine — in fact, hiring freelancers is a great way to ‘interview’ people for a job: if they do good work, pull them into your organization and put them on the payroll.

If you invest in your staff, and they invest (emotionally, not just financially) in the company, then when the hard times come everyone pulls together and works their way out of it.

I would rather drive a company into the ground, personally borrow against my house & my life insurance, get that last $10,000 from a loan shark who is going to break my kneecaps — just to make one more week of payroll — rather than let anyone go.

But That’s Me. I know I can’t think of everything myself; I need all these smart people around me. As many smart people as I can find. And you never know when the part-timer who is working your mail room ends up being a grad student whose thesis is exactly what you needed to solve your problem — of course you won’t know if you fired her.

And obviously: You also won’t know unless you hired her — even if it’s ‘just’ and internship, or ‘just’ a part-time menial job: if you’re committed to identifying talent, promoting from within, working on training, and eventually integrating part-timers into your full-time staff, well, these are the real gems. So far as I know, no one does this kind of hiring anymore. One can’t work their way up a corporate ladder; those paths were closed and only Harvard or Wharton grads get the entry tickets. Andrew Carnegie would be stuck as a telegraph boy, John D. Rockefeller would have spent his days as someone else’s bookkeeper, Oprah would just be a newsreader on a local Tennessee radio station, H. Wayne Huizenga would just be a garbage man, Richard Branson merely a record shop proprietor.

Oh sure: these are all self-made industrialist and entrepreneurs. The rags-to-riches Horatio Alger Fairy Tales we all love to believe in. But no matter how self-directed, every self-made-mogul has, in their history – an educator, an investor, or an early employer who believed in this young genius and gave them a leg up, a boost to the next level — or even just the first $1000 of investment.

Speaking for myself: I would be overjoyed to be put out of business by someone who rose up through my organization and ended up doing the job better than I ever could. I would be as proud as any parent.

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In each of my parables that opened the post, an initial and ongoing outlay of cash means access to resources or shortcuts that would otherwise not be available. And even when you know what you’re buying [a shortcut to bypass the toll road] you occasionally get bonuses from your employees that you never counted on [free apples!]

You’ll never get all you can from your “associates” unless you commit to them first – put ‘em on the payroll. The investment will pay off over time.

Only in an age of nigh-immortal corporations has my second point been lost: the life-work of any craftsman is not just the craft, but in raising the next generation. Trump has permanently poisoned the term, but there is value in apprenticeship: in training not only your successor but also your future competitors. In a world where interns and part-timers hold only those roles not filled by consultants and freelancers — and the whole business is run like an elaborate temp agency — there is no craft, only maintaining the status quo.

We need a world run by craftspeople — not accountants.

If you own the shop, if you run the company:

Find the best people, and put them on payroll. Find promising people, and lock them in. Love them. Train them. Shape them. – And listen to them; if they’re good enough to hire, hell, they’re smart enough that you should always repect their opinion even if you know they’re wrong [at least this year… next year everything you think you know should be tossed out the window]

Like I said: I’m not that smart. I need as many smart people as I can find to help me, and that’s the only investment that will pay off in the long run.

Need another parable? Twitter — the service now known as Twitter — wasn’t the original business; hell, it wasn’t even on the radar. But a company once known as Odeo had enough smart people on payroll that when their original business model collapsed, a new business emerged almost despite corporate ‘oversight’ and interference. Next time you hire a freelancer, consider that you might in fact be giving that next Twitter-equivalent to someone else…