Update on Justice Divine

Blog!

Justice Divine now has a blog, which is just a quick placeholder I set up for her. She's also been making progress on her book. Today we had a conversational lesson of how a "flower" may grow and thrive even in the hard stone of business reality.

Computer Needs a Modem & Appeal for Donations

We can use help by getting a donated external 56K modem for an old Macintosh so she could get access to the Internet. (It is presently running OS 9, but with an ancient 14.4K internal modem. Do any ISPs even support 14.4K dial-up any more?) If you'd like to donate other new or old computer equipment, Justice could use her own system (rather than borrowing the old computer from me). We also have another author that could use his own system. Contact me if you have a bona fide offer to donate (not sell) working old computer systems. We're not a non-profit corporation, such as a 501(c)3, nor are we a charity. Yet your generosity would certainly be appreciated by the burgeoning creative principals we have in our project.

Publishing 101

Justice and I spoke today about the microeconomics of printing and publishing and selling books. We spoke about Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and what an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) means. The former is a requirement to calculate if you ever want to know your product's per-unit expenses. We definitely want to keep track of COGS, though, to make sure we're successful—thus ensuring we can do this again and again! The latter is a requirement if you ever want to sell the book through the channel of booksellers nationwide. We might do her first book as a limited edition, sold direct, which would mean that the latter is not a requirement for now.

With a call I got a price quote for a limited quantity of a short print run of books. From that, we spoke about price-per-unit and what we'd need to reasonably set as the product price to make back our costs. We also spoke about how the price might be similar or different for an e-download copy of the same product.

It was a good, up-front conversation early in the process. Many authors and artists only get educated regarding the economics and business aspects of creativity late in the process and are surprised in the final analysis of how money is involved in the final production of their work. So today we took a bit of time to speak about what it would take to e-publish, and how much it would take to small-print-run publish her work.

We also spoke about contracts, and retaining intellectual property rights (such as copyright) versus assigning rights as part of "Work-for-Hire." We are both agreed Justice will retain copyright and ownership of her own works in whatever relationship we move forward with. We'll work more on a revenue split model when we go forward than for me to "buy her out" as a publisher and own all her rights.

Justice is not a "softie" when it comes to protecting her work! She's quite eager to do a professional job and quite understanding of what it's going to take to be successful. She also is interested in making sure her work is properly valued.

While we are in close agreement on some ideas for initial packaging, publishing and pricing for a web-book sold over the Internet or small limited print run sold locally in the Bay Area, we have not made any formal decisions. Certainly we'd have to think quite a bit before we approach doing a full-scale print run or approached another publisher. It quite a dose of reality to deal with when you consider large-scale costs, inventory and channel management. We're still a way off from that conversation.

For today, there's a small new blossom: her very own first blog, which, admittedly, I set up on her behalf. Hopefully in the days ahead you'll be hearing more about her stories and her work process.

-Peter Corless.
petercorless | @ | mac.com
650-964-4276 (home office)