I’m launching my publishing house and putting out my finished short stories soon and there’s just a ton to do! There’s things you never think about, so from one beginner business person to another, here’s my checklist (and yours if you’re indie publishing!) so far. (Don’t take any of this as gospel, I’m not a business law attorney and allllll this shit is new to me, so this certainly is not business or legal advice, just stuff you should look into 🙂
Name publishing house – Gremlin Industries (logo will be my baby monster Gremlin 🙂
Trademark search for the name and picture to make sure they aren’t taken.
File my publishing house as a d/b/a with my state (or do an LLC, but I’m just doing a d/b/a to start out).
File the trademark for my name as an author, for the business name and for the logo. Probably just for the state but at least look into federal too.
Figure out how much I’d have to make before I have to worry about filing quarterly taxes. (You have to file quarterly once you will owe $1000 in taxes for that year. If you have a day job, like me, you can count how much over in taxes you’ll be, as in what your refund would have been from your day job, and count that towards the $1000. Self employment tax is the 15.3% social security crap and then income tax, so a good bet if you make an average living from your day job is you’ll pay 40.3% taxes on your writing income. Good rule of thumb is save half of it and just expect that to go to taxes once you account for how much your day job withholding will cover.)
Get a host server and make my publishing house/author website (Includes buying the domain name and looking into all that SEO stuff for keywords… and figuring out finally what that SEO stuff is 🙂
Make a separate checking account for my d/b/a where all funds from writing and expenses will come from.
And that’s just off the top of my head :O But, you don’t have to do all these up front. You can get the stuff out there and then do this. All I can say is, when do indies with day jobs find time to write? 🙂
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