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Contract labor

Hiring Your Staff

Posted on Friday, February 22, 2013 3:53 PM

Self-publishing is something of a misnomer. The process of taking a book from ﬁrst idea to a spot on someone’s bookshelf requires the help and talents of many people. The work used to be done by huge publishing houses. When you offer to self-publish, the responsibility for all the many tasks involved falls squarely on your shoulders. But you are already the author, the editor-in-chief, and the business owner. You cannot hope to sit isolated in your little home ofﬁce and do everything yourself, no matter how talented you may be. The success of your book will depend upon how well you assemble a team of assistants. Here’s a look at the staff I have assembled. Perhaps it will give you some ideas.

My most important hire was my husband. Of course he was already on board to give me moral support, but as time went on, he has taken upon himself three important roles. First, he is my travel agent. Second, he is my mail clerk. He’s much better than I at packing and wrapping, and he never seems to mind a quick trip to the post ofﬁce. I can count on him to mail out single book purchases or handle large book shipments. And third, he is my ofﬁcial photographer. He also comes with the advantage of being inexpensive. His salary is $1.00 a year, augmented by clean laundry, home-cooked meals, and endless affection and gratitude.

My business plan recognized that I would need to hire a design artist to create the book cover and a layout expert to make sure that the ﬁnal book meets the exacting standards of the publishing world—page numbers, attractive fonts, spacing, chapter titles, and ﬂourishes all in place. Since both those areas are way beyond my expertise, I hire a design team through the production company who contracted to produce the physical book. My covers and book trailers come from a cover artist. A note here: Tax experts refer to these people as "contract labor. and yes, their services are business deductions.

Many people are not trained to handle money efﬁciently. I certainly wasn’t. My ﬁrst lesson came when a friend of a friend bought a book from me and handled me a check. When I looked at it the next day, I found that she had made it out to Katzenhaus Books. I took it to the bank, only to have it rejected. I couldn’t cash it because I didn’t have an account in the name of Katzenhaus Books. I could either hunt the person down and ask them to write another check (embarrassing!) or open a business account as Carolyn Schriber, DBA (doing business as) Katzenhaus Books. Since there was a real possibility that other checks would follow the same pattern, I went ahead and opened the account. A good move, as it turned out, since the account came with an associated credit card that lets me keep business purchases separated from household purchases. It also provided safe direct deposits for royalty payments.

At about the same time, I realized that I needed to be able to take book orders on my website, which in turn meant I needed to have a credit card manager. Despite what you may have heard, most people trust PayPal to handle their credit card purchases. The service they provide is the easiest—and the safest—way to handle such charges. I’ve never had a PayPal charge that was not paid in full, and the company is quite good about forwarding customer information. They charge only a couple of percentage points on each transaction, and those are pennies well spent in terms of convenience. Granted, occasionally I get a “phishing” attack on my account, asking that I send in my bank account number, but since all such requests are by deﬁnition fraudulent, there is no real danger of an account being compromised. Further, PayPal is very good about tracking down the perpetrators if you send them copies of any such e-mails. I use their services constantly without problems.

When Beyond All Price began to make a lot of money —not a fortune, but more than I ever expected—I sought more help with money management. A ﬁnancial advisor helped clarify the best uses for unexpected windfalls. He found ﬂexible investment ideas that helped preserve the principle while providing a way to start earning interest on the money. He also introduced me to an absolute necessity—an accountant who could help me organize my records and deal with the tax complications that come with self-employment taxes and irregular income schedules.

Somewhere along the line, I received an e-mail from a would-be film maker, asking whether I had protected my ﬁlm rights to the book and if they were for sale. At that point, I had no idea. But I quickly learned that I needed the advice of an intellectual property lawyer to guide me through the intricacies of formal copyright registration and to prepare a simple options contract that would guard against anyone snatching my story and proﬁting from turning it into a movie without my knowledge.

So there are the people I needed in order to “self-publish” a single book. Even I am surprised at how many there are: travel agent, mail clerk, photographer, design artist, layout expert, production company, printer, web host, banker, credit card manager, ﬁnancial advisor, accountant, and lawyer. Each of them deserves partial credit for any success my book has achieved. If you’re beginning this same process, start now to identify the staff that can help you along the way.

Portions of the above blog have been taken from my book, "The Second Mouse Gets the Cheese: How to Avoid the Traps of Self-Publishing," available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple iBooks, and Smashwords.com.

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