/lit/ - Literature

>>23012025
production is easy, bureaucracy sucks, marketing is hard.

you could feasibly make nice perfect bound books at home using a $300 inkjet printer, a $500 hot melt machine, a $100 paper guillotine, and a high-quality paper stock. setting up a shopify/wordpress/etsy store is cheap if not free, and books ship for $4 anywhere in the US via media mail. all told your start-up costs are under $1k, your monthly recurring costs are in the neighborhood of $20, and your per-unit cost is around $2.

this doesn't account for other recurring costs imposed by e.g. tax and legal compliance. unless you want to be personally liable in the event of a libel suit, you need to publish under an llc, which (depending on your state) can cost a few hundred bucks a year to maintain. you'll also have to either do the quarterly tax filings yourself (bad idea) or hire an accountant, which will run you $500+ per filing.

assuming you sell 100 books a month for $15 each, your quarterly revenue is $4,500. your quarterly costs, if we're generous, are:
>raw materials: $600 (at $2 per book)
>shipping: $1,200 (at $4 per book)
>web storefront: $225 in merchant fees (assuming a 5% take, which is relatively low) plus $60 in flat monthly fees
>tax filing: $500
>TOTAL: $2,585
which leaves you with just under $2k in revenue per quarter. if you put any amount of time into the project, you'll wind up making less than minimum wage.

i know what you're thinking: "well, i'll sell more than 100 books per month."

most sellers don't even hit that number, even with advertising -- a cost we haven't factored in yet. the successful small presses i know of leverage relationships with distributors and bookstores and/or english professors, who assign their books in classes.

on the distributor/bookstore side, almost everyone has multiple vendors that sell public domain books. they've built long-term, trusting relationships with those vendors, and are unlikely to switch. even if you were to win a distributor or bookstore over, you'd have to give them as much as a 60% cut of the sticker price, which would eat all of your profit margin.

on the professor side, for public domain work, they'll favor university press' critical editions, since the essays are models for students to follow. so, you'll have to write original fiction or poetry that's so compelling the professor puts it on their syllabus, thereby granting you a monopoly on a passing grade in their class. this is a viable business model, since you can expect a steady flow of ~50 students per professor to buy your book. so, you'll just need to write books that target left-leaning academics :^)

the real money is in e-books, where production and distribution are free. but you still have to pay the tax, legal, and marketing tolls. piracy will also eat into your sales, more so if you target literate audiences. there's not much money in this industry unless you're a mega-scale publisher with a strong network.

t. small press owner/operator

>>17919078
>No Country for Old Men
>The Seventh Seal
>Oldboy (2003)
>The Big Lebowski
>Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
>M (1931)

I think that film has surpassed literature in one big aspect that most apes whine about, accessibility. Any monkey can sit down and watch No Country for Old Men and get a general idea about what McCarthy was writing about but not all of them have the patience to sit through his prose. If anything it'll hopefully filter most of the apes and keep them arm's length from the nearest piece of literature.

>>17723346
This, then this >>17732743 delivering to a Vodoun witchdoctor outside old French town

>>17722381
I am the best across all of my higher-education-pursuing peers in my entire European country. Assume a normal distribution and see in what percentage I end up.

>>17722409
Reread my last point. I stopped fantasizing about publications once I understood that I wouldn't be able to contribute something of worth at this age. Even if I did manage to have an original thought, I could probably not fill two paragraphs with true substance at this age.

>>17723241
I'm in medicine and biotech research, indeed involved in academia. You may actually have a point somewhere in there.
Let me clarify that I don't exactly advocate for the purist, castrating, academic style of writing. The rules can be bend and broken if the writer is skilled enough to pull it off. However, this skill only comes through a time period of following them to a T, so that the writer can become intimate with their limitations. That's pretty advanced though; most "writers" assume that rules are there to be broken, and don't understand that they serve as guidelines that provide the highest probability of consistently writing high quality text. This in turn produces texts that are representative of the low-value, murky mess of streams of thought and uncategorized raw experience. As far as needless flatulent flare goes, I'll be rotting in the ground before I dilute a good script with a single unnecessary word.

Hmm, I'm writing a book and I'm thinking on what tense should the dialogue tags be. It's in first person
Ex.
"Hello," I say
"Hello,"I said

>>17167621
> Any philosophy written before Nietzsche is useless metaphysical speculation and so is everything written after him.
>t. sophomore

The Euthyphro remains the single best theological text ever written, and Plato’s philosophy of mathematics is hugely influential. Aristotle’s ethics are alive and well, as is his work on logic and rhetoric. His poetics are still taught in good writing programs as well.

When you get older, you’ll realize you aren’t the first person to think this, and you aren’t the first person to be proven wrong.

>be me, patrician
>shitpost all day across multiple boards, bumping the lowest of the low threads
>count reading threads and article links as my reading for the day
>haven’t touched a book in years

what's the ttitle /lit/ ?