If you’ve ever seen someone drive down the street with a beautiful luxury car, or seen an unattractive person arm-in-arm with a woman who’s obviously a high-class prostitute, you’ve probably daydreamed about starting your own business. Lots of authors like the idea of being their own boss. After all, when you’re an author, you get to boss your characters around. You force them into uncomfortable situations, commit assaults against them, even murder them. It’s a rush and it can translate well to managing a workforce.

Of course, starting a company is an even bigger endeavor than writing a book. You have to consider things you may not have considered before, things like paying taxes or employees stealing from you because you didn’t get them a Christmas gift. So if you’re not sure this is the article for you, still read it to the end to boost our profile, but feel free to ignore it if you meet one of the following criteria:

1. You only want to publish one book in your lifetime just to prove to your bitch ex-spouse that you aren’t a complete failure.
2. You don’t like the idea of publishing the work of an author who’s clearly better than you.
3. You think everyone should be paid a fair wage, regardless of their work ethic or personal attitude toward you and the way you dress.

Before we start, a quick legal disclaimer: this advice is not coming from a legal professional, and any potential business ventures should abide by local laws and fire safety codes. The advice expressed in this video is not legally binding and may contain fictitious elements that belong to John Lazarus and not D&E Publishing, LLC. By listening to this disclaimer, you are absolving D&E Publishing, LLC of any wrongdoing or civil liability relating to workplace safety, including mixing and storage of dangerous chemicals, building evacuation preparedness and electrocution.

Now, if you’re intrigued by the prospect of a corner office and exotic strange, but still aren’t sure if starting a publishing company is right for you, I’m going to cover a few benefits and drawbacks.

Benefit 1: Reducing Legal Liabilities

The first question any author should ask themselves before they write a book is “Can anybody sue me if I write this?” Fiction writers are generally well protected, though going through someone’s trash to do character research can be a legal gray area depending on where in the process you intercept the garbage.

However, for nonfiction writers, especially in health-related fields, your personal liability becomes much greater. To give an example, I once wrote a weight-loss guide, and well, long story short, losing more than two liters of blood sometimes results in death. While jury nullification saved me in that instance, it’s better to avoid this entirely by starting an LLC. In this case, a lawsuit against your published materials can only go after the assets of the company and not you personally. So even if you get sued, you can usually offset the loss by taking snacks out of the breakroom or making one unpaid intern do all your accounting.

Benefit 2: Increasing Your Sense of Legitimacy

All authors go through an awkward infancy where they feel like a fraud. Most of you probably told a potential sex partner at a party that you’re an author, but once you clarified that you’re self-published, that person either walked away, laughed in your face or banged your slightly more attractive best friend. Having your own publishing company completely flips that dynamic. Pretty soon, half of the people at any party you attend will at least offer you third base if you promise to publish their terrible book of poetry.

Benefit 3: Collaborations and Licensing

But beyond sexual favors, you can also collaborate with legitimately great authors. And the legal powers of your company will prevent that person from stealing your work, taking all of the credit and riding that success to the New York Times bestseller list while you’re stuck making ends meet at Panera bread in Columbus, Ohio.

Also, now that you’ve got your own company, you can print, sell and profit from any book in the public domain. And while I may have overestimated the general public’s demand for James Fenimore Cooper, you could potentially make money without doing anything at all.

Drawbacks of Creating Your Own Publishing Company

Drawback 1: Startup Costs and Expenses

When I first started D&E Publishing in 2011, it was a great time to be a small business owner. Because of the housing crash, property was cheap. But the costs can sneak up on you. Things like fire extinguishers, printing costs for building maps that reveal evacuation routes, the dozens of extension cords you’ll need to plug all of your computers into the same outlet… that stuff adds up.

Drawback 2: Managing Employee Conflicts

Most businesses ensure worker compliance through sheer apathy. Employees having absolutely no investment in the success of their company means people put in the bare minimum, but in general they don’t actively try to sabotage the company. A publishing company is a different story.

You’ll be working with lots of creative types in your company: authors, editors, graphic artists, advertisers. These types of people strongly value their labor, which is generally bad for business. At the start, it seemed D&E Publishing could hardly go a month without an artist punching a prospective author in the mouth for rejecting their cover design. I even had to stop having office birthday parties because people kept being poisoned. It took me several years to learn that the anarchy that such an environment breeds requires the boss to rule with an iron fist and closely monitor employee conversations to ensure peace and harmony. But this kind of business authoritarianism is not for everyone.

Drawback 3: Workplace Accidents Are More Common Than You Might Think

Fans of the channel will know that D&E Publishing’s first office building went up in flames in 2021 due to siphoning electricity from a nearby building. Thankfully, the courts decided that no one could possibly be that negligent and it was clear that my former business partner did it as an elaborate way to commit suicide so fire insurance covered the loss.

But even if you are protected by the law, workplace accidents generally aren’t great for morale or productivity. I had three editors need to go on leave because of uneven stairs and two others need maternity leave because of a faulty toilet seat. In a literary landscape where book trends come and go in the snap of a finger, you can’t fall behind.