I wonder what it would take to start up a publishing company?
Publishing doesn't mean all that much when Amazon has a massive share of the market.
Amazon sells 50%+ of print books and 75%+ of Ebooks.
And really, anyone can sell on Amazon.
If you just used Amazon's distribution network to sell books, you could make a deal with printing companies and sell them yourself on Amazon. Of course, I'd be shocked if you managed to make something profitable.
Self-publishing is simply the future.
Sometimes, people talk about how physical book sales are still 10x more than kindle book sales, but that ignores two important realities:
1) Print books are more expensive
and resellable simply MUST be sold at a higher price than kindle books;
and 2) An author must sale way more print books to make a proper income.
2 is especially important, as it essentially guarantees self-published full time authors will eventually outnumber traditionally published full time authors.
For example, say John Doe wants to be a full time author, and to go full time, he needs to hit $60,000 in income.
With a traditional publishing model, his book might sell for $20, and as a first time author, he might get $4 per copy sold. In order to make $60,000, he has to sell 15,000 copies, or $300,000 worth of books.
With say, the Amazon model, he can sell at $9.99 and get about $6.90, meaning he only has to sell ~8700 ebooks, or $87,000 in merchandise.
Needless to say, its easier to sell a $10 product than a $20 product, all else being equal.
He only has to sell about 60% of the number of books, and he can do it at 50% of the price.
The biggest issue is the marketing. If you can do the marketing yourself, you're set.
