Entrepreneurship
Books and resources for building better entrepreneurs.
Publishing for founders
Business writing has a credibility problem. Too much of it is one anecdote stretched across two hundred pages, and readers have learned to be suspicious.
The books we are interested in are the ones that tell you what something actually cost — the failed launch, the co-founder who left, the year of revenue that went nowhere. Two projects have carried that intent for us: The Entrepreneur’s Manifesto and So… you want to start a social enterprise?.
Social enterprise in particular is under-served by publishing. There is abundant writing on venture-backed growth and very little on building an organisation that has to be financially sound and accountable to something other than a shareholder.
Every independent creator is a small business
This is the part that connects to everything else we do.
An author who self-publishes is running a business: managing production costs, choosing suppliers, setting a price, deciding where to spend a limited budget, and doing all of it while trying to remain a writer. An illustrator taking commissions is doing the same thing with a different product.
Most of the advice available to them is written either for artists who would rather not think about money, or for founders who have never made anything. Neither is much use.
Where the money goes
We say this on our editing page and it is worth repeating here, because it is a business decision rather than an artistic one: if you can only afford one thing, buy the edit. A cover sells the first copy; the writing sells every copy after it, through reviews and word of mouth and readers who finish the book and go looking for the next one.
Owning what you pay for
When you commission work, check what you are actually buying. Our cover illustration rates include full rights and the source files, because a cover you cannot use on a poster without a second invoice is not a cover you own. Not every supplier works that way, and the difference rarely appears in the headline price.
Reaching more than one market
Translation is one of the few investments that can give a finished book a genuine second launch — new reviews, new press, new readers who never saw the first release. For an independent title, that second life is often worth more than the first.
Working with us
Whether you are writing about entrepreneurship or running one, the practical route is the same. If you have a manuscript, see submissions. If you have a project that needs production work — editing, covers, illustration, lettering or translation — that is what our services are for.
And if you simply want to talk through where to spend a small budget for the biggest effect, get in touch. That conversation is free, and we would rather have it before you have spent the money than after.
Why a comics publisher writes about business at all
It is a fair question. The answer is that we have made most of the mistakes available to a small independent press, and the ones that hurt were rarely creative.
They were mistakes about rights we did not read carefully, about spending on the visible thing instead of the important one, and about assuming a finished book would find its own audience. None of that is specific to publishing. It is what happens to anyone building something small with limited money and more enthusiasm than process.
If any of that is useful to you, it is yours. We would rather the next independent creator lost less to it than we did.
Have a story to tell?
Send us the manuscript, the script, or the sketch on a napkin. We will tell you honestly what it needs.