Novel Creation Process: Become a Publisher

By Cody Leet

To Self-Publish or not. If you do, here is how you do it.

▢ Pick a publisher name
There are many articles on publishing under a business or just your name. Both are viable. However, having a business allows you to separate personal from author transactions cleanly and affords other benefits:
  1. An LLC offers some legal protections. For example, if you are sued for defamation because of a mention in your book.
  2. The business is easily transferable to your family should something happen to you.

If you opt to go this way, you need to think of a name that has not been used before in your State. You will want to run a google search with this to find where to do this:

"business name search state of <yourstate>"

▢ Open a bank account
There are many options here from local to online. I have no opinion either way. All you need is your EIN and you can get an account the same day.

It's a good idea to have this to separate your business transactions from your personal transactions. This will help a lot at tax time.

▢ Get an EIN (Tax number)
The EIN number is the social security number for your business. You need this to perform many tasks, such as opening a bank account or publishing in Amazon.

You can request one directly from the IRS here:

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/apply-for-an-employer-identification-number-ein-online

Or, if you used a service like MyNewCompany to set up your business, they can do this for you as part of their package. That's what I did.

▢ Establish an LLC
I set up my publishing company in 30 minutes by using a firm to do the paperwork. Here is the company I used:

http://www.mynewcompany.com/

It cost $200 plus state fees. However. they provide a service that reminds you when other paperwork needs to be submitted, such as annual minutes. This is an invaluable service to us authors that want to write, and not

▢ File Taxes
This part is never fun, and I'm no accountant, so I cannot give any kind of real advice here. But here is a link that was given to me by the Creative Girls Adventure Book Club that you might find useful.

A Tax Cheat Sheet for Kindle eBook Self-Publishing