Register a Company Name

(This is the 7th installment of my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

When you publish an ebook, you'll have to identify who is publishing it. Publishing is a business and by publishing a book you are going into business for yourself.
 
You might say Steve Poling Publishing, but why should you publicize me? Instead, come up with a cool name for a publishing company. When you come up with a cool name, google it and make sure nobody else has something close.

Run it past some friends to get their reactions, because it's really easy to not-see problems with the name. I have a friend who came up with a cool name for a company that just happens to differ by only one letter from a slang term for an unnatural sexual act.

Once you've got a name you like, you have to register that name. How will you register the name depends upon your jurisdiction and how you want to organize your publishing company. Maybe you want to organize your publishing company as a multinational corporation. Get a lawyer and ask him what to do.

To start a little smaller, you can organize as a sole proprietorship and file for what I call a DBA. The letters stand for "Doing Business As." This probably won't need a lawyer. It depends upon your jurisdiction. In Michigan all you need to do is fill out a form, give it to the County Clerk with a fee and get approval. I suppose they check to make sure someone else doesn't already have that same name. (Just for laughs, why not try to file "Ford Motor Company" and see what happens.)

If some MBA tells you different, believe them instead.

Once you've got the name you are going to publish under, get ready to use it in a number of places. Starting with your ebook's metadata.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Free Will And Madmen

This world sees violent, evil acts by murderous individuals.

When the evil is particularly heinous we seek to assign blame. Someones flew airplanes into buildings? Someone shoots up a school? Never let a crisis go to waste.

A headline crystallized my thinking: "What if nobody or nothing is to blame for ...?" (I take pains never to utter the name of anti-martyrs, lest the repetition of these nobody's names encourage like-minded losers.) When a crime is sufficiently horrendous, the mind recoils and we think, "surely, the perpetrator must be mad."

Maybe, or maybe not. I have no desire to understand evil as much I have a desire to eschew it, punish it, and prevent it where possible. Then kill it.

The notion which stuck in my craw is "blame." If we believe that men are mere automata set into motion by forces outside themselves, then those forces which bring about criminal acts are to blame. But if we think that men are free moral agents, and if we hold men responsible for their criminal acts, then "blame" rests on the shoulders of the perpetrator.

We can never say, "nothing or nobody is to blame," because we can ALWAYS say the perpetrator is to blame. Even when the perpetrator is a madman.

Makers versus Takers

Depending upon how you look at it, this fat cat represents either a corporate tycoon--one of the 1% who gets his GOP buddies to vote subsidies to his business and swing sweet-heart deals his way.

Or if you swing the Democrat way this fat cat represents a welfare queen who's never worked a lick in her life and is just riding the gravy train nursing at the public teat.

A pox on both your houses. I'm for the Whigs.

This morning an email arrived at my inbox from Sarah Hoyt who is most definitely NOT a poopy-head. Her ire was raised by some concern troll on another blog and this moved her to utter some inescapable truths. It is not safe to utter inescapable truths.

When she said "The 'government' is not some disinterested entity run by angels," I was reminded of a debate between Milton Friedman and Phil Donohue about greed wherein Friedman points out that government officials are not angels.

At this writing, publishing is in transition. Certain fat cat publishing companies have enjoyed joint monopoly powers that they have wielded to their own advantage and not necessarily to the advantage of the reading public or those who write books.

When cats get too fat they cannot catch mice and find alternate sustenance. Like using the government to hobble the thinner, faster cats.
Independent publishers and writers have the means to circumvent fat cat publishing companies who will use any means necessary to save their phoney-baloney jobs.

Sarah Hoyt is has written down inescapable truths that are most definitely worthy of your time. I most strongly suggest you read them. She believes the future hangs in the balance.