Becoming The Overman

EVER SINCE I was a little kid, I've always wanted to have my own publication company. Now, it seems like I have the material to make that dream a reality.

Back when I was writing my first stories, like a crappy middle school edition of The Artmaster, I wanted to have something underneath my name that explained who the publisher was. So, I called it "Pickle Publications." It may sound odd, but my mother's nickname for me as a child was Pickle, because "sometimes I'm sour and sometimes I'm sweet." Don't patronize me; it sounded good so I used it. Later, when I tried to collaborate with Samantha Snyder on The Echo, I created another company in my head called "S & W Publications." Of course, she decided that she really didn't want to co-write a novel in high school and "S & W Publications" sort of fell flat. Really, they were just things I played with in my head to make myself feel more professional. Like if there were a story I was writing based on the Flash or something like that, I'd say it was a "Detective Comics Publication," although I knew that DC Comics hadn't hired me for the job or anything. Like I said, it just made me feel like a pro.

Now, however, I'm in a position where I really do think I could make money -- easy money -- off of a publication company. You see, when I put Killing Samuel Queen in proper manuscript format, I had to include my publishing company on the title page. Just to have something there, I wrote what I most recently concluded as a neat title, "Fantasist Publications." I felt like it best described the essence of my stories in one nice, made-up word. But after finishing the stageplay, I realized how much money I could make simply selling the script to local high schools. Allow me to fill you in on the numbers.

To perform a play you need a script. You can get them out of catalogues or on-line. These scripts are VERY expensive to acquire, even for lesser known writers and plays. For instance, my first play I acted in was a crappy rip-off of Clue called Death of a Doornale. Not very well known at all, but each script cost $20 -- in other words, that's an automatic $20 per main character in the play, which there were about eight of. Each performance cost $250, and most high school plays are performed three times (that's once on a friday, and twice on a saturday). If my math serves me well, that adds up to about $810 for just one high school to be able to perform one play. Seem like alot of money? Let's continue...

Say that, out of all the cities and towns in the United States, only one per state performed Death of a Doornale that particular semester. That's $40,500 off of one play in one semester. And what work did that publication company have to do to earn that money? Send you the scripts in a box, and you send back the money. It's that simple. To add onto that, if a script was damaged or torn during perfomance, the rental fee of $20 doubled to $40 -- in other words, you paid for them to make a replacement script. And this is just pretending that the publication company only owned this one play, and that one play only got 51 showing in a semester. That's 51 showing out of the thousands upon thousands of potential high schools in the United States, which is assuming that we don't even try to sell to colleges or personally owned theatres. I mean, for such low goals, the profits seem out of this world!

I'm a little tired right now, but in a nutshell this is no sweat off my back if no one buys it or if it fails. But if it succeeds, well, I may just not need to worry about college money for the rest of my life. Or, perhaps, I may not even need to worry about college at all. So here I am, the Overman as C.E.O. and founder of Fantasist Publications! Yippee!

Posted by C. Nicholas Walker on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at 2:28 AM | Permalink