Publishing Cooperative

Regards the repayment of advances: it was a plot device in one of the movies I saw recently, "Serial" with Vanessa Ray (Ryan?) she plays Edie on Blue Bloods. Anyways in the movie she was a successful writer with a serious case of writer's block and the publishing company was complaining that she owed them the book or the return of the advance. They terminated their relationship and gave her X amount of time to repay the advance. She ended up releasing chapters of a new novel she worked on in partnership with her friend and the new series took off. The publishing company was very annoyed. They felt the book was THEIRS and not hers......which was funny because she was using the money she earned from that book to repay the publishing company.

In the fictional world I was trying to set up, it's not truly necessary for the company to make money, it just has to LOOK like it could make money. I was thinking that the hitman type could have this business set up and he could have various books written by hired ghostwriters printed through it, then he could use his illegitimate cash to buy the books and receive the royalties from the book sales, plus the publishing company could collect the fees. He could recycle the books he buys or donate them to literacy programs etc. He might end up spending $200,000 to earn $50,000 (or less) but the difference is the $200,000 is illicit and can't be spent legally while the $50,000 is legal and can be spent legally. Is it a "good" deal? Depends. I saw it as a long term play which could eventually bring in a dependable $150,000 or so per year after some up front capital costs.

It doesn't look like it will work...damn.

I saw the movie, "The Accountant" where Ben Afflects character takes payment in other forms such as baseball cards or comic books so that might be the way to go. Kind of hard to spend that if you need cash though. Maybe he can start out with cash and once he has $500,000 in cash hidden away plus he has a legit job somewhere, he can start taking payment in alternate forms.