The Future of Publishing

What is the impact of nontraditional sales on the trade book industry? This book has focused on how traditional trade publishing operates today within the confines of the historical functions of publishing companies. We’ve addressed the growth of e-book publishing by trade publishers and...

Bookselling, Marketing, and Sales

How does a book go from a publisher to a reader? Trade publishers, who are the biggest, the best known, and the focus of this book, are called that because they sell primarily through the book “trade,” which is bookstores, libraries, and the wholesalers—intermediaries...

From Idea to Book

What are agents and what do they do? Agents, also sometimes called “literary agents,” in the book business represent authors in their business interactions with publishers. The biggest publishers get nearly all their books through agents, so agents are effectively both scouts for new...

The Global Book Business

What are the various segments within the book business and how do they differ? The “book business” referred to in the title of this book is largely the trade book business in the United States. It seemed worth putting this segment of the overall...

Audiobooks

What is the current landscape of audiobook publishing? Audiobooks, whose first organized venture in the form of recordings for the blind came at the same time as mass-market paperbacks, are now coming into their own as the fastest growing segment of trade publishing, after...

The Book Publishing Business Model

How do trade publishers make money? Take, as an almost absurd example of this business model, the companies that merged in 2013 to become Penguin Random House (PRH)—in 2016 they are said by Publishers Weekly to have had €3.7 billion in revenues,...

Children’s and Young Adult (YA) Publishing

Why is children’s book publishing so often viewed as a world apart from adult publishing? You can tell if someone doesn’t work in children’s publishing if she can’t tell you the difference between the Caldecott and Newbery Awards. The American Library Association (ALA) awards...

E-Books

Although much of the e-book market and world is in flux, one thing is safe to say: the success of e-books is difficult for publishers and resellers to predict, and it has been from the beginning. If there is one thing the publishing establishment...

Bookselling in the Twenty-First Century—Amazon.com

How has Amazon influenced publishing? Although Amazon began identifying itself as “earth’s biggest bookstore” and pretty much only sold books for the first few years of its existence, it has clearly outgrown its roots. Nevertheless, for obvious reasons given our focus in this book,...

Some Publishing History

When were today’s major publishing houses founded? Although it was evolving, the trade book publishing business had remained largely the same for the first hundred years or so of the republic, until about a fifty-year period starting with the last quarter of the nineteenth...