The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know®

Professional publishing—sometimes called “STEM” for “scientific, technical, educational, and medical,” but which also includes books aimed at lawyers and accountants—moves a lot of its books by direct marketing to its audience and through conventions and conferences where their audiences gather and can be easily targeted.

Bookstore and other retail shelf space is shrinking at the same time that total title output is rising. The shift to online sales combined with the shrinking retail shelf space hurts the biggest publishers the most because their competitive advantage is largely built on their ability to put books on shelves at scale. Sales moving online could ultim

In addition to the proposal describing clearly what the book will be, it will also describe the author’s ability to help sell it. This will include a description of any “platform” the author has: ways he or she can communicate with potential readers (a blog, a newspaper column, or being in the public eye on any consistent basis). If the author has

Retailers and other sellers, like mail order or web catalogs, who sell books as a sideline to other merchandise that is more central to them, are increasingly important accounts, particularly to nonfiction publishers.

In 2005, before the proposition could be tested that Mobi would enable a real e-book market to develop because one format would suit multiple devices, Amazon bought Mobi—which later became the spine of the Kindle format—and took it off the market. Shortly thereafter, neither Amazon nor BN.com was selling e-books.

Why is this book focused primarily on trade publishing? We focus on trade publishing because it is the branch of the industry that touches the most people and garners the most public attention. It is where the bestsellers come from. Sometimes referred to as “consumer book publishing,” it is almost always the part of publishing people are talking ab

Today there are five major US consumer publishers capable of publishing books in all formats and in all topics and consistently delivering bestsellers. They are Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster.

First and foremost, Audible, now Amazon’s audiobook arm, is a technology company at heart, having started out in 1998, two years after opening its doors, by launching a digital audio player some four years before the iPod came out. It was limited in what it could hold but had the seeds of the company’s philosophy in effect to this day of uniquely e

As the publishing business has consolidated, particularly with big houses putting pressure on their editors to be expeditious, the time and bandwidth editors have for actually editing has diminished. That means that agents, who care deeply about the success their authors’ books will achieve, are doing more editing to maintain quality. The agents’ r

Mass merchants who sell books, including Costco, Walmart, Target, and others, are often reached through specialty wholesalers and are usually handled by publishers’ national account teams.