What Are Book Publishing Companies?
Book publishing companies are corporations
that publish books, or make the information in a book available
to the public for consumption. The book publishing
company takes on the responsibilities of development,
marketing, production, printing, and distribution of the
book.
When a book is accepted by a publishing
company, there is a negotiation for the intellectual rights
over the book, as well as the royalties that the author would
receive for the book. There are issues with
intellectual rights. First of all, each country has
different laws when it comes to intellectual rights. It
should be made clear at the time which exact countries the
author plans on mainly selling his/her book in, and also what
rights the author would like to maintain within each
country. Also, with the internet, if there is a digital
version of the book, the author needs to ensure some kind of
universal global copyright disclaimer, even though there
currently are not too many laws and enforcements regulating the
unlicensed download of copyrighted material from the
internet. This poses a more complicated problem that will
need to be addressed in the upcoming years as more people being
to use the internet.
Once the decisions about the finances are
taken care of, the book is taken through the editorial
phase. In this phase, the staff of editors, artists, and
copyeditors will go through the book and start to edit the book
from the point of rough draft to the finished product.
The book may go through major or minor structural
changes. The editors may request that the author place
more detail on a particular topic. The degree of editing
and editor influence may depend on the author’s credibility and
reputation within the industry. It is likely that a more
well known author will have near total if not total control
over the editing process, while a lesser known author may be
subjugated to more editorial influence.
A good example of this author sovereignty is
with Anne Rice, a well known fictional author. Rice’s
fans became discontent with her work after she took a more
individualized approach to editing, often ignoring the
critiques of the editors of her publishing company. Rice
started to edit her own novels, from the beginning stages to
the end, and Rice’s fans became discontented with the lengthy
and wordy materials that would have normally been cleaned up by
a professional editor, but were instead left in the book.
Rice’s control over this publishing process is an example of
the kind of power and control that an author may obtain,
however most authors do not have this kind of control or clout
with their publishing companies.