What Are Book Publishing Companies?

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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.