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How books get published: a brief overview
Alistair Hodge • 8 July 2022
A really concise guide for authors
Hundreds of thousands of new book titles get published around the world every year. In the UK the majority are published by commercial publishers, who need to sell enough copies at a profit in order to keep in business. But do all published books make a profit for their authors and publishers? Certainly not. Indeed, I know of book titles that have sold fewer than 20 copies over time: clearly such books lend credence to that hoary old saying: “[Publishing] ... the most pleasing way to lose money ever devised.”
Brief legal bit: authors own all of the rights to their intellectual property: copyright as it’s known, was always a property right in English common law. Where a publisher accepts a manuscript for publication the author either sells or more usually grants or ‘licenses’ their copyright to the publisher by means of a publishing contract. In return for being allowed to sell copies of the published work for profit, the publisher will usually pay a proportion of those sales revenues back to the author in the form of a regular royalty payment. A time-honoured process, and the bedrock of the publishing industry.
There are perhaps four main routes to market for such books.
1. Manuscript is complete: publisher accepts it
To many people this seems the most obvious way forward. One writes what one believes is a sure-fire best-seller. A literary agent or editorial director at a publishing house agrees; the author gets a lucrative contract, perhaps even a cash advance; the book gets published, and everyone dances merrily away from the book launch party as everyone’s bank balance swells. Such scenarios certainly do occur.
[How it works: Author has a manuscript ready to go; a publishing contract is signed with a publisher; author usually receives a percentage of sales receipts in the form of a ‘royalty’ payment, often twice a year.]
2. Author is commissioned to write something specific
This has always been a ‘thing’ since printing was developed in the fifteenth century, and it has become the norm in many parts of the publishing ecosystem. It makes perfect sense in a commercial world: the publisher wants to have a book on their lists, say, on the Kings and Queens of England. The publisher has a fairly specific idea of what they want: the book might be part of a series and therefore the manuscript needs to conform to series style; or they might want it written in a specific way, for a particular type of audience; a certain length, etc. etc. The only realistic way in which the publisher can get exactly what they want is to ask a reputable author to write it, in effect to order.
[How it works: Publisher issues contract and ‘commission brief’ to author, perhaps via an agent; author might receive a one-off payment, or royalty, or perhaps both.]
3. Literary agent acts as intermediary
Perhaps most common in fiction publishing (fiction publishing represents less than 20% of the UK market by sales volume, by the way), this is where an agent acts as an intermediary, perhaps spotting writing talent and supporting that author to prepare a manuscript for a specific publisher, in effect acting as a commissioning editor while also coaching the author in terms of writing style and quality.
[How it works: Author and agent both have stake in sales success of book; mostly likely, both parties receive a percentage of sales revenue by way of royalty; author might well receive a cash advance in anticipation of future sales.]
4. Self-publishing: yes, self-publishing can be profitable
Where an enterprising author sees market potential in their work, there is no absolute necessity to hand over that potential commercial success to a publisher. The principal things of value that publishers can bring to an author’s work are a) editorial expertise and b) marketing/sales reach. Thus, if an author entrepreneur is confident of their text, and is able to create sales channels themselves, then publishing the work in their own name – self-publishing – can make a lot of sense because the author retains all of the sales revenue and full control of the process, including editorial, design, cover, retail price, etc. For profitable books, this can work.
[How it works: Author retains copyright; most likely the author pay for the parts of the publishing process they cannot do themselves, e.g. typesetting, or design, or editing – Lexisbooks can help! Author pays all costs, and retains copyright and all sales revenue.]
Unprofitable books
Of course, some books never make a profit for anyone.
Some large commercial publishers play the odds: they publish a dozen books, and if one of those turns out to be a runaway success it can subsidise those that never quite made it. If a publisher makes too many duff guesses, then it could spell financial ruin, for there is no surer way to lose money than to print thousands of copies and see them lanquish – at high cost – in the distributor’s warehouse.
A third category: not for profit
What if a book falls into the category of “wow, that is worth publishing, but goodness me the market for that is tiny”?
One recent example I typeset serves as an example. It was an enormous tome of local history about a Yorkshire town. Perhaps fewer than 100 locals will ever buy a copy of what turned out to be an almost 1,600-page two-volume tome. The text is a masterpiece of scholarship, a work of record, hugely worth publishing so that for decades to come people can refer back to it. Those 100 sales will never cover more than a tiny proportion of the costs of production; yet it was published successfully to critical acclaim.
Such books – and I could give dozens of examples – are never really designed to make a profit. Yet they deserve to be published, and can be. One just needs to be cunning about how it is done. Look out for my forthcoming blog piece on tried-and-tested ways to get such books to market.
I joined the publishing industry in 1984, when I established a non-fiction (history) publisher in northern England. Back then, all photography was on film: a light-sensitive emulsion on a clear cellulose ‘film’ base. Fortunately I had access to my father’s Canon A1 (35mm) with a host of lenses, and I loved exploring its possibilities. Over time, new and better film cameras came along, until I paid around £4,000 (c.1998) for a Mamiya medium-format set-up (those beloved then of wedding photographers). Some of our best reviewed and most beautiful history books used images captured with that heavy old thing. It weighed a ton. I remember in 2004 when I literally ran amid rapidly failing light halfway up a hill to the top of Addingham Moor near Ilkley in Yorkshire to photograph some ancient stone carvings. Aching shoulder and legs; nice photograph. Happy days. Going digital Digital cameras were around at the beginning of this century, but their quality was initially very modest. A Fuji proved an unwise early purchase. A Canon 5D was a much better investment when it came along in 2005 or 2006. That was a true turning point, as for the very first time digital photographs using reasonably priced commercially available kit were unequivocally superior to their film equivalents. Roll on 15 years and an iPhone 13 Pro Max is my next revolution, with astonishing results that produce the best quality with least amount of effort that I have ever experienced. I can foresee entire books being illustrated using such photographs. The cute relief carving (late medieval) of a Derbyshire lead miner that you can see above is one such image, snapped using standard settings on my iPhone. The quality, detail, resolution and sharpness are remarkable here, because the church interior is always black dark, and I made no camera adjustments, just point and shoot. The best modern photographic kit is the best that people have ever had, even taking into account the early large-format landscape plate cameras that were so advanced in their day. The importance of quality repro When it comes to reproducing photographs in books, however, cameras are merely the starting point. Reprographics – or ’repro’ – is the art f making sure that the photographs will print properly, with correct colour balance, saturation, sharpness, and contrast. Good repro is vitally important. Back in the 1990s repro studios charged a fortune to produce colour-accurate film colour separations of film photographs. They would spend minor fortunes to ensure their monitors were colour calibrated, and invested in special, hugely expensive window glass to ensure that natural daylight was consistent within the studio. A digital photograph in a book is only as good as the repro, while a really skilled photo ‘retoucher’ can do absolute wonders to prepare initially poor quality images for reproduction in a book. Publishers still regard it money well spent to use a typesetter who can retouch their images to a high standard. Wallpaper, or visual metaphor? I have heard some contend that photographs in books are mere ‘wallpaper’, a distraction from the text that should properly be regarded as the only thing of importance. I never subscribed to this view, for a well judged photograph accompanied with informative insightful captions can tell ‘a thousand words’, as it were. Metaphor might seem an unusual word to use, yet it seems apposite. A metaphor is a linguistic scheme that evokes emotions, prompt mental images and most importantly associations between the actual words and what the reader takes from those words. Synapses fire, and both enjoyment and enlightenment result in the minds of readers. This associational relationship can be even more powerful with photographs, which is largely why publishers spend such inordinate time and resources when choosing a cover image. For an image can convey a whole set of visual and mental imagery that can enhance, modify or qualify the meaning that each reader and observer takes from the whole. A beautifully written text with judicious photograph imagery can enhance each other’s appeal, and for publishers the appeal of the book as a whole.
There is nothing more jarring to experienced book designers than a badly laid out book. Those tight margins; the restricted inter-line spacing (leading); or the unfortunate use of Calibri or some unsightly free typeface. Sigh ... Timeless book design Elegance of design – both of type itself and of the page – remains as pleasing to the eye as it did to the very first book printers half a millennium ago. Publishers know this, too, for badly designed books can be deeply unsatisfying to read: readers are less likely to purchase, finish and cherish their publications. There is a clear market imperative in really good design. Surprisingly, aesthetically pleasing page design has changed barely at all. It was pretty much the same for printer/publishers such as Gutenberg (Germany, 1450s) or Caxton (England (1480s) as it is to discerning publishers and readers today. The cutting-edge fifteenth-century technology they used was very different, of course, with individual metal letterforms having to be placed manually and painstakingly, line by line, within wooden page-sized frames. Yet, the design principles were largely the same as they are today. Indeed, in recent decades page design theorists have analysed some of those very first printed books to reveal the secrets of their longevity and their elegance. Technologies of text Today, typesetters are blessed with some remarkable software. Over the last forty years even inexpensive word processors such as Microsoft’s ubiquitous Word are endowed with wide-ranging functionality, enabling amateur and professional writers, editors, self-publishers and typesetters alike unprecedented power to manipulate book-length texts. Indeed, I often show my Publishing students how easy it can be to work with text of half a million words or more. My book production career has seen everything from golfball typewriter, WordPerfect 5.1 and Ventura Publisher in the 1980s, to bromide CRC and film imagesetters in the 1990s, through to Quark and now InDesign in the 2020s, and lots more besides. Modern software is immensely powerful, and experienced fingers can make it sing: the holy grails of perfect consistency, of quality assurance, of wonderfully precise spacing and typography, and ultimately of high-quality inexpensive typesetting are all within tantalisingly easy reach. The speed and efficiency would seem incomprehensible to those who felt that Linotype was state-of-the-art just half a century ago. Clumsy hands beware! There is a caveat, however – and it is a large one – namely, that improper or careless use by inexperienced hands can so easily wreak havoc on manuscripts. An ill-conceived ‘search and replace’ can introduce a thousand errors in the blink of an eye; the ‘local formatting’ buttons of bold or italic can introduce a messiness and muddle of code that can be horrendous to fix; text can be ruined; and more errors introduced than corrected via on-screen editing in the wrong hands. A subtle synthesis of ancient and modern Like page design, editorial principles remain timeless, with the work of experienced editors and proofreaders being invaluable to the quality of the book and to the reputation of the publisher. In both spheres – editorial and typesetting – the true modern way is to synthesize the ancient and the modern, subtly, carefully and deferentially. Modern tech is marvellous, as are the time-honoured principles of great design and editorial care. If typesetters use a synthesis of both, then truly beautiful, timeless books can result. If you are interested in any ideas contained in this opinion piece, do get in touch via email, or comment below.
