Thursday, September 25, 2014

Learning About My Publisher(s)


The more I learn about the Publishing Industry, the more I’m reminded of those Russian dolls that have layers within layers. Publishing is an old industry, with a lot of history and it has undergone lots of changes, many of which are happening right now with the ebook revolution. Here’s the gist of how my publisher operates, if you follow the chain up:

My novels will be published via the imprint, Thomas Dunne Books, founded in New York in the 1980s. They in turn produce about a quarter of the books printed by St. Martin’s Press each year, also based in New York and founded in the 1950s. St. Martin’s, in turn, is a division of the British mega-publisher Macmillan (one of the famous Big Six), which is based in London and was founded in the 1840s.

That’s right, the 1840s! They published authors such as Yeats and Tennyson. Macmillan is in turn owned by an even larger media corporation responsible for literary estates ranging from Salman Rushdie to Agatha Christie. And somewhere at the bottom of that mix, at the tail end of that lengthy story is…me. One author, writing one book at a time, hoping to add my own humble little verse to the larger play we call life. Whew! Bottoms up my friends, bottoms up. 


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