Publishers

The inside of a publishing house on an academy campus. Many larger publishers might have offices that look similar to this, with a printing house and several printing machines, but many smaller publishers do not require office space to publish their works.

Publishers are businesses (run with teams or by individual people) that receive literary work and edit, produce, and distribute physical and digital copies of the literary work to be sold in markets of varying types. They vary greatly in size, with some publishers taking the form of multi-million dollar businesses (such as the big five publishers), whereas others involve makeshift operations sometimes led from one's home.

What publishers do

All publishers must go through several steps in order to properly prepare all literary work they receive for proper publication. Here are a few of the tasks publishers handle over the course of the modern publishing process:

• Marketing (including the researching of similar literary works published recently, referred to as "comps", that a work may be competing with)
• Editing (involving for the most part development of a work such that it aligns best with its target audience)
• Production (the physical composition and design of a work)
• Publicity (promotion of the work through media)
• Sales and Distribution (sending the work to various kinds of markets to be purchased)

This process sets literary works up for the highest chance of success in the modern book market and continues to be refined today.

Publishing Conglomerates

Publishing Conglomerates, otherwise known as "the big 5" in regards to publishers, are the five biggest publishing companies in the United States, listed here:

• Hachette Book Group
• HarperCollins Publishers
• Macmillan Publishers
• Penguin Random House
• Simon & Schuster

These companies are foreign owned, and books make for only a small fraction of their revenues.

Independent Presses

Any publisher not owned by "the big 5" is considered to be an independent publisher. These publishers are typically much smaller in size, but benefit greatly from the freedom to be ran in any way the owner desires, which allows for far more versatile variations of the typical publishing business, even down to running all operations by oneself out of one's own home.