Publishing
Based on Wikipedia: Publishing
The Gatekeepers and the Revolution
Five companies control eighty percent of the books Americans read. Let that sink in for a moment. Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan—these are the gatekeepers who decide which stories reach millions and which manuscripts gather dust in rejection piles.
But here's what makes publishing fascinating: it's an industry in the middle of the most dramatic transformation in its five-hundred-year history, and most people haven't noticed.
Publishing, at its core, is simply the act of making information available to the public. That's it. Whether you're carving symbols into clay tablets, operating a printing press, or uploading a file to the internet, you're publishing. The word comes from the Latin "publicare"—to make public. But what started as a small, heavily regulated craft has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar global industry that shapes how we think, learn, and understand the world.
How We Got Here
For most of human history, publishing was rare and controlled. In medieval Europe, monks painstakingly copied manuscripts by hand, and the Catholic Church held tight control over what could be reproduced. Publishing a book without approval could get you executed.
Then came Johannes Gutenberg.
His printing press, developed around 1440, didn't just make books cheaper—it made censorship nearly impossible. Once you could print thousands of copies quickly, ideas spread faster than authorities could suppress them. The Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment—none of these would have happened without mass printing. Publishing became dangerous. And profitable.
By the nineteenth century, publishing houses emerged as the organized businesses we'd recognize today. They took on the financial risk of printing books, paid authors royalties (a percentage of each sale), and developed distribution networks to get books into readers' hands. This model worked beautifully for about a hundred and fifty years.
Then came the internet.
The Big Five and How They Work
Today's mainstream publishing industry is dominated by massive corporations. Penguin Random House alone commands more than twenty-five percent of the global consumer book market. They're owned by Bertelsmann, a German media conglomerate that most Americans have never heard of but that influences what they read every day.
The business model is straightforward but brutal. A publisher accepts a manuscript, and in exchange, the author signs over certain rights—the right to print, distribute, sometimes translate. The publisher then covers all costs: editing, cover design, printing, marketing, distribution. They pay the author a royalty, typically between seven and fifteen percent of the book's price. Sometimes they also pay an advance—money upfront that the author doesn't have to return even if the book flops, but which gets deducted from future royalties.
Because publishers bear all the financial risk, they're extraordinarily picky. The vast majority of manuscripts submitted to major publishers get rejected. We're talking rejection rates above ninety-nine percent. To even get your manuscript in front of a publisher, you typically need a literary agent, and getting an agent is its own gauntlet of rejection.
This selectivity has consequences. It means mainstream publishers tend toward safe bets—books similar to what's already selling, authors with existing platforms, sequels to proven successes. It's why you see so many celebrity memoirs and why breakout debut novels feel like small miracles.
The Attempted Merger That Shook the Industry
In November 2020, something remarkable happened. ViacomCBS announced it would sell Simon & Schuster—the third-largest American book publisher—to Penguin Random House. If completed, this merger would have created an absolute publishing behemoth, consolidating even more power in fewer hands.
The United States Department of Justice said no.
They filed an antitrust lawsuit in late 2021, arguing that the merger would harm competition, particularly in the market for authors' services. Think about it: when fewer publishers compete for manuscripts, they can offer authors worse deals. The government wasn't just protecting consumers; they were protecting writers.
In October 2022, a federal court blocked the merger permanently. It was a rare instance of antitrust enforcement actually stopping a major media consolidation, and it sent a clear message: there are limits to how concentrated book publishing can become.
Small Publishers and the Indie Alternative
Not all publishing happens through the Big Five. Thousands of small independent publishers—often called indie publishers—operate on the same basic model but with important differences.
Indie publishers typically don't pay advances. They can't afford the financial risk. But they're often more willing to take chances on unusual books, experimental writing, or niche topics that big publishers would pass on. Many important literary works first found life through small presses before being picked up by larger houses after proving their worth.
The tradeoff is distribution. Big publishers have established relationships with bookstores and libraries across the country. They can get their books onto shelves at Barnes & Noble, into airport bookshops, onto the tables at independent bookstores. Small publishers struggle with this. Their books might be excellent, but finding them requires more effort from readers.
The Vanity Press Problem
Here's where publishing gets murky.
A vanity press will publish anyone's book. That sounds democratic until you understand the deal: the author pays all the costs, surrenders rights to the publisher, and then often pays royalties on their own sales. It's backwards. The author takes on all the risk while giving up control.
These companies frequently engage in predatory practices. They charge inflated prices for low-quality services—poorly designed covers, minimal editing, printing errors. They promise marketing support that never materializes. And because the author has already paid, the vanity press has no financial incentive to actually sell books.
The Better Business Bureau has documented numerous complaints. Authors' unions in the United Kingdom have called for reform of the entire paid-for publishing sector. But vanity presses persist because they prey on a universal human desire: to be a published author.
Making matters worse, many vanity presses now brand themselves as "hybrid publishers" to escape their toxic reputation. True hybrid publishing does exist—legitimate arrangements where author and publisher share costs and risks—but distinguishing genuine hybrids from vanity presses in disguise requires careful research.
The Self-Publishing Revolution
And then there's the option that changed everything: self-publishing.
When an author self-publishes, they retain all rights. Every right. They control the cover, the pricing, the marketing, the distribution. They keep a much larger percentage of each sale—often seventy percent or more through platforms like Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, compared to the fifteen percent a traditional publisher might offer.
The tradeoff is responsibility. Self-published authors must either develop skills in editing, design, and marketing themselves, or hire professionals on a fee-for-service basis. There's no publishing house taking on risk or providing expertise. If the book fails, the author absorbs the loss.
But here's the thing: self-publishing has produced genuine phenomena. Books that traditional publishers rejected have gone on to sell millions of copies. The romance and science fiction genres have been particularly transformed—many bestselling authors in these categories are now self-published, earning more than they ever would have through traditional deals.
What makes this possible is print-on-demand technology. In the old days, printing a book meant committing to thousands of copies, storing them in warehouses, and hoping they sold. Now, a book can be printed when a customer orders it, one copy at a time, anywhere in the world. The economics of publishing have fundamentally changed.
Beyond Books: The Wider World of Publishing
Publishing extends far beyond books. Newspapers and magazines, journals and textbooks, catalogs and directories—all of these are forms of publishing with their own distinct economics and conventions.
Academic journals represent a particularly strange corner of this world. Researchers write articles, usually for free, since publishing is part of their job. Other researchers review those articles, also typically unpaid—this is the peer review process that validates scientific work. Then publishers charge universities enormous subscription fees to access the journals. It's a business model that has faced increasing criticism, with many arguing that publicly funded research should be freely available to all.
Textbook publishing is its own beast entirely. The global need for education means constant demand, and major publishers have responded by integrating their textbooks with online learning platforms. A modern textbook might come bundled with access codes, video lectures, interactive exercises, and testing systems. This vertical integration makes it harder for students to buy used textbooks or find cheaper alternatives—a strategy that has made textbook prices a recurring source of outrage among students and parents.
University presses occupy an interesting middle ground. Run by academic institutions rather than commercial interests, they focus on scholarly works that might never turn a profit but advance human knowledge. Oxford University Press, the largest university press in the world, has been publishing for over five hundred years.
The Franchise Machine
Some of the most profitable publishing happens around entertainment franchises. Consider Star Wars.
Ballantine Del Rey LucasBooks holds exclusive rights to publish Star Wars novels in the United States. That's not just one book—it's hundreds of titles, constantly expanding the universe, keeping fans engaged between films. Random House UK holds the same rights in Britain. These arrangements represent publishing as brand extension, storytelling as corporate strategy.
The same model appears with Harry Potter, James Bond, Doctor Who, and countless video game properties. The publisher isn't just selling books; they're selling continued access to beloved fictional worlds. A Star Wars novel doesn't need to stand on its own merits the way a debut literary novel does—it has a built-in audience of millions.
This is tie-in publishing, and it's extraordinarily lucrative. These multimedia properties get marketed aggressively across multiple channels simultaneously: books, games, toys, soundtracks, clothing, and social media campaigns all reinforcing each other. Sales frequently outperform standalone published works.
Green Publishing and the Environmental Question
Books have a physical cost. Paper comes from trees. Printing requires energy. Shipping books around the world burns fuel. As environmental consciousness has grown, so has interest in reducing publishing's ecological footprint.
Print-on-demand technology helps here too. Instead of printing thousands of books speculatively and shipping them to warehouses, books can be manufactured close to the customer when ordered. No unsold copies sitting in storage. No returns being pulped. Just-in-time production applied to literature.
E-books eliminate paper entirely, though they come with their own environmental costs—the energy consumption of data centers, the manufacturing and disposal of e-readers. The full lifecycle comparison between physical and digital books is more complicated than it first appears.
Accessible Publishing
Not everyone reads the same way. Some people need larger print. Others need books formatted for dyslexia, with specific fonts and spacing that make reading easier. Still others need Braille, or audiobooks, or digital formats compatible with screen readers.
Accessible publishing uses digital technology to produce multiple formats from a single source. A book marked up in Extensible Markup Language—that's XML, a standardized way of structuring digital text—can be automatically converted into large print, Braille, audio, and various e-book formats. What once required producing entirely separate editions can now be accomplished through automated transformation.
DAISY, which stands for Digital Accessible Information System, is a technical standard specifically designed for accessible publications. It allows readers to navigate through a book using a table of contents, skip to specific sections, and adjust playback speed for audio—features that seem simple but make an enormous difference for readers who can't use standard print books.
The Legal Framework
Publishing is fundamentally a legal act. The Berne Convention, an international agreement dating to 1886, establishes that publication requires the consent of the copyright holder. When you write something, you automatically own the copyright. Publishing is how you grant others access to your creation.
The Universal Copyright Convention defines publication as "the reproduction in tangible form and the general distribution to the public of copies of a work from which it can be read or otherwise visually perceived." That language—"tangible form," "general distribution"—matters enormously in legal disputes over who published what and when.
There's even a term for malicious non-publishing: privishing. This is when a publisher technically publishes a book but prints so few copies, with so little marketing support, that the book effectively never reaches readers. It's publication in name only. Why would a publisher do this? Sometimes contractual obligations require publication, but the publisher no longer believes in the book. Sometimes it's retaliation against a difficult author. The book exists but can't be found—a quiet form of suppression.
Where Publishing Goes From Here
The publishing industry is simultaneously ancient and constantly reinventing itself. The core act—making information public—hasn't changed since humans first scratched symbols into clay. But everything else is in flux.
Authors today face more options than ever before. Traditional publishing through the Big Five offers prestige, advance payments, and professional support, but demands surrendering control and accepting low odds of acceptance. Small publishers offer more personal attention but less marketing muscle. Self-publishing offers independence and higher royalties but requires authors to become their own businesses. Hybrid arrangements blur all these lines.
Meanwhile, the definition of publishing itself keeps expanding. Social media posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, video games, interactive websites—all of these are forms of publishing, making content available to the public. The line between creator and publisher has never been thinner.
What remains constant is the fundamental bargain: someone creates something, and publishing is how it reaches everyone else. Whether that happens through a multinational corporation or a single person with a laptop, whether the format is paper or pixels, whether the content is a scholarly article or a viral video—it's all publishing. It's all the ancient act of making things public, continuing to reshape how humans share knowledge and stories with each other.