one of the Creative Industries

what does the publisher do? Charlie Stross' publisher notes We provide a range of functions for authors, including copy editing the manuscript, commissioning a cover, arranging [ISBNs], printing the books, exporting data to bibliographic agencies, making sell-in material, selling the book to major retail customers at head office level, selling the book to individual bookshops through our sales force, planning and executing consumer marketing campaigns, sending out review copies to reviewers, following up with those reviewers, analysing sales patterns, following those up with retailers and so on. Meantime we're warehousing stock and reprinting as necessary.

• Cory Doctorow responds with A publisher make a work public... Midlist writers with a lot of energy and limited interest in the reach of their works can make as much money as writers who are signed with major publishers. For example, Jim Munroe publishes many of his own books and make 4-5x per copy over what I make off my books with Tor. But his books reach a much smaller audience than mine do, meaning that his ideas don't reach as far as mine. (MemetIc)

EBook is an evolving medium for this

categories pf MarKet-s (which overlap):

• [Trade Publishing]: mainstream commercial publishing

• Text Book

• Scholarly/academic: university presses, etc.: typically focus on selling at high prices, to libraries

• Reference: dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.: also sold mainly to libraries

• Self Publishing

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