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Regardless of their size or the types of books they publish, publishing houses are structured similarly. For example, they have teams or divisions responsible for acquisitions and manuscript development; copyediting, design, and production; marketing and sales; and administration. And unlike daily newspapers but similar to magazines, most publishing houses pay independent printers to produce their books.

The majority of publishers employ acquisitions editors to seek out authors and offer them contracts to publish specific titles. For fiction, this might mean discovering talented writers through book agents or reading unsolicited manuscripts. In nonfiction, editors might examine unsolicited manuscripts and letters of inquiry or match a known writer to a project (such as a celebrity biography). Acquisitions editors also handle subsidiary rights for an author—that is, selling the rights to a book for use in other media, such as a mass-market paperback or as the basis for a screenplay.

After a contract is signed, the acquisitions editor may turn the book over to a developmental editor who helps the author draft and revise the manuscript by providing his or her own feedback and soliciting advice from reviewers. If a book is to contain illustrations, editors work with photo researchers to select photographs or find artists to produce the needed drawings or other graphics. Then the production staff enters the picture. While copy editors fix any spelling, punctuation, grammar, or style problems in the manuscript, design managers determine the “look and feel” of the book, making decisions about type styles, paper, cover design, and layout of page spreads.

Simultaneously, the publishing house determines a marketing strategy for each book—including identifying which readers will be most interested in the forthcoming title, deciding how many copies to print and what price to charge, and selecting advertising channels for reaching the target customers. Marketing budgets usually make up a large part of a publishing company’s expenses, and marketing managers are often fairly high up in the organization.