Excerpt

Traditional Publishing

It might be an amusing exercise to dig into the long history of publishing and printing houses, but it wouldn't be particularly useful for our discussion, so I'll refrain. You can go down that rabbit hole on your own thanks to the internet, but it's enough to say traditional publishing is called traditional, sometimes "legacy," because it's been around for a long time.

But what does that mean for an author? When we talk about traditional publishing, what do we really mean?

Traditional publishing is a process of publishing based on publishing/printing houses who acquire a specific license to produce and sell an author's manuscript (intellectual property) in a specific format, to a certain geographic location, for a specific amount of time. These licenses can be as broad as all rights across the universe forever, or as specific as only e-book, to Timbuktu, for 30 days (That last is an exaggeration, the first…not so much. There are presses that will seek license to a maximum number of rights forever, and they should be avoided like the plague). The publishing house shoulders most, if not all, of the upfront costs of the production of the physical or digital product, and a certain level of contracted marketing expense in exchange for retaining a percentage (often a very large percentage) of the royalties created from the sales of the completed product(s).

Traditional publishing houses are usually grouped by size (meaning how many books they produce in a year and how wide their distribution arm is) and referred to as large, medium, small, or boutique presses or houses. Some people also group magazines and newspapers into traditional publishing, though instead of being called publishing houses those are referred to as media outlets. They generally contract for very short pieces or articles for a shorter period of time than is typical at a book publishing house.