# Do Book Publishers Matter?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [April 13, 2017, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374 "2017-04-13T13:20:42Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Sir\_T-Cups](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sir_T-Cups)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/1 "2017-04-13T13:20:42Z")
One of my favorite bloggers, Paul Lukas from ESPN and Uniwatch cited a book in his most recent post. When giving the title of the book, he also listed the publisher. Lukas references books a lot (and worked in publishing I believe) and always lists the publishers when he’s talking about a book.
Likewise, I’ll see a lot of people reference publishers when promoting or talking about books. Because of this, I’d think they have to mean something…but what?
I love reading, and definitely consider myself a layman, so do the publishers actually matter? For those “in the know” will they scoff at a book coming from one publisher, but think more highly of one coming from a different one?
What’s the straight dope?
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### Author:  [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/2 "2017-04-13T13:42:17Z")
Interesting observation… I had not really taken note of this before, but now that I think about it, references to books do often state the publisher, and yet for the life of me I cannot imagine why that’s relevant 99.9% of the time.
In the specific case you cite, the McGill-Queen’s University Press is a tiny publishing concern shared by two Canadian schools, so a person seeking this book might need to know that to find the book.
In some contexts, like book tours, I am sure mentioning the publisher might be something that authors are actually asked to do. I don’t know that anyone cares anyway, but it would explain the publisher-name-dropping.
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### Author:  [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/3 "2017-04-13T13:45:40Z")
Historically, if you wanted to obtain a copy of a book, especially if it was not new or had a specialized audience, your only recourse might have been to contact the publisher directly. That’s why citation formats always indicated the publisher.
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### Author:  [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/4 "2017-04-13T14:04:23Z")
> [@Sir\_T-Cups](#):
>
> I love reading, and definitely consider myself a layman, so do the publishers actually matter? For those “in the know” will they scoff at a book coming from one publisher, but think more highly of one coming from a different one?
Well, many people are skeptical of publishers that self-publish books. They may give a look to those from vanity presses, but they’ll be coming at it with very low expectations and a feeling that it’s probably no good. Most book reviewers ignore them (I’m not talking about Amazon reviews, but rather reviewers who are paid to read books).
Not that there can’t be a great self-published book. But for every great one, there are hundreds and thousands of mediocre ones, not to mention those that are out-and-out awful.
Years ago, an editor said that 10% of all submissions were laughably bad and 10% were publishable (but not always published because they could only take 3% of submissions). The other 80% were mediocre. Not awful, but the characters didn’t really come to life, the plot was predictable or cliched, the writing serviceable but uninspiring, etc. That same rule applies to self-published books; the only difference is that they expect the reader to pay the author to read it.
So a book published by Tor or Orbit is going to be taken more seriously than one published by Amazon Digital Services.
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### Author:  [@Sattua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sattua)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/5 "2017-04-13T14:57:51Z")
Agree with RealityChuck: while in the past this might have been about letting listeners obtain copies of the book, these days it’s probably about credibility. Publishing is undergoing a seismic shift. Not only is it useful to know if a publisher is academic, Big Five, or a credible independent, it’s important to know if the book was likely vetted–especially if the author’s reputation isn’t well established elsewhere.
Not that even big publishers do a super-fantastic job of vetting their books all the time. Publisher should only be a piece of the puzzle in deciding whether a book is credible or not.
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### Author:  [@Sir\_T-Cups](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sir_T-Cups)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/6 "2017-04-13T15:01:01Z")
Paul’s a pretty accessible guy, so I just went ahead and left a comment on the linked piece and he responded with the same sentiment as **RealityChuck**
> [@](#):
>
> Interesting question! It is indeed standard practice to list a book’s publisher when reviewing it. Why is that?
>
> In the pre-internet era, knowing a book’s publisher was useful if you couldn’t find it at a bookstore and had to have the store special-oder it for you, because different publishers’ books were available from different distributors. Obviously, Amazon and other online booksellers have largely made that moot.
>
> But even in the internet era, knowing the publisher can benefit a savvy consumer. For example, if you know that a particular publisher tends to put out particularly good (or particularly bad) books, then seeing that publisher’s name might affect your decision on whether to purchase a given title. In short, publishers are brands, and brand knowledge is always useful.
>
> In the case of the book I reviewed on the site today, I mentioned that it’s published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Even if you’ve never heard of them, you know it’s a university press, which means this book is probably pretty scholarly in its approach. You could view that as a plus or a minus, depending on what you’re looking for.
So there we go! Ignorance fought.
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### Author:  [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/7 "2017-04-13T15:31:15Z")
> [@Acsenray](#):
>
> Historically, if you wanted to obtain a copy of a book, especially if it was not new or had a specialized audience, your only recourse might have been to contact the publisher directly. That’s why citation formats always indicated the publisher.
This. It’s largely archaic if not obsolete.
Referencing a publisher and, in even older form, the publisher’s city gave some notion of the quality of the book as well. A tome published by a known-name publisher was assumed to meet certain standards; being published in New York or London or Berlin spoke further of its exact qualities and probable origins.
But there’s next to no need for it these days. An ISBN is far more useful parenthical information to include.
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### Author:  [@RikWriter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RikWriter)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/8 "2017-04-13T16:22:03Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#):
>
> Years ago, an editor said that 10% of all submissions were laughably bad and 10% were publishable (but not always published because they could only take 3% of submissions). The other 80% were mediocre. Not awful, but the characters didn’t really come to life, the plot was predictable or cliched, the writing serviceable but uninspiring, etc.
That’s a load of shit. It was then and it’s even more so now. 80% of what gets published is mediocre to just plain bad. What gets published has very little to do with quality and much, much more to do with marketability.
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### Author:  [@Ukulele\_Ike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ukulele_Ike)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/9 "2017-04-13T17:17:04Z")
> [@RikWriter](#):
>
> That’s a load of shit. It was then and it’s even more so now. 80% of what gets published is mediocre to just plain bad. What gets published has very little to do with quality and much, much more to do with marketability.
Christ Almighty. You should see what _doesn’t_ get published.
You’re right about marketability, though. Consolidation has made the major publishers profit-mad. There’s no more “Hey, this is great stuff, we can get out maybe a thousand copies to an audience who will LOVE it.”
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### Author:  [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/10 "2017-04-13T17:30:25Z")
Sometimes, knowing who published it gives you some idea of what to expect from a book. For example, you would expect something different from a novel published by an evangelical Christian publishing house than one from a publisher of gay/lesbian erotica.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/11 "2017-04-13T17:34:43Z")
On the other hand, though, it’s now possible (even if not easy) to reach a mass audience with no publisher at all. For instance, _The Martian_, before becoming an award-winning film, originated as a self-published book by a largely-unknown author. And I expect that sort of thing to become more common, as online communities grow better at crowdsourcing vetting of material.
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### Author:  [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/12 "2017-04-13T17:56:26Z")
> [@RikWriter](#):
>
> That’s a load of shit. It was then and it’s even more so now. 80% of what gets published is mediocre to just plain bad. What gets published has very little to do with quality and much, much more to do with marketability.
Nonsense. You can’t market a book that doesn’t have something to offer its audience. Word of mouth is the most dependable way to make a book successful, and if the book is bad, it will get bad word of mouth. Maybe you might hate a best seller, but it’s clear that thousands of others like that book.
And the rule applies to published work, too. 10% is crap, 10% is great, and 80% is just OK. The thing is, even the 10% published that is crap (by your determination, not by readers’) is better than 90% of what’s written and not published.
There is a myth that commercial publishers aren’t interested in good books. Certainly they are. The thing is that the people who complain about it haven’t written books that are good enough. It’s more difficult than people imagine to write a book that’s good enough to publish.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/13 "2017-04-13T17:56:37Z")
I’d like to think that getting your stuff published by an academic press sent the message that the contents had some intellectual plausibility. I mean, otherwise why bother fighting to try and get them to publish the book?
I’ve got three unpublished books here, two of which I’ve been trying to get into an academic publisher\*. I _could_ just self-publish them, at this point. It would fulfill my mission of “getting the message out”. But they’d lack that cachet of respectability I want to maintain.
\*They’re on the origins of myths, which I try to make a case for being partly indebted to natural phenomena, as I did with _Medusa_.
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### Author:  [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/14 "2017-04-13T18:17:49Z")
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> On the other hand, though, it’s now possible (even if not easy) to reach a mass audience with no publisher at all. For instance, _The Martian_, before becoming an award-winning film, originated as a self-published book by a largely-unknown author. And I expect that sort of thing to become more common, as online communities grow better at crowdsourcing vetting of material.
This was always possible, actually. _The Celestine Prophecy_ did it in 1993. It’s just extremely difficult – and usually you don’t break through to major success until a major publisher picks it up. And it’s not going to happen all that often. (Consider the books you actually paid money for. What percentage were self-published?)
Self-publishing will always be a crapshoot. Most self-published books sell around 70 copies (not counting those given away from “promotional” purposes). One or two a year will be big sellers. Thousands of others won’t even get close to 70 copies.
Basically, in self-publishing, it’s easy to get published, but damn difficult to make any real money from it (or have anyone read it). With an established publisher, it’d damn difficult to get published, but you are guaranteed to get money if you do and you are also guaranteed to have people read it.
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### Author:  [@Fenris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fenris)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/15 "2017-04-13T19:44:20Z")
There was a period when the publisher really mattered (at least to me) regarding genre books.
When Judy-Lynn Del Rey was in charge of Del Rey, there was a period from say, 1974-1984 where I knew I could grab ANY Del Rey book off the stands and there was at least an 90%+ chance I’d like it a lot.
Ditto for Baen Books in the late '80s through the mid '90s. If it was Baen, it would have a terrible, terrible cover, low-grade smudgy ink that got all over your fingers when you read it and about a 75% chance I’d like it.
Ditto for Tor Books. Say from 2000-2009-ish? This one’s less defined but there’s a pretty good chance that the editors of Tor share my taste.
DAW on the other hand never got me above about a 35% chance (at a guess) that I’d like a new author off the bat. My impression is that they tried to be more “highbrow” at a time when that wasn’t what I was looking for. Ace was about the same percentage, but it seemed stagnant, content to either reprint older books (in general) or publish new works by old, established authors.
Today? That’s not true any more. I can’t remember the last time I found a new author through Del Rey, Tor is pretty good but there’s only a 50/50 chance I’ll enjoy it. They publish the older style stuff I enjoy and the more modern stuff that I should enjoy, but don’t. Ace is dead (as far as I know) and Baen seems stagnant: it publishes it’s stable of authors but doesn’t seem to be looking for new talent. (note: these are my impressions as a reader. I’ve got no facts to back them up, just what I feel as a consumer)
Unfortunately the days where I could just grab a book off the shelf, check the publisher and without reading the back cover be assured that I’d enjoy it are long gone.
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### Author:  [@sandra\_nz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sandra_nz)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/16 "2017-04-13T19:49:17Z")
I never gave publishers a second thought until my husband became an author. I think for most people, publishers aren’t that relevant, but for people who are particularly into a genre, there are definitely “tiers” of publishers. So when my husband went from being published by one publisher to another, that was definitely seen as a step up in his writing career.
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### Author:  [@RikWriter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RikWriter)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/17 "2017-04-13T20:09:25Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#):
>
> Nonsense. You can’t market a book that doesn’t have something to offer its audience. Word of mouth is the most dependable way to make a book successful, and if the book is bad, it will get bad word of mouth. Maybe you might hate a best seller, but it’s clear that thousands of others like that book.
>
> And the rule applies to published work, too. 10% is crap, 10% is great, and 80% is just OK. The thing is, even the 10% published that is crap (by your determination, not by readers’) is better than 90% of what’s written and not published.
>
> There is a myth that commercial publishers aren’t interested in good books. Certainly they are. The thing is that the people who complain about it haven’t written books that are good enough. It’s more difficult than people imagine to write a book that’s good enough to publish.
Sorry, but I don’t agree with your numbers. I’ve read a lot of traditionally published fiction that was objectively horrible. Page-long info-dumps, typos, wrong word usage, dialogue that would make the CW cringe and “plots” that wouldn’t make it into an 80s action movie, but the book was similar enough to James Patterson or Tom Clancy or SOMEBODY that a publisher thought it would make money. Quality has diddly-shit to do with it.
By way of contrast, I am acquainted with a man who’s made well into the seven figures from a series of urban fantasies he wrote. His agent submitted the first book to just about every publisher and every one of them rejected it, some multiple times. Finally, he decided to self-publish it (dead-tree, this was before the heyday of e-books) and sold several thousand copies via the internet. One found its way into a relative of someone who worked for a publisher and they showed it to them, and what do you know? He had a publishing contract.
Was the book not good enough for the publisher originally and suddenly “became” good when a relative showed it to them? No, it was just a different set of eyes, a different mood on a different day.
Quality has diddly-shit to do with it. You can write a very good book, and if you don’t get it in front of the right person on the right day, it will never, ever get published.
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### Author:  [@RikWriter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RikWriter)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/18 "2017-04-13T20:10:52Z")
To answer the OP, though, publisher can mean something in certain genres. In SF/F, Baen books usually means a certain style of fiction aimed at a certain audience, while Tor, by contrast, might mean another.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/19 "2017-04-13T20:21:34Z")
> [@RikWriter](#):
>
> Sorry, but I don’t agree with your numbers. I’ve read a lot of traditionally published fiction that was objectively horrible. Page-long info-dumps, typos, wrong word usage, dialogue that would make the CW cringe and “plots” that wouldn’t make it into an 80s action movie, but the book was similar enough to James Patterson or Tom Clancy or SOMEBODY that a publisher thought it would make money. Quality has diddly-shit to do with it.
> By way of contrast, I am acquainted with a man who’s made well into the seven figures from a series of urban fantasies he wrote. His agent submitted the first book to just about every publisher and every one of them rejected it, some multiple times. Finally, he decided to self-publish it (dead-tree, this was before the heyday of e-books) and sold several thousand copies via the internet. One found its way into a relative of someone who worked for a publisher and they showed it to them, and what do you know? He had a publishing contract.
> Was the book not good enough for the publisher originally and suddenly “became” good when a relative showed it to them? No, it was just a different set of eyes, a different mood on a different day.
> Quality has diddly-shit to do with it. You can write a very good book, and if you don’t get it in front of the right person on the right day, it will never, ever get published.
Yep, all you need to make a statement about an entire industry is a single anecdote. Why listen to people who have been in the business for decades? “I knew a guy” is always more accurate. :rolleyes:
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### Author:  [@RikWriter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RikWriter)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-book-publishers-matter/784374/20 "2017-04-13T20:27:28Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#):
>
> Yep, all you need to make a statement about an entire industry is a single anecdote. Why listen to people who have been in the business for decades? “I knew a guy” is always more accurate. :rolleyes:
Which “people?” And which decades? You really think the business doesn’t change?
And I gave a specific example, but there are a multitude of stories out there of people who were rejected over and over by one publisher after another, and were only accepted by purest chance, yet made millions of dollars. JK Rowling, Andy Weir, Hugh Howy…that’s just off the top of my head. There are self-published authors right now making well into the seven figures who couldn’t get their novels published through a traditional publisher. That’s not to say there isn’t a metric shit-ton of dreck out there self-published, my point is that being published by a traditional company is no guarantee of quality, and that quality isn’t the main reason books actually get published. They get published because someone thinks they can market them quickly and easily, with as little spent as possible.
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