Once in a while, someone will say something that’s so self-evidently true, and so unexpected, that you’ll spend the rest of your life working through its implications. For me, one such truth is “A publisher makes a work public, it connects a work and an audience”, and the person who said it is my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, senior editor at Tor Books, the largest science fiction publisher in the world. I first heard Patrick say this a decade or more ago, sometime after Google was founded, but before it was the enormous powerhouse it is today. Patrick was talking about the role of a publisher, and how it might change as a consequence of the internet. As soon as he said it, something clicked for me: the Flatiron Building, the famous skyscraper in midtown Manhattan that houses Tor and its parent company, Macmillan, is essentially in three businesses.
The first is identifying works for which it believes there may be an audience: reading slush (the uncharitable but accurate term for unsolicited manuscripts), entertaining agent pitches, and scouting around for writers to solicit.
Then there is the process of taking steps to prepare the work so that it will be of interest to that audience: editing, typesetting, proofreading, packaging, adding art and design elements.
The third business is connecting the work to the audience: writing catalogue copy and distributing catalogues, despatching a salesforce to major retail and wholesale channels, soliciting testimonials, placing ads, soliciting reviews, touring authors, and these days, producing internet collateral from accompanying videos to online chats to full-blown game tie-ins.