Jessica Faust recently did a blog entry on Imprints. To quote her,
Before we begin, what is an imprint? An imprint is essentially the line under which a book is published. Imprints are usually formed as a way for a publishing house to distinguish the types of books published under that line.
For example, Penguin is the overall corporation. Berkley is one of its houses. Berkley has many imprints. A publishing house might have one imprint for fantasy/sci-fi books, another for mysteries, and several for different types of romance.
Jessica was asked how did she know which imprints could be submitted to simultaneously. See her post for the details, but the summary answer was:
To summarize...you cannot usually submit to multiple imprints within a publishing house, but you can submit to multiple houses within the master publishing conglomerate.
The "big four" publishing conglomerates are Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster, though there are other large publishers out there like Hachette, Thomas Nelson, and Holtzbrinck. Who owns what houses and what imprints are currently viable seems to constantly be changing, so you may wish to check out their websites to determine who has what (or even if they allow non-agents to simultaneously submit) before trying this.
Update on Oct. 9th, 2007: Today, Holtzbrinck officially changed the name of their US trade publishing unit to Macmillan.
3 comments:
Deborah, This really is such an informative blog for writers. Do you mind if I mention it in the next QueryTracker newsletter? I think it could help a lot of writers out there.
Patrick, yes, please do mention it in the next QueryTracker newsletter. It'd be nice if more people than just me got some use out of all this information.
Thanks. I hope to get the next one out in a week or so.
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