If you’re serious about getting your manuscript published, whether it’s a literary novel, a true-crime book, or a genre romance, it’s a good idea to find out who exactly might publish it. “But that’s my agent’s job,” you might say. True. But it’s also your job, and your responsibility to your career as an author, to be well informed about publishing houses. Gather any knowledge you can about who’s publishing what — whether you have an agent or not.
Most publishing houses, especially big ones, are divided into “imprints,” which publish under a separate name, often in a specific genre. They usually have their own editors, though some editors acquire manuscripts for multiple imprints. Some are narrower in focus Natalia’s Bookhouse than others — books published under the imprint that shares the name of the house (Random House, Simon & Schuster, etc.) usually cut a wide swath: fiction and nonfiction; literary and commercial. But each publishing house also has more specific imprints and regularly creates new ones. Random House, the world’s biggest publisher, lists no fewer than fifty-five U.S. imprints on its website.
Visit Random House’s website, and those of other publishers. Even if you think it’s not the place for your genre, you may be surprised. Most publishers list their imprints with brief descriptions, and often a specific imprint doesn’t fit the overall image of that publishing house. Houses create new imprints to follow book industry trends — following the success of such authors as Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter, several politically conservative imprints appeared, including Crown Forum at Random House, Sentinel at Penguin, and Threshold at Simon & Schuster. Other imprints, such as Rayo at HarperCollins, are popping up to cater to the fast-growing market of Latin-American readers.
After you consult the publishers’ lists, bypass their marketing lingo and look at bookstores. Browse Amazon, or go into your local Barnes & Noble, and head for the section where you think your book belongs. Browse the shelves, or scroll down the Amazon pages of books similar to yours, and list the imprints you see. A few will appear over and over — the major publishers — and you’ll see a few others, perhaps smaller houses or new imprints. If you’re in the mystery section, about one-fourth of the books’ spines will say “Berkley Prime Crime” — Penguin’s mass-market mystery imprint.
Once you have an agent, if they’re competent, they’ll know to submit your genre mystery series to an editor at Berkley who acquires for Prime Crime. But let’s back up: if you see a particular type of mystery filling the shelves (or missing from them), keep that in mind when devising your own series idea. But don’t follow trends blindly: remember that the books now on the shelves were acquired as long ago as two years, and the trend you see may already have passed