Hundreds of thousands of books come out every year worldwide, so why not yours? Shapiro reveals the best and fastest ways to break into a mainstream publishing house. She maps out the rules of all the sought-after, sellable categories and explains the differences in making each kind of book. Shapiro includes information on crafting a winning proposal or cover letter to get your work considered. -- adapted from back cover

"Of all the aspects of making a book, design is perhaps the most mysterious. Authors and readers surely realize that covers are designed objects that, like it or not, books are commonly judged by. But a book's interior is also the product of a designer'scareful attention to such matters as where the page numbers go or how wide the margins are. Even publishing professionals-editors, agents, marketing staff-often have only the vaguest idea of how designers...

Jane Truman is thrilled to be hired by a top publisher until she meets her new boss, Vivian Grant, a demanding and abusive tyrant who interferes with her life and her growing relationship with Randall Cox.

"This book tells the story of the turbulent decades when the book publishing industry collided with the great technological revolution of our time. From the surge of ebooks to the self-publishing explosion and the growing popularity of audiobooks, Book Wars provides a comprehensive and fine-grained account of technological disruption in one of our most important and successful creative industries. Like other sectors, publishing has been thrown into...

"From Gutenberg to Amazon, Michael Castleman's The Untold Story of Books is the first and only history of publishing told from a veteran author's point of view. Witty, entertaining, and full of remarkable new insights, it is a deeply researched, fascinating history of the idiosyncratic book business--aimed at authors, aspiring authors, booksellers, industry professionals, and everyone who loves to read books. Organized into three distinct book businesses,...

Everything you've ever wanted to know about publishing but were too afraid to ask is right here in this funny, candid guide by acclaimed author Courtney Maum.

"The Book-Makers is a celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of eighteen extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error. Some of these names we know. We meet jobbing printer (and American founding father) Benjamin Franklin. We watch...