So You Want to Work in Publishing?
Updated: Oct 18
You love books, you dream of a life surrounded by them. You picture yourself in a charmingly cluttered office, sipping artisanal coffee while discussing the finer points of literary genius.
Publishing: a world of books, book fairs, tote bags, and people who can write an 80,000-word novel but still don’t know how to use Track Changes. It’s glamorous in theory, chaotic in practice, and completely reliant on an army of overworked, underpaid professionals who make sure the books actually get made, printed, and sold.
If you’ve wondered who does what in a publishing house, let me introduce you to the entire cast of characters, from the boardroom to the warehouse.
Let me introduce you to publishing reality.
Publishing is a wonderful, maddening, ideas-fuelled industry where deadlines are lies, everyone is overworked, and nobody knows what’s actually selling. It’s a place where the intern has a master’s degree, editors are drowning in submissions, and entire careers are built around guessing what readers might like two years from now.
Still here? Good. Here’s who you’ll meet in a publishing house - and what they really do.
The People Who Run the Show (Sort Of)
Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
The big, big boss. The visionary. The one who talks about ‘exciting new directions’ while everyone else panics about budget cuts. Gets name-checked in press releases, probably hasn’t read an actual manuscript in years. Sometimes the position can be shared - into a CEO partnership, shared responsibilities - the sort of George and Mildred arrangement.
Publisher
The high priest of taste and commercial viability. Decides what gets published, works closely with editors, and somehow balances literary credibility with making money. Often seen nodding gravely in meetings.
Publishing Managing Director (MD)
The person actually running the publishing business while the CEO does interviews about ‘the future of books’. Juggles budgets, board meetings, and ensuring the company doesn’t go bankrupt.
Finance Director / Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
The one who says no. Keeps the work money flowing (or not). Knows exactly how much that full-colour, die-cut, foil-embossed special edition is going to cost and will absolutely fight you on it.
The People Who Find and Shape the Books
Editorial Director
Oversees the editors. Decides what books are worth investing in and publishing, which means reading a terrifying number of proposals. Smiles politely when someone says, "I’ve written a book. It’s a cross between Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code - it's a new genre: Cozy Murdermance"
Commissioning Editor / Acquisitions Editor
The gatekeepers. Decide which books get signed. Spend their days soothing authors, reading submissions, and dodging enthusiastic would-be novelists at book fairs.
Development Editor
The book whisperer. Takes a raw manuscript and turns it into something readable. Has mastered the art of gently telling authors their work is a mess without making them cry.
Copy Editor
The grammar ninja. Catches every misplaced comma, factual inconsistency, and the fact that the protagonist’s eyes were green in Chapter 1 and blue in Chapter 7.
Proofreader
The last line of defence. If a book goes to print with a typo, guess who gets blamed, may not be a job and replaced by AI?
Managing Editor
The publishing project manager. Keeps everything running on schedule. Or at least tries to. Has a permanent tension headache.
The People Who Make Books Look Good
Creative Director
Has big, beautiful ideas and a Pinterest board full of inspiration. Thinks in typography, colour palettes, and “visual storytelling”. Also the one who has to explain why that stunning cover design isn’t going to work in a 2cm Amazon thumbnail.
Art Director
Oversees book covers, interiors, and marketing materials. Spends their days wrangling illustrators and explaining to editors that good design takes time and no, they can’t just ‘Photoshop it quickly’.
Illustrator
Creates the artwork that makes children’s books magical and history books engaging. Often found working at 3 AM, fuelled by over whelming enthusiasm and sheer artistic stubbornness.
Graphic Designer
Takes all the ideas and actually makes them work. Knows more fonts than you knew existed.
How to become a Publishing Rotter
From complimentary lunches to compulsory redundancies, here’s how to get ahead in the book trade without the inconvenience of writing, illustrating or, where possible the inconvenience of reading or working on a book.
There was a time when the publishing scoundrel was readily identifiable by his double-breasted suit, club tie, expense account, or his velvet smoking jacket as claimed by the former Bonnier UK CEO Richard Johnson in his 2018 autobiography Show Me Your Medals. Accounts may differ however an ability to consume three bottles of claret over lunch may have been relegated to the past - but insisting over coffee that an author's advance is quite out of the question has survived intact.
Today’s bounder is more likely to wear trainers, describe himself or herself as a disruptor, and give a PowerPoint presentation on the importance of human creativity.
The clothes have changed, the principles remain reassuringly intact.
For those ambitious to join this distinguished profession, here is a curated mini dictionary of the essential expressions, habits and accessories.
A
Acquisition: The practice of buying something that somebody else has spent forty years creating, then describing its subsequent success as evidence of your own brilliant publishing strategy.
Advance: A sum of money given to an author or illustrator in instalments usually small and widely spaced to ensure that they never entirely lose the will to write another book.
Anniversary: A celebration of a publishing company's distinguished history, calculated from whichever date provides the most attractive number for the invitation. Earlier acquisitions, previous incarnations and decades of publishing may be quietly disregarded.
B
Backlist: A collection of books published by people who have since retired, died, been dismissed or become inconvenient. Particularly attractive because it can continue earning money without requiring anyone to remember who created it.
Bestseller: A book that has sold enough copies for everyone in the company to claim responsibility. Usually the sales director, the marketing department, the chief executive and someone who joined the business three weeks ago.
C
Corporate Memory: A highly selective faculty enabling publishing executives to recall every commercial success in the company's history while forgetting the people who made it possible. Particularly useful following acquisitions, when decades of publishing history can be condensed into a ten-year anniversary celebration. Unlike ordinary memory, corporate memory improves considerably with the departure of those who remember what actually happened.
See also: Anniversary; Acquisition; Legacy
Creative: An old-fashioned term for the person who actually produces the work. Best kept away from important discussions about its commercial potential.
Collaboration: An arrangement in which a creator brings forty years of experience and a publisher brings a meeting room.
Culture Reset:- A management initiative undertaken when the chief executive decides that the company has developed the wrong culture, despite having personally presided over its development.
Generally involves compulsory workshops, anonymous staff surveys, a new set of corporate values and the departure of several employees who remember how things used to work.
The chief executive emerges from the process with renewed confidence, an executive coach and, occasionally, a larger salary.
See also: Restructuring; Listening Exercise; Moving Forward.
D
Deep Dive: A meeting lasting longer than necessary, during which several executives examine a problem that someone in the warehouse could have explained in three minutes.
Diversity: A vital commitment, normally celebrated in an annual report containing photographs of people unlikely to be encountered at the next board meeting.
Disruption: A fashionable term for doing something rather badly while insisting that everyone else is hopelessly old-fashioned.
E
Editorial Vision: The ability to recognise a successful idea six months after another publisher has published it.
Ethical Publishing: A phrase best displayed prominently on a website, preferably some distance from the contracts department.
Exciting New Chapter: What a publisher calls closing an imprint, departure of staff or the sale of its assets, it’s the only chapter in publishing that requires neither an author nor a happy ending.
See also: Moving Forward; Legacy; Family.
F
Freelancer: Someone who can be paid considerably less than an employee because they enjoy the privilege of buying their own pencils, heating their own home and worrying about their own pension.
Family: Publishing companies frequently describe themselves as families, particularly when announcing redundancies. Families, one imagines, with unusually efficient human resources departments.
G
Ghostwriter: A writer who writes a book while somebody else becomes its author and asserts their Moral Rights as the author. A system which, if adopted more widely, could dramatically increase the literary output of television personalities, politicians and chief executives.
H
Hot-desking: A progressive system under which employees who have worked for a publishing company for thirty years must compete each morning for somewhere to sit, while the chief executive explains the importance of belonging.
Humbled: The preferred expression of a publishing executive accepting an award, honorary degree or industry accolade. It is invariably delivered while standing beneath a large photograph of themselves.
Human Creativity: A principle to be defended passionately at conferences, especially if defending it does not involve increasing royalties, paying illustrators properly or mentioning the people who created the backlist.
I
Intellectual Property: Something which begins as an author's imagination and ends as an asset on somebody else's balance sheet.
Innovation: Reissuing a thirty-year-old book with a different cover and announcing an exciting new direction.
J
Journey: Every publishing executive is on one, rarely by public transport.
K
Kindle: A device which enabled publishers to sell books without printing, binding, warehousing or distributing them, while preserving a remarkable confidence in their entitlement to most of the proceeds…digital first
L
Literary Lunch: Formerly the principal means of conducting business in publishing. Now replaced by video meetings in which everyone pretends their microphones are working.
Listening Exercise: A carefully managed opportunity for employees to express their opinions before upper management goes with what it had intended to do anyway.
Legacy: A word used appreciatively to describe someone's contribution to publishing, ideally after that person has ceased asking to be credited.
Lessons Learned: A ceremonial phrase recited after a corporate disaster and carefully recorded in a document entitled Post-Project Review. The most important lesson - nobody is personally responsible.
M
Moral Rights: A rather tiresome legal concept suggesting that the person who created a work might wish to be identified as having created it. Believed in certain boardrooms to be an unfortunate misunderstanding of the word moral.
Mentoring: Offering a young creative professional a coffee and forty minutes of advice in place of employment.
Moving Office: A favourite activity of the publishing CEO who has run out of ideas for publishing books. Usually announced as an exciting new chapter in our journey, it involves abandoning a perfectly good building, disposing of several tons of books, and moving the surviving staff into a smaller office with fewer desks and more inspirational quotations on the walls.
The resulting disruption is invariably described as an opportunity to work more collaboratively, particularly by executives fortunate enough to retain private offices.
See also: Hot-desking; Transformation; Exciting New Chapter.
N
Networking: The process of cultivating people who might one day be useful, while ignoring those who were useful yesterday.
Non-disclosure Agreement: A document reassuring both parties that an unfortunate episode can now be forgotten, although generally only one party has been paid to forget it.
O
Originality: Highly desirable in a manuscript, provided it bears a strong resemblance to something that sold exceptionally well last Christmas.
Opportunity: What an illustrator receives when asked to work for nothing in return for exposure.
P
Passion: An emotion which, according to publishers, should be shared by everybody in the industry, particularly those whose remuneration makes more conventional incentives impractical.
Publishing Director: A person responsible for publishing books until one goes wrong, at which point responsibility passes to the editor, who may already have left.
Q
Quality: An aspiration proudly displayed in company brochures and occasionally rediscovered during the proof-reading stage.
R
Restructuring: A highly sophisticated management procedure in which the people who make the books leave the building and the people who attend meetings remain.
Rights: Things which authors possess before signing a contract.
S
Synergy: The mysterious phenomenon by which two perfectly functional publishing companies can be combined to produce one company with fewer employees and a larger management team.
Storytelling: An activity publishers are passionate about, particularly when presenting a persuasive narrative about why profits have declined despite record executive bonuses.
T
Thought Leader: Someone who has never written a book but is frequently invited to conferences to explain the future of books.
Transparency: The quality most admired in publishing and least likely to be encountered in a royalty statement.
Transformation: A process lasting three to five years, requiring a programme director, several management consultants and a considerable budget. Usually concludes with the chief executive unveiling a new logo.
See also: Restructuring; synergy; Moving Office.
U
Underperforming: A description applied to books, authors, illustrators, editors and entire departments. Rarely to the person who commissioned them.
V
Values: A handsome collection of nouns: integrity, respect, creativity, inclusion - arranged across a corporate website. Not necessarily intended as operating instructions.
Visionary: A title most comfortably bestowed on an executive by someone whose annual appraisal they control.
W
World Rights: An ambitious contractual arrangement by which an author or illustrator grants a publisher permission to exploit their work in countries the publisher may never visit, markets it may never enter and languages it may never understand.
Wellbeing: An important corporate priority addressed through mindfulness workshops shortly before the next round of redundancies.
X
X Factor: That indefinable quality which makes a manuscript commercially irresistible. Usually established after another publisher has made it a bestseller.
Y
Young Talent: An inexhaustible natural resource, especially useful when older talent has become expensive, outspoken or familiar with copyright law.
Z
Zeitgeist: The prevailing cultural mood, which publishers are uniquely qualified to identify approximately eighteen months after it has passed.
Zero-hours: The contractual expression of a publisher’s deep commitment to flexibility, chiefly its own.
And there you have it - twenty-six letters containing almost everything the aspiring publishing executive needs to know. With a little practice, a good vocabulary of corporate euphemisms and a complete absence of self-doubt, it should be possible to enjoy a long and distinguished career in publishing without once being troubled by the people who make the books.
Of course, there are still publishers who believe that authors, illustrators, designers and editors deserve recognition for their work.
The People Who Get the Books Printed and Shipped
Production Director
Ensures books actually exist in physical form. Works with printers, negotiates with suppliers, and battles ever-changing paper costs. Often muttering about delays.
Operations Manager
The supply chain mastermind. Ensures books reach bookshops, warehouses, and customers without vanishing into a logistical black hole.
Production Controller
Makes sure every book is printed on time, on budget, and without the text somehow printing upside down.
The People Who Make Sure Books Sell
Sales Director
Convinces bookshops, supermarkets, and online retailers that this book is the one they should stock. Juggles sales figures, industry trends, and the latest crisis at Waterstones.
Key Account Manager
Manages relationships with big retailers like Amazon, WHSmith, and Tesco. Knows which books are getting prime placement and which are destined for the bottom shelf.
Publicity Director / PR Manager
Secures media coverage, interviews, and book reviews. If an author is on TV promoting their book, this is the person who made it happen. "Swooped in to scoop", "in a six-figure deal", "epic stand party",“upbeat, particularly from commercial fiction publishers”, “Romantasy is still very much in favour".
Marketing Director
Creates buzz. Runs social media campaigns, plans book launches, and somehow convinces people that books are exciting in a world full of Netflix and TikTok.
Social Media Manager
Runs the publisher’s Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Tries to make books go viral. Occasionally regrets career choices.
Events Coordinator
Plans book tours, launches, and literary festivals. Always stressed. Can often be heard saying, “But where will we get 500 signed copies by tomorrow?”
The People Who Sell Rights and Handle the Legal Bits
Rights Director
Sells international and subsidiary rights. Negotiates foreign editions, film deals, and that dream adaptation on Netflix.
Subsidiary Rights Manager
Finds ways to monetise books beyond direct sales, including licensing, book clubs, and serialisation.
Contracts Manager
The legal guru who ensures authors get paid (eventually) and that everything is airtight in case of lawsuits.
The People Who Keep the Office Running
HR Director
Hires people, fires people, and tries to keep workplace morale above “mild despair”, has an employment lawyer on speed dial.
Personal Assistant (PA) / Executive Assistant
Keeps the CEO and senior execs from forgetting everything important. Knows where the bodies are buried.
Legal Counsel
Advises on contracts, copyright issues, and why publishing that unauthorised biography might not be a great idea.
The Forgotten but Essential People
The Intern
The most overqualified, underpaid person in the building. Knows how to use the publisher’s ancient software better than the IT Guy.
Might be hired at the end of the internship (but probably not).
The Receptionist
The frontline defence against uninvited visitors, lost couriers, and authors who “just popped by.”
Knows exactly who’s in the office, who’s avoiding calls, and where the good biscuits are hidden.
The Cleaners
The only reason the office doesn’t look like a landfill.
Completely invisible until they move someone’s coffee mug, at which point all hell breaks loose.
The Warehouse Manager
The person who actually knows where the books are.
Absolutely does not care about your last-minute delivery.
The IT Guy
Nobody knows what they do until something breaks.
Disappears for months, then magically reappears when a server crashes.
The ISBN Expert
Knows more about ISBNs than should be humanly possible.
Never gets the credit they deserve.
So, Where Do You Fit In?
If you’re wondering where you belong in publishing, ask yourself:
Do you love books but hate people? Editorial or Design.
Do you love books and enjoy talking? Sales or Publicity.
Do you want to make books happen? Production or Operations.
Do you want to own the whole circus? Start your own publishing house.
(May the gods help you.)
Publishing is chaotic, underpaid, and addictive. If you’re still here, you might just belong.
Remind myself not to start another publishing company.
(Probably going to start one anyway.)
David Salariya is a writer, illustrator and former publishing CEO who founded The Salariya Book Company and created bestselling series like You Wouldn’t Want To Be…. With over 40 years in publishing, he’s worked across every stage of the book-making process - from editorial meetings to warehouse crises. He now shares honest advice for anyone curious about how publishing works (and what it’s really like to work in it).
More at davidsalariya.com.
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