More from Charlie about the publishing industry

Charlie's second post is now up. I heartily recommend this to both readers and to small press and epub authors who want to know more about the process of turning manuscript to hardback or mass market paperback in the bookstore. I'm one of the latter, but I learnt this stuff by hanging around writing forums for several years listening to experienced writers, and editors, and agents -- this is a crash course in Useful And Interesting Stuff.

CMAP #2: How Books Are Made

As CE Petit points out at comment 11, this post is specifically about commercial fiction publishing, and there are other areas of publishing that do things differently (and he gives a detailed example). There are other useful things in the comment thread as well e.g. Charlie explains at comment 21 some more about "mass market", and a large chunk of the reason why that thoroughly annoying format between mmpb and trade paperback appeared.