Is there anywhere on the Internet (or elsewhere) where I could find some kind of family tree so that I can understand how all the various publishers, divisions, and imprints are related to one another? (For example, I know because my agent told me that Berkley and NAL are related, and I was able to discover that they are both part of Penguin, but I can't figure out how St Martin's and Tor are related, even though I know they are.)
well, they're cousins sort of. Here's an explanation for Tor.
I'm not sure if a "family tree" exists for the other publishers. I'll bet if it's out there, one of the snarklings will know!
12 comments:
There is a family tree but I forget where it is. It's saved on an old computer somewhere in my garage. I'll think about it some more and see if I can't remember where I got it.
My favorite website for "who owns what" is the Columbia Journalism Review, which monitors media.
Here's the link:
www.cjr.org/tools/owners
You can find the family trees for most media companies there.
The best thing to do is to go to each publisher's Website and click on all the links. Time-consuming as hell, but what in writing and publishing isn't?
If you write (and read) in a specific genre, the best advice is to work backwards and go to the books on your shelf and google the imprint and that will lead you up the ladder to the main publisher.
Some of what you want is here:
http://www.romanceaustralia.com/articles/roe-publishers.htm
Interestingly enough, the "Who Owns What" website for CJR that I mentioned in my earlier post above lists six of the media companies that own the seven biggest NY publishers (Bertelsmann, News Corporation, Pearson, Time Warner, Viacom and Reed Elsevier). They do NOT include Holtzbrinck, which owns Tor and St. Martin's.
There's lots of places for relational data, though I've personally never seen the entire book publishing industry fully laid out in 'family tree' style. You can get a pretty complete list of publishing companies and their subsids and imprints from Standard & Poors Industry Surveys (Publishing.) Your public library should have it; if your library has S&P's NetAdvantage and you have a library card, you may be able to access it online remotely. (I just did at mine so I could answer this question for you.) The list you're looking for is a one page list (small print!)in the Industry Surveys. It's by corporate owner (i.e. Bertlesmann AG) then lists below it their subsids and imprints (i.e. Alfred A. Knopf.) Get thee to a library (if you want complete info.)Sign me Busted...I guess you all can tell I've been a writer for a few years and a librarian for 27. Sigh...
First Anon is wrong. There's an easier way: a chart in Writer's Market shows exactly what the snarkling was asking for.
Miss Snark,
You have to -- absolutely have to -- trademark "confuzzled".
Great word, except it makes my nose itch.
FreePress.net has taken the CJR data and compiled it with additional info in a slightly easier-to-read format. Click "publishing" under each company to find book publishers:
http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart.php
To enlarge on anon #2's comment, my 2006 Writer's Market has a chapter (pp 87-91) titled Publishers and Their Imprints. I doubt it's exhaustive, but it does give a pretty good idea of which divisions and imprints fall where - for 6 major houses anyway.
Hi, I did this awhile ago. It's a compilation of the "Who Own's What" trade publihsers data with notes from, well, me. Holtzbrink isn't on here, but Tor has it's own page.
Linky (MS, it's no longer a doc download. I'm sure it'll look like crap now, such is life.)
Many thanks for the links to the sites like CJR and the Standard & Poor's.
Print sources are good, too, but the problem is that they can be out-of-date. There have been plenty of mergers and acquisitions in the world of book publishing.
I'd suggest that anyone who begins with a print source like Writer's Market verify through an on-line search that things haven't changed since the info was published.
Standard & Poor's reports are usually completely up-to-date, but, if you can't find that one in your library, just do some Googling. The financial news reports these changes -- mergers, acquisitions, sales of a division within a company, and whatnot. If it is important to you to know which mega-corporation owns which publisher or imprint right now, you can find that.
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