Customer Reviews

The Huenefeld Guide to Book Publishing

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This classic is the foundation publishing management book. It is the one later writers draw from and it is the one the speakers quote. John Huenefeld has spent years consulting with publishing companies and studying them. Now he compares their operation and tells their stories.

This book covers Management (staffing, planning, budgeting), Acquisition (contracting, developing, screening, negotiating), Pre-Press Development (designing, typesetting), Marketing (promotional copy, telemarketing, dealers, special markets, subsidiary rights, libraries), and Business Operation (financial planning models, report formats, financial administration, inventory, facilities). It also contains the equations and rules-of-thumb we all use today.

This book should be the bookend on every publisher's shelf. It is the financial management book you will start with and the book you will return to. DanPoynter@ParaPublishing.com.

This book contains good information, but I found it hard to read. The author loves to use a string of big words where a couple simple ones would do better.

Mainly, though, I found the book to be very hard on the eyes. For a book that's written by someone supposed to be a guru in the publishing industry, I have to wonder why he chose to prepare the text on either an old dot matrix printer or a cheap inkjet. The text is fuzzy, with horizontal lines dropped out-- suggesting a broken dot matrix pin or clogged ink jet. Further, many, many paragraphs contain hyphens in the middle of them. It is obvious that hard hyphens were used to typefit the book, but then it was reformatted without further editing-- throwing those hyphens into the most awkward places. The services of an editor would have been a wise investment.

Anyway, if your eyes can stand it-- and my old ones could not-- you could glean some good information from this book. Note, however, that the largest part of the book is geared toward hiring department heads, something that will be of little or no use to the small publisher.

My suggestion? Buy Thomas Woll's book: Publishing for Profit. It's very similar, but much easier to read, more relevant to the small publisher, and less than half the price!