Imprinting on a Publisher

This may be too much "inside baseball" for many of you, but Sarah Weinman (crime fiction writer and reviewer, and former editor of GalleyCat) is in the middle of a series of excellent posts examining the various imprints of some of the major American publishers.

They're quite detailed, and get into the details of what a particular imprint is known for, and how well it's currently maintaining its brand.

She's done three so far:
Vol. 1 is on Macmillan
Vol. 2 is on Simon & Schuster
and Vol. 3, just posted today, takes on Hachette

Commentors on the first post have wondered what the purpose of an imprint is, which is a fair question. An imprint done correctly focuses attention, both inside that house, with a devoted, professional team of editors, marketers, publicists, and so on, and outside the house, among readers, reviewers, authors, and agents. Small houses tend to be focused just by virtue of being small; larger houses need to organize themselves to focus well.

It's possible to have coherent publishing programs and strong teams without imprints -- my employer, Wiley, has a lot of closely defined internal "product lines" without having many consumer-facing imprints -- but a publisher does need to be organized in some way so that readers come to trust that publisher in their area of interest and so that the people within the house develop expertise in a particular area.