Perhaps the most important thing publishers do is deciding what to publish. If we get it right then everything else is so much easier. Get it wrong and we face an uphill struggle. So how do we go about it at Knightstone Publishing? Well it starts with a lot of reading. Every manuscript is read in the order it is received. We normally form an opinion on whether we like it fairly quickly. This is the first filter. If we're going to publish a book, we have to like it. It's perfectly possible to make a success of publishing books you don't personally like but we feel that if we're going to spend months working on a title it might as well be one we enjoy.

For the second stage we put our commercial heads on. Just like the writers, we also need to earn a living so we have to be confident that we're going to make money from every book we publish. The ultimate question is, "will we earn any money from this title?" This is a product of two factors: The contribution from each copy of the book and the total number of copies sold. The first is relatively simple to work out. We can estimate the costs fairly precisely and can see what price competing titles are selling for. The difficult part to work out is the second factor and so this is where we focus most of our thoughts. We need to look at the strength of the title versus the completion to estimate what percentage share of the market we are likely to gain. Particularly effective here is an original approach, style or theme. We will also consider whether the title or indeed the author, have any features that will ease the job of marketing the book. Then we need to look at the size of the market as a whole to determine how many copies we are likely to sell.

By this point we have a much smaller pile of potential manuscripts. But we still have to narrow the field further. We now take a look at the risk associated with each title. This a measure of how confident we are in our sales assessment. A title might have very high sales if it captures the public imagination - but will it? This is a high risk title. Another title might be in a very small niche market with no real competition. It will never top the best seller lists but the presence of demand and the lack of competition means it will definitely sell, albeit in modest quantities. This is a low risk title. Overall we like to maintain a healthy balance between the high risk and low risk titles.

If you would like to submit a manuscript, please visit our submissions [http://www.knightstone-publishing.co.uk/submissions.html] page to find out more.

We'll follow this article with two further articles looking more specifically at the considerations relating to fiction and non-fiction.