How to choose a book publishing company

Updated August 2026

Publishing services are not a licensed profession in any US state. Anyone can register a company on a Tuesday and be selling publishing packages by Friday, and a great many do. There is no regulator to check with and no qualification to look up, which means the checking is yours to do.

The good news is that it is not hard, and it does not take expertise. Four questions and a fifteen-minute look at public records will separate a real service company from an operation you should walk away from.

The four questions

1. Who owns the copyright, and when does it transfer?

The answer should be "you, at all times". You wrote it, or you commissioned it, and it should never stop being yours. A ghostwriting agreement transfers the writer's interest to you; it does not transfer anything to the company.

Anything else needs a lawyer before you sign. Be particularly careful with contracts that assign rights "for the term of the agreement" without saying how the agreement ends, or that claim a right of first refusal on your next book. Neither is necessary for anyone to edit or design a book.

2. What exactly is included, itemised, with a price against each line?

You should be able to see what an edit costs, what a cover costs, and what formatting costs, separately. A single round-number package fee with no breakdown is the most common structure in this industry and the least defensible, because it makes it impossible to tell what you are getting or to compare two quotes.

Ask specifically which level of edit is included. "Editing" is four different jobs at four different prices, and a package that includes a proofread is not comparable to one that includes a developmental edit even though both say "editing" on the invoice.

3. Can you name books you have published, with links?

This is the fastest test there is, and the one that fails most often. Real client work is checkable in seconds: a title, an author name, an Amazon link. Vagueness here — "we work with hundreds of authors", "our clients prefer confidentiality" — is the loudest available signal.

Confidentiality genuinely applies to ghostwriting, where an author may not want the arrangement known. It does not apply to everything. A company that has published books can always name one author happy to be named.

When you get the links, check who is listed as publisher on the Amazon page. It should be the author's own imprint or "Independently published" — not the service company. If the company appears as publisher of record, the author did not keep full control of the edition.

4. What happens if we stop halfway?

A reputable answer explains what you have paid for, what you keep, and what happens to work in progress. There should be no pause before it, and it should already be in the contract.

Staged payments tied to delivery are the structure that protects both sides: a deposit to begin, then instalments as agreed portions arrive. Be wary of a demand for the full fee up front — that puts every bit of the risk on you.

The question that tells you most

Ask what your book does not need.

A service company that understands publishing will happily talk you out of things. Not every book needs a developmental edit. Not every book needs an audiobook, or a trailer, or a marketing package. Most first-time authors are sold several things that will not move a single copy.

If the answer is "everything in the package", you have learned what you needed to know before spending anything.

Warning signs

• An unsolicited approach praising a manuscript nobody sent them.
• Urgency — a discount that expires, a slot about to go. Real production schedules do not work this way.
• A contract that assigns them your copyright, or ties up rights with no reversion clause.
• Guaranteed bestseller status. Nobody can guarantee sales; the ones who say so are describing a paid list placement, which is a different thing sold under a borrowed name.
• Marketing packages with no specifics. "Press release distribution" and "social media campaign" mean nothing without numbers attached — how many, to whom, measured how.
• A refusal to name past clients, or named clients whose books you cannot find on sale.
• Reviews that all read alike, appear in a burst, or sit on a site that resembles a review platform without being one. Check the domain carefully; lookalike review sites exist and are used deliberately.
• Any suggestion that paying them improves your chances with a traditional publisher. It does not.

Checking the public record

Every US company is registered somewhere, and nearly every state publishes that register free. Search the company name in the state it claims to operate from and you can see when it registered, whether it is in good standing, and who the officers are.

Two things to read carefully. A registration a few months old, from a company claiming a decade of experience, is a direct contradiction worth raising. And an operator who has run several publishing companies in succession, each dissolved after a year or two, is a pattern the register will show you and nothing else will.

Which register to use and how depends on the state. We have written up the specifics — the business search, the consumer protection route and the writers' association — for four of them: state-by-state verification guides

Three routes, and which you are actually choosing

The middle column is a legitimate business and it is what most companies in this space, including this one, actually are. The difference between it and the right-hand column is not the price — it is whether the company is honest about which one it is. A service company that describes itself as a publisher, implies selectivity it does not have, and keeps rights it does not need is the thing to avoid.

For a fuller comparison of the routes themselves, including hybrid publishing and how to tell a real hybrid publisher from a vanity press: self-publishing vs traditional vs hybrid

Before you sign

1. Get every promise in writing. A phone call you remember clearly is not evidence.
2. Have a lawyer read the contract. An hour of review costs a fraction of the fee and is the cheapest insurance in publishing.
3. Ask for a paid sample — a chapter edit, a cover concept. It costs a fraction of the project and answers the only question that matters.
4. Check the register. Fifteen minutes.
5. Look up two of their client books and confirm the author is a real, findable person.