ABSTRACT
How editors choose books to publish remains the most mysterious question for people outside publishing and, indeed, for those inside who never get a proper glimpse of the process. Like many mysteries, however, it can be reduced to fairly prosaic levels, although some books do escape the process of rational choice. Most editors, if pushed, will admit that there were some titles that they published with success in the face of evidence that suggested an outcome to the contrary. Even specialist publishers, who work with fairly well defined ideas about what books are required reading for their market, will own up to having published titles that did not fit into, for example, any course-reading requirement, but which intuition told them that they should publish. Books that lie completely outside the norm of what is being read and recommended should not be spurned because sometimes there are winners there.
