It really depends on the company, bluejester. There are quite a few multi-national mega-publishers who have purchased formerly independent publishers, and new lines and imprints being started on a daily basis. Here's a really good definition from Tor Book's website. Not all publishers treat imprints and divisions the same, but this will get you started on understanding how it works. Hope it helps!
Imprints explained (also Lines, Lists, Logos, and the Logic Thereof)
A publishing company is a business, and as such it has an incorporated name, which isn't always the same as the name on the spines of the books. We'll call the name of this business the
legal name.
That publishing company (especially if it's an international company, like Tor's
parent company), may be organized into
divisions, each of which will have its own legal name.
Within each of these divisions, there will be a number of
imprints, which are the "public" names for groups of books (sometimes also called
lines or
lists) used for marketing purposes. Many of these imprints also have their own graphic devices or
logos which help to identify particular lists or imprints.
A Useful Fiction: Right about now, it might be helpful to explain one of the most important reasons why publishers create separate imprints for lines of books.
Most publishers don't actually sell many of their books to people. Instead, the publisher's sales representatives sell them to booksellers (including wh olesale distributors, rack jobbers, and bookstore owners), who in turn sell them to the public.
Most publishing lists are arranged in descending order of commercial potential, with the top book on the list (or
lead) being the one the publisher expects will sell the most, and get the widest distribution, with the ones below it getting proportionately less. Since booksellers have limited funds, they sometimes run out of steam (and money) about halfway down the list, leaving promising but less-well-known titles behind.
It's a strange truth of publishing that if a sales representative closes his or her sales kit in the middle of a presentation, and opens another one with a different imprint on the cover, the bookseller will frequently start again at the top. This different imprint is thus a useful fiction that allows both the sales representative and the bookseller to pretend that the imprint is, in fact, a brand-new publisher. As a result, more books get sold.
This explains the existence of the Tor Fantasy logo -- you know, the shield-shaped one, with the mountain and stars. It's used on the spines of mass-market books in the Tor Fantasy line, which is not a separate imprint but does have a separate sales kit. (We've stopped using it on the spines of Tor hardcover fantasy, except for some ongoing fantasy series that already had the mountain-and-stars logo on their earlier volumes, so they'll look nice sitting next to each other on the shelf.)
Reasonably clear so far? Good. Let's talk about how this all applies to Tor/Forge/Orb.
Macmillan Publishers Ltd.: But first, a word about our parent company. Macmillan Publishers Ltd. was until recently a privately-held British company owned by the Macmillan family (yes, the same family that produced the Prime Minister). As you might expect, Macmillan has several British divisions, including Pan Books, Picador, Macmillan General Books, etc.
(A historical footnote: Macmillan Publishers Ltd. used to own the American company called Macmillan. However, that company was sold to an American owner in 1950 and now has no connection to Macmillan Publishers Ltd. For a while the American Macmillan was owned by a different British concern, the Maxwell Communications Group, but it's now owned by Simon & Schuster.)
In April 1995, the Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, a.k.a. the
Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, acquired a majority interest in Macmillan Limited. The Holtzbrinck Group, headquartered in Stuttgart, already owned a substantial of other trade, academic, and business-oriented publishing operations on both sides of the Atlantic, including numerous German publishing houses, newspapers, and periodicals ,
Scientific American magazine, and the publishing houses Henry Holt, Farrar Straus Giroux, and W. H. Freeman. The Macmillan family continue to be minority shareholders in Macmillan Limited.
St. Martin's Press: Because it thought the idea of owning an American publishing company was still kind of neat, in the mid-1950s Macmillan U.K. started another company in the U.S. called
St. Martin's Press. (Another historical footnote: it was called St. Martin's Press because, at the time, Macmillan Publishers Ltd. was headquartered on St. Martin's Lane in London.)
Tom Doherty Associates: Meanwhile, in 1980, a fellow named Tom Doherty decided to set up his own publishing company. Tom was at that point publisher of Ace Books, a venerable paperback publisher that had more recently been bought, and continued as an imprint, by Grosset & Dunlap. After leaving Ace, with the help of some investors, Tom formed a corporation with the legal name of
Tom Doherty Associates, , whose business it was to publish books. (You may have noticed the words "A Tom Doherty Associates Book" on the covers and title pages of some of our books. Now you know why.)
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It goes on and on, but this gives you the general idea of how it works. If you happen to want to read the rest of the history, it's
here
