Traditional publishing houses receive over 30,000 unsolicited queries and manuscripts per year. University presses, small presses and self-publishing companies--including e-book publishers--receive around 10,000. Absent the staff to review all of these, many publishers--as well as literary agents--subcontract with freelancers to handle the preliminary reads and to provide coverage notes on each project's strengths, weaknesses and marketability. This may also entail drafting rejection letters.
Once a book is accepted for publication, it is assigned an editor who will work closely with the author to bring it up to the highest standards. This can be anything from simple line and copy editing to substantive rewrites of material. Editors who work from home are assigned between one and ten authors at a time depending on the complexity of each project. Because the editing phase of publication is all done electronically, an at-home editor can live anywhere in the world and be as accessible to her authors as if they were working side by side. Editors often hold advanced degrees in English or journalism and are usually required to take tests demonstrating their expertise in spelling, grammar, punctuation and proofreading.
Publishers of nonfiction texts, scientific books, foreign translations and school textbooks rely heavily on freelancers to verify the content is accurate and timely. To that end, they look for individuals who hold advanced degrees in the subject matter they'll be assigned and/or have a demonstrated expertise. Publishers of cookbooks frequently use homemakers to test the recipes, especially insofar as confirming that measurements and preparation steps are clear and easy to understand. Fact checkers are also used for fiction projects in which the characters are in unique professions that have their own lingo and procedural methodologies. The most common are plots involving law enforcement, private investigators, the military, sports and doctors.
Photographers and graphic artists are in high demand to design covers for trade paperbacks and e-books. The concept pieces are developed as a result of detailed questionnaires that are filled out by the artists. Experience with photo editing software is essential for these types of jobs. A cover artist will typically design three different covers for presentation to the author and the publishing entity. In traditional publishing houses, it's usually the publisher who has the final say; for e-book and print-on-demand entities, the author's preferences tend to prevail.
With the downscaling of in-house marketing divisions at publishing houses, the task of writing back-cover blurbs, book catalog synopses, press releases and advertising materials is often subcontracted to at-home writers who have excellent communications and public relations skills. It's also an insider secret that freelancers are sometimes paid to write reviews of new releases to help generate consumer interest.