Virginia Quarterly Review web editor Jane Friedman has created an infographic called “Understanding the Key Book Publishing Paths.”

Follow this link to see the whole infographic–what path did you choose?

Friedman identified the following five options: traditional publishing, partnership publishing, fully-assisted publishing, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) publishing with a distributor, and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) direct publishing. She also includes a section for “special and hard-to-classify cases.”

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What’s your favorite children’s book setting?

The travel site cheapflights.co.uk has published an infographic exploring some of the most beautiful real-life locations from children’s books.

We’ve embedded the complete infographic below along with free digital book links to some of the books for your for your Kindle, iPad or other eReader.

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Last year publishing house Weldon Owen created an infographic called “How a Book is Born,” tracing the path of a book from idea to final product in a handy flowchart.

We’ve embedded the whole infographic below–all book professionals can learn from this image which shows how a book is conceptualized, pitched, picked up, written, edited and who gets drunk along the way.

Check it out: “Here’s the heartwarming, only slightly messy, and roughly 74 percent accurate story of how an idea churns through the publishing process just like—as a publisher we once knew put it—a rat travels through an anaconda. Don’t think too much about that analogy. Just enjoy this flowchart that takes you from a brilliant idea to a best-selling trade book. And stop asking your mother embarrassing questions.”

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Reddit user slotbadger created an insightful chart mapping page-lengths in beloved fantasy series.

The chart illustrates the reader’s unofficial maxim: “the books of a fantasy series tend to get fatter.” They also noted: “I actually made this a few years ago, which is why there are a few books missing. Found it crawling through old files on my computer! Unfortunately I don’t have the source, and can’t be bothered to update it.”

Click on the image to enlarge the chart–where does your favorite fantasy series fall on the map?

Lord of the Rings fan Emil Johansson has created a sprawling infographic illustrating how the One Ring was controlled during the 4,860-year span of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s epic series.

Embedded below (click to enlarge), the chart includes a map and timeline of ring-related events mentioned in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. What do you think?

Here’s more about the infographic: “This is a timeline of the events related to the One Ring created by Sauron in Second Age 1600. The years of the War of the Ring are described in more detail.”

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Ever wonder what your favorite novel would look like as an infographic? Programmer Jeff Clark took Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, exploring the book in a set of visualizations exploring the relationships between words, themes and the shape of the classic novel (click to enlarge).

With digital books and graphic-making tools, we can now see how words interact inside massive novels. Here’s an excerpt:

A word used in multiple places in a text can be interpreted as a connection between those locations. Depending on the word itself the connection could be in terms of character, setting, activity, mood, or other aspects of the text. This graphic shows a number of these word connections. The 365 chapters of the text are shown with small segments on the inner ring of the circle with the first chapter appearing at the top and proceeding clockwise from there. The outer ring shows how the chapters are grouped into books of the novel and the book titles are shown as well. The words in the middle are connected using lines of the same color to the chapters where they are used. (link via)

3DIssue.com has created an infographic called, “The Digital Publishing Explosion,” that explores the rise of eBooks.

According to the graph, the average eBook reader reads 24 books a year, compared to the 15 books read by the average print book reader. We’ve embedded the entire image after the jump for you to explore further.

Check it out: “The Digital Publishing Explosion | Infographic from 3D Issue 11 OCT 2012 0 inShare ‘The Digital Publishing Explosion’ infographic highlights some of the key trends and predictions in digital publishing. It’s been a fast changing environment in recent years with many developments and this looks set to continue.” Read more

If you spend hours working on a blog post, you want to find as many readers as you can for that piece of online writing. On today’s edition of the Morning Media Menu, Social Times editor Devon Glenn introduced a Launch Grow Joy infographic with 30 tools for sharing your online writing.

Above, we’ve highlighted one section of the infographic focused on ways to syndicate your writing, but you can explore the complete infographic below–how many of these tools do you use? Press play below to listen to the podcast.

SocialTimes has more about the chart: “This chart contains 30 channels where a blog post – or anything with a URL, really – might be found and shared by others online. Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are obvious choices for sharing stories with friends, but there are other sites devoted specifically spreading and sharing links. Don’t forget StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Digg. One interesting section on this chart is a list of sites that syndicate content. Amazon, for instance, is testing out a publishing tool for bloggers on the Kindle. If you give each post the maximum exposure, you can focus on writing better stories and still get a lot of page views.”

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Aptara has created an infographic called, “Buy the Book: How the Business of eBooks is Shaping Publishing,” which explores the expanding eBook marketplace.

We’ve embedded the whole infographic below to help publishers gain perspective on the growing digital book world.

It is full of interesting statistics. For example, “36 percent of publishers derive more than 10 percent of their revenue from eBooks. This number has doubled in one year.” In addition, “4 out of 5 publishers now produce eBooks, a whopping 30 percent increase in 3 years.”

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