It’s pretty obvious how James Atlas’s publishing endeavor, Atlas Books, got its name. But how about Atlas’s new series of business books, Enterprise, published jointly with W.W. Norton? Or Penguin’s new conservative imprint, Sentinel?

Even as long-established publishing companies continue to merge themselves out of existence, new imprints continue to be launched. Lines like Enterprise or Mr. Atlas’s new series of short biographies, Eminent Lives (also launching this month), published by HarperCollins, are usually designed with specific topics and subjects in mind. Their names, rather than reflecting the names of proprietors (as publishing companies used to) or editors (as they still occasionally do), are very much marketing devices.

Picking a name for the imprint is important to your success, said the executive editor of Atlas Books, Jesse Cohen. “It has to carry a lot of weight,” he said. “It has to evoke not just what the series is about, but also be intriguing at the same time. It’s got to have a certain buzz.”

That buzz is mostly for the benefit of others in the publishing industry, of course average readers are more likely to be influenced by the name of the author or the title of the book than the name of the imprint especially if they don’t know it.

For Atlas Books, the name of the series actually came late, according to Mr. Cohen. “We called it the Business Series for a long time,” he said. “We had different ideas. Enterprise was the one that sunk in.” Mr. Atlas said he can’t remember exactly how he decided on the name Enterprise. He suggests, however, that “it emerged from sitting around in conference rooms with smart people.”

As Enterprise gets a start this fall, so will Sentinel which will publish markedly conservative authors. Sentinel’s Founder, Adrian Zackheim, also forgets just how they decided on the name, but the editor, Bernadette Malone, said that it comes from the Princeton Sentinel.

“Will Wiezer, who’s the marketing director, had gone to Princeton, and there the conservative paper is the Princeton Sentinel” she said. “Will thought of Sentinel for us and it led to a very cool colophon.” Mr. Zackheim described it as “a colonial looking chap … with a lantern and a bell, so he’s watchful and warning.” Ultimately, Sentinel was decided upon because it “is a good word to describe the tough-minded defense of conservative values that the imprint represents.”

The process of naming a publisher, series, or imprint, is often a slow one that lots of people become involved in. It is often less about choosing and more about discarding. Ms. Malone, who came to Sentinel from Regnery, described it as a process of elimination. “A lot of the ones we had chosen were already taken,” she said, but didn’t want to say which ones because she “wouldn’t want to be known as the imprint wishfully known as something else.”

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NOTES

Chamber Music America has announced the jazz composers who will receive grants from the New Works: Creation and Presentation program. These awards range from $10,000 to $14,000. The recipients are: John Blake Jr., Cornelius Boots, Billy Childs, Jay Clayton, Marty Ehrlich, Jimmy Greene, Jeff Haas, Lenora Zenzalai Helm, Fred Ho, Vijay Lyer, Matthias Lupri, Edward Simon, Ben Waltzer, Ben Wolfe, and Peter Zak…. The Thurber House has announced three finalists for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. They are: “No Way to Treat a First Lady” by Christopher Buckley (Random House), “The Day I Turned Uncool” by Dan Zevin (Villard Books), and “Me and Orson Welles” by Robert Kaplow (MacAdam/Cage). The winner, to receive $5,000, will be announced at a ceremony on November 15.