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Okay, the publishers whose books are typically seen in a book store or in a drug store or supermarket rack are published by trade publishers. Traditional is not an actual term used in the publishing industry. It's a term used by the scammers and vanity publishers because they're busy trying to fool new writers who do not know anything about the publishing industry into becoming their victims or customers. There are a few other types of publishers such as university publishers, but you will generally not be negotiating with any of them. Instead, you will find yourself dealing only with the trade and vanity publishers. In point of fact, the majority of books found in a book store will be trade and university published. Rarely will you see a vanity or self-published book. This is because vanity and self-published books rarely have any editorial quality control.
Let's move on and look at the kinds you are like to encounter.
With self-published, you are the publisher. You obtain printing services from a local printer and binder or you deal with one of the self-publishing companies that do it all for you and then deliver the books to your door. A few will offer distribution services, but more often those are up to you. At any rate, you pay for everything and you receive all the profit. If you have a very good non-fiction niche book, you can do very well with self-publishing and become a success.
With vanity publishing (also referred to as subsidy) you pay to be published. Some vanity publishers claim not to accept everything and a few actually live up to that. However, their services tend to be expensive which is why they accept just about anything. Besides, they know the real truth that 99.999% of their books will never see a book store shelf because most people don't know how to distribute books to retailers. Because of the Internet, vanity publishers have exploded in numbers. Where there used to be only three or four such companies in the entire US, there are now dozens, if not hundreds because they can now offer distribution through the Internet and it doesn't cost them a single thing while they can now claim to have your book available from coast to coast and even abroad.
With trade publishers, there is no cost to the author. Never! This is because trade publishers analyze the market meaning they get weekly reports from all retailers who sell books through the distributors who provide those books to the retailers. They then know what kinds of books are selling, so they tend to look for manscripts that reflect the kind of content that the buying public is purchasing. Because the buying public is particular, the trade publishers do their best to put out a quality product which means finding books with not only the right content, but also distinct writing styles, good control of pace, and easy readability. Not all of the public wants to read a writer whose sentences ramble on for over five hundred words because not every writer is capable of doing that well as Hemmingway could. This is partly why it is so difficult to be accepted by a publisher. They're looking for subtle differences that most writers can't produce without lots of practice. In fact, most writers' first and even second manuscripts are often considered nothing more than practice or trunk stories because those end up stored in trunks under the bed. Only a few writers ever get their first manuscript published.
After accepting and editing a manuscript, trade publishers go beyond what the other publishers do. They send their books out through the distributors to be stocked at book stores and other retailers, but with a difference from what only a few vanity publishers ever attempt. Trade publishers also have actual sales people who visit the headquarters of the chains to promote what they've published. Only rarely will a publisher ever advertize on the TV or in the papers and when they do, it's generally to let the public know that a new book is out by an established author and this is frequently caused by lots of letters from the public asking the publisher when the next book will be released. This is because it is not cost effective to advertize that a book has been published when there is no demand established yet for that author. Keep this in mind. A ginsu knife can be advertized even though no one heard of it before its original introduction because it could be demonstrated in the commercial in order to impress the buying public. Your book cannot. It doesn't slice. It doesn't dice. It can't cut through cans and still be sharp. Also, the individual reading it might not even read it in the way the author intended. Even if the reader does, that could limit it to a small segment who reads in the same manner. This is why trade publishers limit their main advertising efforts to industry publications that are read by retailers who do the actual book selling to the public. So, trade publishers are actually driven by the market. They don't regulate or shape the market.