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Nov

29

Gollancz to launch raunchy new Romancz imprint

Posted in: Press Room on 29th November 2006 by Sandy Auden

Gollancz publishers are launching a brand new imprint in January 2007 called Gollancz Romancz. Sexy supernatural stories are already big business in the US and Gollancz hoping to tap the same market in the UK...

Gollancz Romancz Logo Jo Fletcher, Editorial Director at Gollancz, is behind this new development, ably supported by the Gollancz management. "Last year, we got a new boss who freely admitted that she knew nothing about SF, Fantasy or Horror but was very interested in learning about it," said Fletcher about how the imprint idea started. "She looked at the list and observed that there weren’t many women on it. And we explained that we buy books because they’re good, we don’t necessarily look at the sex of the author. So she said, I think we need more girlies.

"When I was at the World Fantasy convention in America and during my New York visit the week after, I looked around to see if there was anyone I was missing. What I noticed was that paranormal porn or supernatural romance (or whatever you choose to call it) was massive in American and it had started with Laurell K Hamilton. Virtually every publishing company we saw has masses of this stuff coming out. So I started reading it. Poor Ian (my husband) was treated to nightly readings of the some of the more choice scenes.

"In the end I found one that I really liked."

Finding a good book is only the start of the process in modern publishing. "We buy books by writing an advance information sheet then presenting it to a publishing meeting of our colleagues," said Fletcher. "We explain why we want to buy it, then we have a discussion about it and we get a yes or no.

"So I said this is not just Fantasy it's Fantasy with lurve. This isn't just… and I went through the whole parody of the Marks & Spencer advert and finished with… This is not just Romance, this is Gollancz Romancz. And I got to buy the book."

A few names are already attached to the Gollancz Romancz imprint – Charlaine Harris, Kim Wilkins and Elizabeth Vaughan – but the publishers haven't gone out and recruited en masse. "Because our provisos are so strict, we’re going carefully," Fletcher said. "First off, any author we buy has to be good enough to go on the Gollancz list on its own because we have a responsibility to those people who buy Gollancz books, because they know they’re going to get something good. So you can’t just go publishing any old crap just because it fits the parameters, it’s got to be good.

"Secondly, the Fantasy angle has to be the main point of the book for it be Gollancz. Otherwise it would be mainstream. So with Charlaine Harris you've got the Sookie books where the protagonist is a telepath and you’ve got the Grave Sight books where the protagonist can find dead people. That doesn’t happen in real life, there’s no way you can dress that up to be anything other than Fantasy.

"With Kim Wilkins' Rosa and the Veil of Gold, you got a Russian woman who has magical powers, she's a witch if you will. She has to go across to the dark side of Russia to save her lover. And with Elizabeth Vaughan you’ve got something very different; War Prize, the first of a trilogy, is like Diana Gabaldon meets Conan. She is the daughter of the King, born and bred to be of service to her country, but her father dies and her loathsome half-brother takes the throne and promptly gives her as a war prize to the barbarian who's besieging the city. It's basically a Mills & Boon story but the author has done an amazing job on a really good picture of a clash of culture. So the romance is there but it’s a beautifully written East meets West story as well."

There's a very specific market that Gollancz are aiming for with the new imprint. "It's the 18-30 year olds, young women who have come to fantasy through Buffy and who read Bella and Heat magazines. They wouldn’t touch a fantasy book because it's for geeks but they would touch something that’s a good women's read. And it’s for that reason we’re packaging them the way we are. They start out as demy hardbacks and then they’ll go into mass market paperback pretty soon because we are hoping to get these into the supermarkets. By making them demy hardbacks means they’ll be cute and sit in a handbag easily and they’ll have very female orientated covers.

"We know that if we put our minds to it, we could probably claim that half of the best seller list is actually genre fiction.""Gollancz is always looking for ways to widen its audience, like the recent launch of Gollancz Manga. This is another way. We’re looking at what’s out there. We know that if we put our minds to it, we could probably claim that half of the best seller list is actually genre fiction, but we don’t because it’s published as mainstream, and if that’s what it takes to get people reading then that’s fine. But it would be really nice to get people reading more than they do. We want to reach the girls that read these lifestyle magazines, who probably only read one book a year when they go on holiday. We're trying to get through to a whole different audience, to let them know what a wealth of imaginative literature is out there."

The upcoming 2007 schedule for Gollancz Romancz currently looks like this:
January: Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris [Amazon]
February (Valentine's Day): War Prize by Elizabeth Vaughan [Amazon]
March: Rosa and the Veil of Gold – Kim Wilkins [Amazon]
May: Dead as a Doornail – Charlaine Harris

So there'll be no shortage of sexy, steamy supernatural fun next year then. Marvellous!

Source: Jo Fletcher, Editorial Director, Gollancz Publishers

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