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You could be forgiven if you had not realised that two of this year’s Science Fiction & Fantasy (SFF) hits were, in fact, SFF titles. Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and M R Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts were both lavishly praised and selected for the Waterstones Book Club, and both have sold more than 100,000 units (print and e-book sales combined).
You could be forgiven if you had not realised that two of this year’s Science Fiction & Fantasy (SFF) hits were, in fact, SFF titles. Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and M R Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts were both lavishly praised and selected for the Waterstones Book Club, and both have sold more than 100,000 units (print and e-book sales combined).
Both were published by Little, Brown imprint Orbit, and their covers are far from the typical SFF treatments. The livery, says Orbit publisher Tim Holman, reflects a “mainstreaming” of SFF (even literary houses are publishing books with fantastical elements) and a policy of book-specific rather than genre-specific marketing. “The market for these [two] books went far beyond a ‘normal’ SFF book,” he explains. “So we deliberately went out thinking how to present them so they would appeal to a wide range of readers. When you do that, almost certainly a book doesn’t end up looking like SFF.”
Marketing without traditional tropes, Holman believes, enables more people to appreciate the sector. “Let’s be honest, SFF still has an image problem [with some readers], but publishers are not entirely without blame, contributing to the problem by putting too many purple dragons on the covers. But as we have seen fewer purple dragons, [we have seen fewer] misconceptions of what SFF is.”
No purple dragons, but Orbit is certainly in a purple patch in its 40th year. In addition to Carey and North, Anne Leckie’s provocative, gender-bending space opera Ancillary Justice became the first book to win all three major SFF prizes: the Nebula, Hugo and Arthur C Clarke Award.
Entry points
Orbit’s stock in trade, it should be underscored, is still in big-brand series authors, including fantasy stars Trudi Canavan and Jim Butcher, who have shifted £9.1m and £2.3m respectively through BookScan since records began. Series publishing does have its benefits, as completists generally want to hoover up everything an author writes, but there are drawbacks too: “There are discrete points of entry; no one wants to start a series on book four. Digital—which is a significant part of our revenue—can help with this, as we can be clever with pricing to drive backlist.”
Holman has been in the SFF game for 23 years, after joining Orbit as an editorial assistant in 1991. He has had overall responsibilty for both the UK and the US arm—which he founded in 2008—for six years. The transatlantic teams work together closely, particularly on acquisitions: “If both London and New York are excited about a new author, we’ll do everything we can to buy together. But we don’t have to; if one team doesn’t love a book, it doesn’t make any publishing sense to force them to acquire it.”
Looking to 2015, there are more genre-bending titles on the way, including Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, “a thriller that just happens to be in space”, and chick-lit author Jenny Colgan’s Resistance is Futile (“Bridget Jones meets ‘The Big Bang Theory’ meets ‘Independence Day’, Holman says).
It is a trend he thinks will continue. He says: “I wouldn’t be surprised if speculative fiction comes to dominate Adult Fiction in the way that it does Children’s and YA. Which means we will be competing with general publishers for authors. I think that’s a positive thing; it keeps us on our toes and makes us think creatively about what we can do to build readerships.”