Just been to the BSFA meeting, and listened to Jo fletcher being interviewed. (BTW writing this on the bus home using the bus' free wifi. Hurrah for free wifi.)
Jo is basically in charge of the SF and Fantasy list at Gollancz. She's an editor, but her title is something flashier, which I gather means "she's a really good editor and we trust her to do what she wants". She was also responsible for creating the awesome SF Masterworks series.
A heartening point to take away is that she was very upbeat about the future of SF books, despite SF book sales falling in the UK in the last few years. Her optimism was due to:
- Europe opening up as a big market to sell into. This is allowing them to give writers okay advances.
- A reprint of the top 10 selling SF Masterworks with mainstreamy cool covers has sold very well this year.
- They're working on getting Tesco etc to sell SF books, and believes that may happen soon (maybe due to The Prestige).
Also, I never realised that Gollancz decided to concentrate on UK authors, which is cool. Apparently the logistics of publishing Us authors is a bit of a nightmare.
All very interesting.
