Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (2)

Nuts & Bolts: Betsy Mitchell
September 23, 2008

A bit of administrivia first: I'm going on vacation from October 24 to November 7, and I'd love to have guest bloggers for those two weeks. If you're interested in writing guest posts for Genreville, or if you want to suggest good candidates for future Nuts & Bolts or Series Business posts, please leave a comment or send me an email.

This week's Nuts & Bolts interviewee is Betsy Mitchell, editor-in-chief of Random House's Del Rey imprint. As EIC, she oversees the imprint's acquisitions and handles many marketing decisions as well as working on individual books. Perhaps most famously, Mitchell decided to launch Naomi Novik's Temeraire series with three mass market releases in three consecutive months, an unorthodox move that met with spectacular success. I asked her about her work on Peter F. Hamilton's The Dreaming Void (March 2008); usually Nuts & Bolts focuses on specific titles, but she went off on such interesting tangents about the relationship between imprint and author and the need for flexibility and experimentation that I decided to put those up instead.

Genreville: Where did you first encounter Hamilton's work, and what attracted you to it?

Betsy Mitchell: Peter F. Hamilton burst onto my consciousness in the mid-'90s,  when I was still at Warner Books and The Reality Dysfunction and its two sequels came up for auction in the U.S. I still remember presenting the trilogy at our weekly editorial meeting: "She's so excited she's shaking," one of the sales guys said. Embarrassing, but true. I hadn't read anything so sweeping in scope and full of interesting, involving characters since Ringworld, Dune, or Asimov's Foundation trilogy. Whoever this Peter Hamilton was, I had to have the three books.

GV: What challenges did you face when editing and promoting his books?

BM: The challenge was, aside from Mindstar Rising--an SF mystery published by Tor, the first in the Greg Mandel trilogy--Hamilton was as yet unknown in the U.S. And The Reality Dysfunction was a monstrous manuscript, close to a thousand pages long. At that length, a hardcover would be tremendously expensive to produce. It would require a cover price of $26.95, and who would pay that for an unknown author? And in mass market, the story would threaten to bust its glued spine.

In some burst of imagination, I had the idea to break the book into two parts and publish them back to back in subsequent months, in mass market. A $6.99 cover price was completely acceptable to readers who'd never heard of Hamilton, and the second half of the story following just a month after the first would, I hope, assuage any reader irritation over not receiving the full story in a single book. As it turned out, The Reality Dysfunction was a huge success and Hamilton was off to a strong career. When I left Warner he followed me to Del Rey and has become one of our top names.

GV: How did it inspire or discourage you? How is that experience affecting your current and future projects?

BM: The experience was rather exhilarating. Other editors told me at the time that they were dying to buy the project but came up against the same stumbling blocks of production cost and price. Hamilton has since become such a name that we can publish his 800-page novels at $27.00 with no reader resistance, but it had to start somewhere.

Experimentation is absolutely required in today's book world. Keep an ear out for odd success stories in other genres--they can often be adaptable. Get others excited about your project and ask for their advice; another department's ideas may be something you'll never come up with alone. Play with parameters. Go forth and publish!

Next week's Nuts & Bolts will feature author Tobias Buckell discussing his novel Sly Mongoose (Tor, August 2008), the third Xenowealth book.

Posted by Rose Fox on September 23, 2008 | Comments (2)