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A New Year for Genreville

January 7, 2009 A new year means an excuse to try new things. I've been kicking around two big ideas and it's time to release them into the world and see what they make of themselves.

A Book a Week

Those of you who follow my personal blog may have seen me making posts about a "book tournament".  I had been shelving books and realized that I own hundreds of books that I've never read. I waded through the stacks and pulled out 32 genre titles. Some had been recommended; some had gotten great reviews, in PW and elsewhere; some just looked interesting. Then I paired them up and asked my readers to vote on each pairing. Over the course of five weeks, I ran five iterations of the contest, re-ranking the books after each round by the number of wins and total number of votes, and then sorted them into a final master list.

The next step, of course, is to read them all. As I read each one, I'll be posting a short review, mostly trying to place each book in context in the larger world of SF/F/H writing. I'm aiming for one per week, though I may occasionally delay a bit. I used to read and review three books a week for PW, so one a week shouldn't be too much trouble, especially since I already know most of these are likely to be pretty enjoyable.

I've started with Emma Bull's War for the Oaks (Ace, 1987; Orb, 2001) which handily won the competition with 5 wins and 205 total votes. It's a quick read; I started it on Monday and finished it Tuesday night. The review will go up sometime in the next week.

Ask a Publicist

Whenever I post about publicity or marketing, I get a huge response. Clearly this is a side of the business that people want to know more about. In service to you, dear readers, I flipped through my address book and emailed a few acquaintances who I thought might be willing to weigh in on various questions related to genre book marketing and publicity. The response has been amazing. I've already heard back from nearly a dozen people who want to chime in, from major imprint publicists like Alex Lencicki (Orbit) and Jodi Rosoff (late of Tor, now with Ace/Roc) to independent publishers like Gavin Grant (Small Beer) and Vera Nazarian (Norilana). I can't wait to see their answers to questions like "How do you go about getting blurbs?" and "Is an imprint a brand?".

If you'd like to contribute a question or three, email rose.fox@reedbusiness.com with "Ask a Publicist" in the subject line. I can't promise that I'll pass every question along to the experts, but I'm sure you'll come up with plenty of brilliant ideas. I'm hoping we'll have enough to put up a post every week or two.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. I look forward to spending this coming year with you.

Posted by Rose Fox on January 7, 2009 | Comments (6)