PW: What prompted Leisure to start publishing horror fiction in hardcover?

DD: We've been expanding our paperback line very gradually, so that we're now up to two horror titles per month. Publishing hardcovers seemed to be the next step. We did a lot of research to be sure the marketplace would support this kind of expansion. Basically, we feel that horror is coming back. But we didn't want to force things too hard, too fast and hurt the genre.

PW: How often will you issue a hardcover, and will it affect your paperback schedule?

DD: We don't have a specific time frame. We're treating the books as event publishing, with roughly three or four horror titles coming out per year. We'll do the occasional romance as well. But we're not going to be publishing them every month. We'll do just a couple per year when we feel we have the right books. This shouldn't affect our paperback schedule, other than that, approximately one year after the hardcover comes out, we'll publish the paperback edition.

PW: Why did you decide to inaugurate the hardcover line with Douglas Clegg's The Infinite, which is the third novel in a series?

DD: We put a lot of thought into our selection of a launch book because we have a lot riding on it. On the one hand, we considered Doug's commercial success. But the quality of the book was another factor. We feel The Infinite is a hardcover type of horror novel. It crosses over somewhat from horror to mainstream, and it has a hardcover sensibility. With Doug's popularity and his growing success with us, we felt he was ready to make the jump to hardcover.

PW: What other horror titles do you have in preparation as hardcovers?

DD: The second hardcover, scheduled for October, is The Museum of Horrors, an HWA (Horror Writers Association) anthology edited by Dennis Etchison. HWA approached us with the idea, and we were very interested to work with them and some of the authors represented in the book. This will be our first anthology. In contrast to previous HWA books, it won't have a specific theme. We talked to Dennis and agreed that we didn't want to narrow it. The only criterion for contents was the quality of the stories.

PW: What criteria will you use to determine whether a book should be a hardcover or paperback?

DD: The popularity of the author and whether or not it will support hardcover publication are important. To some degree the style of the book is also a factor. There are some books that are more mass market oriented, and some more hardcover oriented.

PW: Do you anticipate that your hardcover line will have any impact on your relationship with the specialty press? Until now, you've been publishing mass market editions of their hardcovers.

DD: I don't think so because we sell to different markets. Specialty press editions are aimed at collectors and hardcore fans. Limited editions, by definition, don't have an impact on trade sales. Previously, when we just did the paperback, we saw no competition. We're certainly not out to quash any specialty houses. There's definitely room for both of us. We sort of help each other out.

PW: A few years ago, it was fashionable for trade houses to say that horror was dead and withdraw from horror publishing. Why is Leisure flying in the face of this?

DD: I think the prevailing wisdom is that horror was dead. At Leisure, we revamped our horror line, changed our packaging and began aiming books more at an adult audience—and we saw the line really take off. Other houses were watching us and saw our books getting out in greater numbers. We knew they would be watching us. We bucked the trend by expanding the horror line, and the hardcover line is the next step in that expansion. Now, the other houses are coming back on board and resurrecting their horror lines. They saw that horror isn't dead. We were the test case.