If You Like Speculative Fiction, Raise Your Tentacle

Genius Book Publishing started out with the intent to publish “speculative fiction.” But just about as quickly as we made that decision, we began hearing a startling question: “What is speculative fiction, anyway?” I mean, isn’t all fiction speculative? After all, the eternal writing prompt “What if?” can apply to anything from science-fiction to romance, and everything else, for that matter. Fiction, by it’s very nature, looks not to what is, but what could be.

But that doesn’t solve the problem. When most people (and for the purposes of this post, most people includes all the editors at Wikipedia) say speculative fiction, they are referring to genres like fantasy, horror, science fiction, supernatural, superhero, utopian, dystopian, and apocalyptic fiction, or some combination thereof.

(Just a thought: Wouldn’t it be great if someone wrote a superhero/fantasy/apocalyptic story? With a lead-in like that, I may actually be willing to do an anthology… but I digress.)

In a recent blog post, Mike Shatzkin pointed out, “40 years ago that all trade book publishing companies were started with an ‘editorial inspiration’: an idea of what they would publish. Sometimes that was a highly personal selection dictated by an individual’s taste, such as by so many of the great company and imprint names: Scribners, Knopf, Farrar and Straus and Giroux, for examples. Random House was begun on the idea of the Modern Library series; Simon & Schuster was started to do crossword puzzle books.”

Mike’s comments (or really, his father’s, since that is who he is quoting) really struck something within me. In the year since I started this publishing endeavor, I had lost sight of my original goal. Genius Book Publishing has always been a genre press (another tough term… but again, I digress), but we have tried to be as general as possible because I didn’t want to get pigeon-holed into a single genre. There’s a flaw in that approach, however.

I’ve touched upon this before, but one of a publisher’s primary duties—and one of the draws for authors who sign up with those publishers—is to build an audience, a following for each author. If the publisher can’t or won’t do that, then the author doesn’t get paid—no sales—and neither does the publisher. However, the publisher who focuses on a genre or set of closely related genres (e.g., speculative fiction) can share the audience between all of its authors. After all, it is demonstrable that most readers like more than one author. No reason they can’t read and buy most or all of a publisher’s authors—if they all write books that are similar enough to share that speculative nature.

At one point, when readers, authors, and others would ask me what kinds of books do I want to publish, I would say, “Good books.” Later on, it became clear to me that I wanted to publish exciting books that really grabbed the reader and didn’t let go. That was still a little too generic, but it was better than, “good books.” Now that I am truly realizing the power and responsibility of building an audience, it has become increasingly apparent—and increasingly important—for Genius Book Publishing to be focused in what we publish to achieve that synergy where readers come to trust us to publish books that they will want to read, and authors will know that we can build them the audience they deserve.

Does that mean we are going to be dropping any projects that don’t fit within that synergy? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that we may not pick up some projects that would otherwise have been interesting to us, and No, insofar as we have no plans to cancel any projects that are currently in the works. It isn’t good enough to be ready to invest time, money, and effort into a book we believe in. We have a responsibility to both our readers and our authors to continue publishing books that both can agree upon.

So, in the future, you may not see quite as much of a variety in our selection—we probably won’t be picking up any legal thrillers anytime soon—but the books we will be choosing will hopefully appeal to those readers out there that like our other books.

Thus, if you like superhero apocalyptic fantasies, or science-fiction mysteries (okay, mysteries may be a bit of a stretch, but I love me some speculative mysteries), expect to see more of that, along with quite a bit of horror, in the coming years.

You can put your tentacles down now.