Spontaneous Derivation

I’m breaking it up by publisher so that you can experience the scary of HarperCollins.

Non-SF/F Publishers/Imprints

They like to hide their SF/F amongst thrillers, romances, historicals, mysteries, you get the idea. They’re more genre imprints than mainstream imprints, although this is not always the case.

Very often the ratio of SF/F to other genres is low, but then again, the ratio of non-mainstream genre to mainstream is fairly high.

Anchor Books

More of a historical imprint of Random House. However, Acacia ended up here—which is not surprising, since the author, David Anthony Durham, also writes historical novels, like Pride of Carthage (also in the Kindle store).

Ballantine

An imprint of Random House. Amongst the more normal SF/F titles like Elric: To Rescue Tanelorn, you’ll also find romance/horror like Night Fall.

Bantam

Yet another imprint of Random House. SF/F was more rare here before they folded the imprint Spectra under Bantam—at least in the Kindle store.

I find myself strangely contemplating reading The Magicians and Mrs. Quent: “Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and H.P. Lovecraft collide….”

Harcourt

Four words: Ursula K. Le Guin. Well. Not really words, but you know what I mean. And only one Le Guin book under their name. Only 25-some books in the Kindle store overall, though.

HarperCollins

Much more varied, because they’re a full-fledged publisher and don’t seem to believe in grouping books under individual imprints in the Kindle store.

They are totally badass about releasing books on Kindle, even for a full-fledged publisher: currently over 30 books are going to descend upon the Kindle store, and usually they’ll be adding more over the next few days.

With Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Neal Stephenson, and others, their ratio of SF/F versus other books is fairly decent for a publisher that’s folded every single one of its imprints under HarperCollins in the Kindle store…

Penguin

Usually their SF/F stuff ends up in the imprints, but once in a while there’s either a catalog error or something else going on, and an SF/F book ends directly under Penguin as a publisher.

This brings an effect that’s like: “Wow, first it’s the ‘For Complete Idiots’ series, The Winter of Our Discontent, and The Art of Being; and then it’s SETI, Misspelled, and When All Seems Lost: A Novel of the Legion of the Damned.

Random House

Ditto. Alternate similar mainstream books with The Second Siege: Book Two of Tapestry, The Dragon in the Sock Drawer: Dragon Keepers #1, and Elissa’s Odyssey: Phoenix Rising #2 (I detect a pattern here).

However, I have to give them mad (random) props for Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go.

Simon & Schuster

Stephen King and YA Fantasy live here. Also, Go Go Girls of the Apocalypse.

St. Martin’s Press

Another a full-fledged publisher. Nevertheless, it bears interesting fruit once every 50 books. Usually it’s Charles de Lint.

Yes, I can be incredibly patient in some things… less so in others.

SF/F Imprints

Science fiction and fantasy imprints are almost always easier to deal with than the parent publisher, because then you don’t have to sift through the hundred books or so that are unleashed to find the SF/F ones.

Ace & Roc

Combined because they’re both imprints of Penguin. Combined, at least 6 new books are coming out, including an early Christmas book involving werewolves.

Neil Gaiman would like it. I think I’ve had my share of werewolves though. There’s plenty of other courses though, like The Dresden Files, Breath and Bone, and Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age series.

However, I have to give lots of love to Ace and Roc for Armed and Magical, which is like eating cake. I have been needing some cake.

Baen

Is full of hate for the Kindle store. However, their Kindle-compatible eBook store lives on WebScriptions.

DAW

Slowly but surely; a couple books every once in a while.

I have no idea what’s up with Goblin War by Jim C. Hines ending up with a publication date of January 6th, 2009 but… that’s what Amazon says is true.

Plenty of other DAW books are available, however, and every single one is SF/F.

Del Rey

SF/F imprint of Random House. They’re busy bringing their backlist into the Kindle store, although the rate is slow since they’re very focused in Manga these days—which don’t transfer easily to the Kindle and thus aren’t.

Orbit

They live and breathe SF/F, with a few books every release period. Jeff Somers lives here so as far as I’m concerned they’re good, even with few books.

Spectra

Originally quite a few titles ended up here, but recently they’ve been, a la HarperCollins, folded up into the parent publisher, Bantam.

Notable inhabitants include George R. R. Martin; I’ll be curious to see if A Dance of Dragons will go under Bantam or Spectra in the Kindle store.

Tor & Forge

Tor is specifically SF/F, while Forge does literary SF/F combined with alternate history, romance, thrillers, and other genre, which makes the latter harder to parse—although it seems like every five books hits SF/F. Both are imprints of Macmillan.

Tor has tons of marvelous authors, like John Scalzi and Gene Wolfe and Tobias S. Buckell, and Cherie Priest and… uh… I think I’m mostly naming authors because I met them through Tor’s free eBook program. Of course, I always loved Gene Wolfe.

I didn’t realize had completely forgotten Tor had done The Book of Joby. Awesome-o-rama.

Publishers and Imprints I Keep Hoping Show Up

Eos

Where are you?

Nightshade

Ditto.

Prometheus/Pyr

Ditto.

Subterranean Press

Probably they’ll never show up here; they focus on high quality print editions. Nevertheless.

Started a new thing; 1759 words last night. It’s currently called, not very creatively, Project #46.

Nope, I have no idea where this one will go. This one wasn’t even planned. Right now it’s just raw wordage. I’m assuming 50k for fun, rather than having a definite place to go.

Starting line:

Jillna wondered if she should claim to be the daughter of an ambassador, or perhaps the niece of a company executive.

Second to last paragraph, which is not what you think it is:

Chasra laughed. “This is too rich. You are such a farce. Just a word of advice—you better like eating humble pie, ’cause you’re gonna get ripped to pieces here.” Even Fern laughed, but a polite and small laugh into her hand.

Will it go anywhere? Who knows? This could be described as “Mike and Psmith meets I, Robot,” and though that’s rather inaccurate it gets the basic idea across. Going somewhere is optional right now.

Some minor writing quarter-mile marks:

• This is actually the first time I’m writing with a female protagonist, and currently a mostly female main cast (with a more balanced set of minor and walk-on characters).
• This is the first scene I’ve ever written where more than two characters take an active role in a conversation. It’s about to become four. The best part is that they all sound different.
• More of the characterization is carried through dialogue and, in the case of the POV, thoughts. Almost every time I come across something I recognize as a “tell” rather than “show”, I shift it to conversation or drop it entirely.
• The point of view character actually has a personality and history from page one. It helps that I’m planning on multiple POV characters.
• My narrator I’ve made as invisible as possible and not such a pill. Interesting narrators are probably not my style unless they’re first person. This might be a problem with this project.
• I’ve killed the urge to write about Death and Destruction and Emo and settled on embedding personality quirks, faults, and fears into my characters rather as a nebulous infective atmosphere, because I’m not good at nebulous infective atmosphere. Unless you want to read the equivalent of Evanescence on downers.
• I’m writing humor. This may turn out badly. But at least the narrator isn’t trying to exude humor; the humor is currently involved in conversation and/or character thoughts. And right now the situation has gone slightly bizarre and needs no tells to indicate its bizarreness, because it all comes from the characters and their quirks/fears/faults and, in one case, bizarreness.

I have Nick Mamatas to thank for the dialogue, POV, narrator, and most of the rest, by the way. I have every expectation that I would still have been far less clueless without his critique on another piece of mine. Which points out to me the importance of workshops like Clarion and Viable Paradise, where critiques from pro writers are available.

I try not to care when starting a writing project. I don’t know why when I end up caring anyways. Right now, this is a small break from bigger rewrites I have in mind. I have learned my lesson: where I am at the state of my knowledge, serials that are not largely pre-written, for a high percent value of “largely,” are bad ideas.