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Reimagining Marketing with Curriculum-Based Teaching Guides

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Here at Ooligan Press, innovation has been the name of the marketing game in the past couple years. To market a book, you’ve got to market your brand.

This is where extending outreach to new or secondary audiences reimagines a stagnant brand strategy. We’ve taken the hassle away from literary analysis and created an online, self-guided curriculum for teachers, librarians, and independent learners alike.

Marketing to Educators

We all know Ooligan is staffed by Portland State graduate students. It would seem only natural that Ooligan serve educational or academic audiences outside of the typical target consumer. So, why teaching guides? And what titles will be included in this new outreach?

Extending our outreach to educators is really all about brand strategy. Every book has a specific target audience, but teaching guides act as promotional materials that appeal to a singular audience across multiple genres. This outreach attempts to solidify a stable target audience for our press. And a stable consumer means a potential increase in sales.

With creative writing exercises, reflection questions, and interactive activities, Ooligan’s new teaching guides will appeal to educators as well as the homeschooled learner or the not-so-enthusiastic reader. Not only do these guides reinforce Ooligan’s mission of regionality, community, inclusion, and social-emotional awareness, but they also strengthen pre-existing connections with educators and the Multnomah County Library.

In fact, as Ooligan Press’s 2021-22 Marketing Manager, I was shocked to learn that the press actually had dabbled with teaching guides in the past. With curriculum-based teaching guides of backlists like Ricochet River and Sleeping in My Jeans drowning somewhere in the deep, dark Ooligan archives, I took inspiration from the strategies of yesteryear and am seeking innovative ways to reimagine how these strategies may be more consistently and successfully implemented now and in the future.

In particular, we will be focusing this effort on YA titles. They may be fiction or nonfiction, but must teach valuable social-emotional lessons or spread awareness about key regional, historical, social, or political spheres. Think of it this way: if one of our YA titles can contribute to meaningful discussion in either a high school classroom or library setting, it is probably a worthy candidate for a teaching guide.

So, what does the process actually look like? Well, it’s taken some trial and error. First, the 2017 teaching guides from Ricochet River and Sleeping in My Jeans had to be redesigned. While the curriculum the 2017 Oolies had created is smart and interactive, the design was not much more than a PDF-converted Google Doc with some on-brand fonts. To ensure each guide seamlessly adhered to its respective title’s branding aesthetics, one volunteer crafts a beautifully designed guide. The sparkly new Ricochet River and Sleeping in My Jeans teaching guides are live on the Ooligan website’s Educator Portal, where access is just a simple click and download away for educators and independent learners.

The tricky bit? Creating the actual curriculum for new titles. Each teaching guide must have a particular set of interactive activities, discussions, and additional materials like comparative readings, teaching slideshows, and K-W-L curriculum worksheets.

Whew! Oolies are multi-talented, absolutely. But it’s not like all book publishers are versed in the art of curriculum building, so how the heck do we do it? With the assistance of fellow educators, our curriculum will be reviewed and given the green light. Once this happens and the curriculum has been created, a callout goes live for yet another designer to conceptualize and design the curriculum into a brand new teaching guide.

What’s Next?

Promotion, promotion, promotion.

With all this hard work, it’s crucial that we ensure these standards are incorporated into future production schedules. Project Managers now have access to a Teaching Guide Checklist to assess their title’s appropriateness for a teaching guide. In the Marketing Plan stage, project teams will begin planning for teaching guides in their Marketing and Publicity Highlights, and will begin production after blurb requests—before publication.

Oh, but that’s not all. We’ve got to spread the word. Social media promotion and community connections will be important here. So, get to work on those social media collateral callouts and continue to reach out to educators and libraries for some awesome deals on class sets. This year at Ooligan we’re all about innovation. If all is implemented successfully, teaching guides can set a precedent for a stable target audience within our little independent graduate press.

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Inside Ooligan Press: Your Manuscript is Accepted! Now What?

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Note: This is part of the blog series “Inside Ooligan Press”, about how we take a manuscript from an idea to a professionally published book.

So, you wrote a killer query letter and submitted a proper proposal. You won over Acquisitions and we pitched your project to the press successfully, then we offered to publish your book: now what? For the sake of transparency and in an effort to demystify this crazy little thing called publishing, I humbly offer you an inside look at what you can expect when working with Ooligan Press.

Once you get notified that our pitch was successful, we enter into the contract negotiation phase of the process. We are a small, not-for-profit press that generally cannot offer author advances. However, authors are compensated for their work, receiving industry standard royalty rates for trade paperbacks based on cover price and units sold, paid out biannually after publication. The Publisher and author negotiate terms of the contract including dates and deadlines for revisions, the final manuscript and any additional materials, and publication, among other things. This process generally takes about two weeks, give or take, during which time it is encouraged that the author has a trustworthy individual review the contract with them.

Once the contract is signed, we will typically go straight to work with a light or heavy developmental edit, determined by the Acquisitions Editors when we evaluate your manuscript. As a teaching press, we accept manuscripts that are strong and show immense promise, but that offer learning opportunities for the members of the press. This includes the need for editorial work. Expect to do revisions! The Acquisitions Editors lead a team of editors in reading and analyzing your manuscript to determine what is working and what needs work based on our knowledge and experience. We craft an editorial letter full of our critiques, compliments, and suggestions for revision and deliver it to the author for review. We follow up with a phone call or video chat to discuss the letter if the author feels it would be beneficial to do so. The DE process takes about a month, sometimes more. Then the author gets to work on revisions, for which they also get about a month to complete, though timelines may vary based on the project.

During development, your title may change. Sometimes it is necessary to tweak the title, or change it altogether, but not always. Acquisitions Editors must consider best practices for title generation and consider whether yours is appropriate for the genre and market, the literal and connotative meaning of the words or phrases used, and whether it encapsulates or represents the content found within the book. If we feel a change is necessary, we provide the author some alternative titles to consider and deliver them with the editorial letter. While the author’s input is taken into account, the final title is decided upon by the editors.

While we are hard at work developmentally editing your manuscript, you will be completing Ooligan’s Author Questionnaire: a document that will be used by all departments to produce and promote your book. While this questionnaire is lengthy and can feel slightly invasive, the author can of course choose which questions they will and will not answer depending on their comfort level.

Upon delivery of the revised manuscript and questionnaire, the author is then introduced to their Project Manager: the person who will see the project through the rest of the way. They are responsible for keeping the production of your book on track and are your primary point of contact for questions and concerns after acquisition and development.

Your manuscript will undergo copyediting by a team of editors, led by Ooligan’s Managing Editor. Depending on the needs of your manuscript, this may be a light, medium, or heavy copyedit. We use The Chicago Manual of Style as our primary style guide. This process may take one to two months depending on the time of year and the current stages our other titles are in. The author then receives the edited manuscript and reviews and implements the editorial suggestions, for which they typically get a month to complete.

While these editorial processes take place, your book’s dedicated project team, led by your Project Manager, has already begun their work crafting the sales hook, back cover copy, and so much more. They work with the managers of each department, Acquisitions, Editing, DEI, Digital, Design, Marketing, Publicity, and Social Media, to create a master plan to produce a quality book and launch it into the world. But wait, there’s more.

Be sure to check out future installments of this blog for a look at more stages of the production and promotion process at Ooligan Press!

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What’s in a Proper (Book) Proposal?

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Note: This is part of the blog series “Inside Ooligan Press”, about how we take a manuscript from an idea to a professionally published book.

So, you wrote a killer query letter and we requested a proposal package, but what does that mean? Before you go and resubmit the same query letter and call it your proposal (as MANY have done) think again!

The proposal package consists of two crucial items, submitted together on our Submittable page. They are your cover letter and your full manuscript, but let’s break it down even further. If you followed our directions with your query, you only sent us the first ten pages of your manuscript. When we request a proposal package, this is your invitation to submit the full manuscript—you got a full read request. Go you! Submit the most up-to-date, most polished version of your manuscript, preferably in a Word document.

The how and why of the cover letter are a little more complex. With your query, you provided just enough to get us interested in reading your full manuscript. With your cover letter, you are trying to convince us that you and your book are the right fit for our press, for our mission, and for our reach. You’ll want to help us envision the future for your book and provide pertinent details about how to best present it to the world—and how you plan to participate in that presentation if we publish it.

Your proposal cover letter can be a beautifully designed document organized into sections and contain striking headings, images, and mock-ups of the cover, or it can be a bunch of words on a page. While a stylized document certainly helps us envision your book and its potential future more readily, it is not required, and words alone will suffice. Just be sure to include the words we’re looking for.

First up is the content warning. This means letting us know if there is anything in your manuscript that may be triggering to a reader. Triggers vary, but the most common ones include self-harm, suicide, sexual assault, graphic violence, substance abuse, and disordered eating. If you are unsure whether something you’ve written may be a trigger, err on the side of caution and warn us. Do note that this warning will not prevent your manuscript from being read and considered: it simply ensures that the right person will be reading and evaluating it (the right person being an editor to whom the content will not cause mental or emotional harm).

The rest of your letter should include a synopsis of your book, the projected page count, a table of contents if appropriate, the genre and intended audience, comp titles, marketing ideas, and any connections or platforms you have that may be utilized for marketing and promotion purposes. If your query letter did not contain an author bio written in the third-person detailing your pertinent background information, include that here as well. Yes, this requires a little effort, but there is a reason for it, I promise.

Once the Managing Acquisitions Editors decide yours is The One, we still have to pitch your manuscript to the entire press before voting to accept or reject the project. We must convince them to see what we see, that there is potential for a successful collaboration with you and your book. We do this with a pitch presentation, which contains the information from your cover letter, along with our own in-depth market research guided by our expertise in the publishing industry. We set it to music and a little light choreography. That last bit is not true. But we do have to make a strong case for why we should publish this book and be convincing in its presentation: a solid informational foundation and an author who understands their book, has realistic expectations, and is willing to work alongside us to get the job done can make or break our case—and it is your cover letter that reveals all of this to us.

Every manuscript for which we request a proposal package gets thorough, careful consideration. But even with an excellent manuscript, the author’s work is not done. You’ve got to convince us that you and your book are the right fit for us, that you are willing to do what is asked of you and more—and that begins with creating a proper proposal.

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Sci-fi in Translation

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Here at Ooligan we’ve been working on our newest project, the French Sci-Fi Project, a collection of science fiction short stories translated from French, in partnership with PSU’s Language department. We’re excited to expand our horizons into the international scene with this new book and hope that we can continue to publish books in translation in the future.

But for now, if you’re interested in looking past the horizon on your bookshelf into international waters, here’s a list of five science fiction books that have been translated into English from a range of languages including Chinese, German, and Italian. In this list you’ll find mystery, aliens, challenged humanity, and international influence, giving anyone who’s just coming into science fiction a little breathing room to start their journey into the unknown.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu

If you’re looking for the next science fiction world to dive into with a series, look no further than Cixin Liu’s Hugo Award winning book, The Three-Body Problem. In this first book of the trilogy, you’ll be introduced to the Chinese Cultural Revolution as the military sends signals out into the universe for signs of alien life. The reply? An alien race looking for a new home. Will they succeed in invading our planet with the help of a few of our own? Or will humanity come together to fight back against a global invasion? Pick up the whole series to find out!

The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

As the French Sci-Fi Project inspired this list, it’s only natural that another short story collection be included, and Italo Calvino’s The Complete Cosmicomics, originally published in Italian in 1965, made the cut. Though Calvino originally published the stories in Italian, he later would publish these short stories in a literary magazine in Cuba, his native country, as well. The stories explore natural phenomena and the origins of our universe, with readers calling Calvino’s writing “nimble and often hilarious.” If you’re looking to think outside of the realms of our reality, pick up this collection!

The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang Jeschke, translated by Ross Benjamin

As a winner of the Harrison Award for international achievements in science fiction, any of Jeschke’s works could be included in this list, but it was The Cusanus Game that won him the Deutscher Science Fiction Preis, a highly regarded German science fiction literary award. The novel, published in 2005, follows a biologist during the aftermath of nuclear fallout in Northern Europe. Jeschke serves up Fallout with a time traveling twist that captures readers interest until the end. Pick this book up if you’re ready to get back to the roots of the science fiction genre while keeping your feet (and the protagonist’s) firmly planted on our home planet.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

An international bestseller from Murakami, one of Japan’s most successful authors, 1Q84 is for anyone who enjoys The Matrix and has been diving too deeply into “ShiftTok” and the concept of reality shifting. The main character enters an alternate reality at the suggestion of a taxi driver. As the two main characters’ timelines overlap throughout the dystopian society, it reveals just how connected everything is. While lighter on the science fiction tropes, this book is sure to please anyone looking for a heartfelt story of human connection.

The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn: One More Last Rite for the Detective Genre by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, translated by Josh Billings

Want an Agatha Christie mystery novel with some Russian sci-fi humor? Look no further than the writings of the Strugatsky brothers and The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn. For at least three decades the brothers were the most popular science fiction writers in Russia, and the most influential Russian science fiction writers in the world. The novel reads like a Hercule Poirot mystery when the lead detective’s ski vacation is rudely interrupted by a dead body and mysterious events start happening around the chalet. This book, like the last, is for those who want a genre bend to their sci-fi, and want to be sitting on the edge of their seats to find out what happens next.

Add these five international science fiction titles to your list now, and be ready to dive into the world of French science fiction when Ooligan releases the French Sci-Fi Project in Spring 2024!

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Magazines & The Publishing World

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Magazines and books both have a long standing in the publishing industry. For a long time, the magazine industry specifically has relied on ad revenue to maintain a steady flow of income. Now that advertisers are forced to be more specific with their spending, publishers are left to figure out how to fill that space. But, thankfully, it’s not all bad news! Excitement in magazines is growing, and some publications are seeing their subscription numbers peak. So, what’s going on? How are magazines now coping in our digital age and an ongoing pandemic? And how is the industry specifically in Portland doing?

While publishers are working through these tough questions around books and magazines, every cloud has its silver lining. With many of us finding ourselves with more time on our hands over the last two years, reading magazines has become more popular than ever.

According to Forbes, nearly sixty new magazine titles were launched and published in 2020. “What accounts for the fact that people are still launching new magazines at all? Aren’t these erstwhile publishers cognizant of recent trends in American journalism, like the supposed crises afflicting print media; the commercial imperatives that make the economics of print news products a Herculean challenge; not to mention myriad other obstacles?

“Now, the fact remains—the number of magazines launched in 2020 is considerably down from what 2019 produced on this front (when the industry saw the launch of 139 titles, per Professor Husni, which feels so long ago now that it seems like one of the last of the go-go years of print). But the million-dollar question is nevertheless crying out for an answer: “People still believe there is a need for print. People are stuck at home, bombarded by bad news. They are looking for diversions.””

It’s true that the impact of the pandemic and shifts in consumer behavior are transforming the book publishing and magazine industry. To better understand how these trends will shape the future of magazines, publishing house Walsworth reached out to industry expert Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni, PhD. Husni is the founder and director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi’s Meek School of Journalism and New Media. He engages in media consulting and research for the magazine media and publishing industry.

“Our conversation with Mr. Magazine ranged from how publishers can build better business models to account for declining ad revenue, to the booming trend of bookazines, in-depth special edition magazines on a single topic, and beyond. The following conversation has been edited for content and clarity.

“I wish I could say it’s something that sticks. We’re seeing it implemented more than ever before. But I recall back during the 2008 recession, magazine executives were saying we have to change the business model and be in the business of circulation and depending more on the consumer. Then the minute the economy started picking up, they went back to their old ways. But this time because of the magnitude of the impact I think it will be different, and because there are so many other outlets for advertisers like emails and text messaging. Advertisers know how to reach their customers; they don’t need a third party to sell their stuff. There’s a major change taking place, and whether it shifts to bookazines or quarterly magazines, there is less dependence on advertisers and more dependence on people reaching into their pockets and spending up to fifteen dollars for a magazine. So, the content of the magazine better be experience-making content that is timely yet timeless—it’s not going to make a difference whether I read the magazine today, tomorrow, or next month. That’s where we’re going to be seeing the big change; magazines are going to be the only non-disposable media platform.””

I find this fascinating as someone who always waited for the mail to come, hoping for the next issue of my faerie or party supply magazine. Now that I live in a city with one of the largest Zine libraries and a robust indie magazine scene, I now have even more options. Here are some of my favorites:

So, whatever the future holds, it is clear that the demand for magazines will remain. In the midst of great uncertainty, the human mind craves information and entertainment like never before. And, I reckon there are few things that scratch that itch like a good magazine or zine.

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Catalogs: A Useful Tool Selling Book Rights

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International book fairs are the comic con of the book publishing industry. This might be an overexaggeration; however, these fairs are how agents and publishers market their books to other industry professionals to spread the word about their backlist and frontlist titles. (Frontlist titles are the up-and-coming books of a publisher, and backlist titles are books that have already been published.) Promoting these books at conventions can be accomplished in many ways. The most useful of these methods that we use during these networking events are called book catalogs.

Catalogs are large documents (either print or digital) that have all the information an agent, publisher, or book buyer would need to learn about the titles you are looking to market or sell. These documents can be a standard, informational paper; however, most publishers will have elaborate designs to capture buyers’ attention. Catalogs have many uses, and not all these uses are exclusively for book fairs. Publishers use catalogs to present their frontlist and backlist titles to booksellers and buyers around the country so they may pick and choose what titles they want to sell.

Now, you must be asking yourself what goes into these catalogs. Throughout the industry, there is a set standard of elements that need to be in the document. Let’s go through some of the elements that should be included.

Title
Obviously, the first thing a catalog should have is the book’s title to ensure ease and accessibility. They might even include a table of contents or section markers to ensure the catalog is easy to navigate. This is especially helpful if the publisher works with multiple genres.

Hook and Description

All catalogs have detailed book descriptions and hooks. This book description is a little different from what you would normally see on the back of a book or even when online shopping. When writing a book description for a catalog, you have to explain why a publisher or agent should be interested in your title. This is the section where publishers add any praise or awards the book has received.

ISBN, Page Count, etc.

Having things like the ISBN, page count, and word count in a catalog will provide agents and publishers with the important information they need to see if the particular title they are interested in is a good fit for the presses they represent.

Rights Sold

Catalogs that are used by rights agents have a section that clearly states what rights have already been sold for each title. For example: if the Spanish rights for Love, Dance & Egg Rolls have been sold, the Ooligan Press catalog would state that in the rights section to make sure no agents or buyers make inquiries for rights that have already been sold.

Our goal here at Ooligan Press is to have our catalogs in these book fairs every year to spread the word about our engaging titles. That is why our rights coordinator and agent Sylvia Hayse, from Sylvia Hayse Literary Agency, has started to circulate our catalogs at these types of events. By having our catalog in these book fairs, we have the power to connect with publishers abroad.

Catalogs are often openly available to view by consumers. As a bookseller or even a reader, it might be interesting to poke around and see what goes into the business of book publishing.

You should all take a look!

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The Effect COVID-19 Has Had on Publishing

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As we find ourselves still in the middle of the pandemic, it is hard not to think about what it was like before and how things have changed and how each individual has been affected, whether in their personal or professional lives. Businesses in different industries have had to change and adapt to keep going. However, unlike some industries, the publishing industry has actually seen growth amid the pandemic.

Like many others, the publishing industry has seen its share of employee, staffing, and supply chain issues. These are areas that most in the industry will continue to deal with as the pandemic continues. Yet, unlike most other industries, the growth that has been experienced is nothing but good.

According to Cliff Guren, Thad McIlroy, and Steven Sieck and their article “COVID-19 and Book Publishing: Impacts and Insights for 2021,” “Trade sales in 2020 were almost uniformly ahead of 2019, and in several categories unit sales were up over 20 percent through mid-December.”

This is due to publishing being a part of the arts. In the beginning of the pandemic, individuals turned to the arts to keep busy, distract themselves, and find enjoyment, especially when we were all in lockdown.

Additionally, according to Statista and their stats on “Unit sales of printed books in the United States from 2004 to 2021,” “Data showing how many books were sold in 2021 revealed that the printed book market remains healthy: a total of 825.75 million units were sold that year among outlets which reported to the source, marking year-over-year growth of 8.9 percent. Trade paperbacks remained the dominant format with over 450 thousand print units sold.”

Furthermore, specific areas in publishing, trade publishing to be exact, are thriving even more than others. When individuals sought out material to read, they sought books that could be considered predictable and unrelated to what was happening in the real world. According to Rachel King and their Fortune article “The romance novel sales boom continues,” “The predictability of these novels makes for literary comfort food, one that many readers craved in abundance during some very turbulent times.”

King went on to further state, “Unit sales for romance books topped 47 million in the twelve months ending March 2021 (including print and ebook sales combined), representing an increase of 24 percent from the previous year, according to NPD BookScan. Romance accounted for 18 percent of adult fiction unit sales in the twelve months ending March 2021, making it the second most popular fiction genre overall—second only to general adult fiction—which accounted for 30 percent of adult fiction sales in the same time frame.”

This is not to say that other genres were not sought out. Genres like mysteries and thrillers also soared like romance. Overall, the publishing industry continues to thrive and the data is showing that it is going to continue to do so. So, even though the pandemic has changed so much and continues to change things, this can be considered one positive that has come from it.

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Why Would You Want To Work For Someone Else’s Publishing Company?

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With an ongoing global pandemic, it is no surprise that many individuals are looking into options that allow them to work from home. In the publishing industry, freelancers are common and many publishing companies even contract freelancers for specific projects or needs. With the added appeal of making your own schedule and essentially managing your own business, why wouldn’t you want to be your own boss?

Employees who are hired as full-time workers of publishing companies usually have several benefits in doing so. For many individuals, the structure and financial security of the nine-to-five office job is preferred; not to mention, many of these jobs allow for health insurance, paid time off, matching retirement plans, and so forth. These employees are often paid hourly or salaried pay and don’t have to deal with the added responsibility of keeping track of and withholding their own taxes from their income. While freelancers do have the option of hiring an accountant or bookkeeper to keep track of that side of the business, working for a company has that built in the structure of the business already.

Even with all the benefits of working for an already established publishing company, according to a blog from Udacy (a technological career training site): Statista data projects that in 2027, 86.5 million Americans will be freelancing and be 50.9 percent of the total workforce. The draw is not only due to individuals and companies pivoting due to the COVID-19 demands that began in early 2020. That same Udacy blog states that the numbers have been steadily increasing over the past decade or so. For many, a huge draw is being able to be in control of their own work/life balance. There is, no doubt, a level of freedom that comes with which clients and projects you take on, how many you take, what kind of work you take on, when you are able to schedule appoints—both personal and professional, when and where you work, and generally being able to call the shots on your career and professional life.

While it does take a lot of “behind-the-scenes” work to network and find the work and the clients in order to sustain your financial needs and make ends meet, many individuals are drawn to the challenge and the desire to learn all aspects of what is essentially running their own business. Many business and entrepreneurial start-ups happen as a result of freelancers who start with the vision of what they want their careers to look like and build from there.

When it comes down to a decision as to whether or not freelance work is right for you, it truly varies from person to person. Take stock of your career goals, look at what you want out of life and what is important to you. Many individuals are able to do some combination of contracted, employed, and/or freelance work. If you are wanting to do a bit of both, just make sure to check with your employer to make sure that any of the projects you take on are not considered a conflict of interest. Otherwise, do what works best for you and your work/life balance and professional development.

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How the Big Five Publish Genre Fiction

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Booksellers are often tasked with ensuring the shelf a new book is placed on aligns with the marketing the publisher is going for. Is The Handmaid’s Tale science fiction or dystopian fiction or “speculative fiction” as Margaret Atwood herself would have it? Ursula Le Guin famously countered Atwood’s definition, calling this categorizing “arbitrary” and “restrictive.”

Regardless of what you call them, fiction books as a whole sell more copies than nonfiction books—and thrillers, mystery, romance, science fiction, and fantasy are the most read. And while pop culture critics lament the downfall of our supposed literary culture, what are writers and publishers alike to do in creating, acquiring, and publishing books to cater to the growth in genre fiction readers? Since the Big Five have the most publishing power, the best way to investigate the popular fiction they make is to dive into their genre fiction-focused imprints.

Penguin Random House

Starting out with original adaptations of Star Trek, Bantam Books (and science fiction subdivision Bantam Spectra) has put out works by modern genre heavyweights like Danielle Steel and George R. R. Martin. Though they no longer publish manga, the Del Rey imprint specializes in science fiction and fantasy books, publishing novelizations of video games along with classics like Anne McCaffery’s Dragonriders of Pern series and the “weird fiction” of China Miéville. Not to mention numerous digital imprints such as Alibi (mystery), Loveswept & Flirt (romance), and Hydra (horror and scifi)—or the semi-independent DAW Books distributed by Penguin Random House.

Ballantine Books’s move away from early pulp fiction acquisitions conflicted with rival Ace Books, as they squabbled to get rights to The Lord of the Rings. They now both sit under the same Penguin Random House umbrella, and Ace Books boasts a backlist of Dune, The Once and Future King, and Neuromancer and shares that same editorial team with fantasy imprint Roc Books that published the Discworld series and The Dresden Files series.

Macmillan

Tor Books is the jewel of Tor Publishing Group, formerly Tom Doherty Associates, publishing almost three thousand works since just 1980 and known as the imprint that published Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series and Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series and The Stormlight Archive series. The Tor/Forge blog and Tor.com website are renowned for their insight into the speculative fiction publishing world too.

Housed under Macmillan’s St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books is one of the only imprints focused on mystery, thriller, and suspense novels. The Cassie Dewell novels of C. J. Box (which would become the TV show Big Sky), the gothic whodunnit The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller, and works by Louise Penny (who recently published State of Terror, co-written with Hillary Clinton) were all Minotaur books.

HarperCollins

The entire Harlequin branch of HarperCollins nearly monopolized the romance market for decades, including everything from erotica to paranormal and historical love stories. After acquiring Avon Publications, many early “cheesecake” paperbacks were folded into HarperCollins, and newer releases include tie-ins to the TV show Bridgerton. Early works by Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle now fall under Harlequin. However, ebooks and self-published works have started to outpace the popularity of formally published romances.

Harper Voyager was originally Eos Books, but now publishes science fiction, epic fantasy, and especially urban fantasy. Voyager boasts work of tabletop role-playing game legend Gerald Brom, military sci-fi writer William H. Keith (as Ian Douglas), and speculative fiction writer and poet Beth Cato.

Hachette

Forever and Forever Yours are Hachette’s romance imprints, but the big dive into genre fiction is through science fiction and fantasy imprint Orbit. Popular reads from Orbit include The Witcher series and The Broken Earth Trilogy. Acquisition of Gollancz also means Hachette oversees the out-of-print ebook collection website, SF Gateway.

Simon & Schuster

Still a separate entity, at least for now with the merger court case pending, the only real genre fiction imprint left at Simon & Schuster is the speculative fiction Saga Press. Mostly featuring up-and-comers like Catherynne M. Valente, Rebecca Roanhorse, Ken Liu, and T. Kingfisher, it’s no surprise they still market the works of Le Guin.

Publishing works of popular genre fiction is no small task—Ooligan Press’s first fantasy title in its twenty-year history, Court of Venom, was released April 5, 2022. However, it’s easy to see that walking up to the dystopian fiction shelf in your local bookstore may not just be the work of an attentive bookseller, but the work of an entire imprint intent on bringing a love of genre fiction all the way from the top of the editorial team to the hands of those ready to be swept away to another world.

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Machines, Authorship, and Ethics

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Deep-learning machines—Artificial Intelligence (AI)—are staking out more ground in literature. They make the work of authors and publishers easier every day. Need InDesign to check your XML formatting, no problem; want to adjust the tone of an email, Grammarly has your back. But as machines become increasingly complex, so do the algorithms that help them understand and learn—algorithms written by people. People have life experience, and within the context of this article, that should be seen as extremely limited when compared against the other 7.75 billion people in the world. The ethics of representation as we build and train machines to do more work for us is as important as AI doing the work itself.

Ethics, like the Humanities, weaves its way into our lives and decisions slowly, making our training in it and experience practicing it hard to spot on any given day. Unlike more scientific pursuits, like math or engineering which have fairly linear signs of success or failure, ethics must be intentionally practiced and included in our endeavors. Those who can write code should not be the only ones inserting their ethics into machines.

Therefore, we must have social scientists working with AI engineers from the start. As Dr. Leah Henrickson said in our interview about AI in literature, “Words are the only way we can express what is in our minds to others.” Language is nuanced, subtle, and personal.

Have you ever asked someone whose primary language is not English what something meant in their language? Often that answer goes something like, “Well, there isn’t really a word for that in English, but it kind of means…” The unofficial language of coding is English. Contemplate a deep-learning machine coded by English speakers but asked to write or edit a book in Hindi. Although that machine can know all of the words and grammatical rules of Hindi, does it have the experience of a Hindi speaker? Does it have nuances of that language running through its electrical veins? Does this make it a translated book?

Now is the time to be seeking subject matter experts to assist coders, engineers, and scientists in the writing of algorithms for AI systems. In literature, that should include literary experts from a broad spectrum of languages, cultures, and genres. Imke van Heerden and Amil Bas have been researching this very thing. In their paper on AI as author, they say, “This article suggests that a network of researchers from literary studies and machine learning could work together to create a shared language between disciplines with vastly different methodologies.”

So how do we get there? In the publishing industry we must begin to understand things like AI, deep-learning machines, and natural language generation (NLG). We must become curious about how they are built and trained, and how they learn. There is a deep commitment to equity in most of the publishing world, but just over the horizon is a whole new set of partners creeping into our industry. Will we just stand by and let Silicon Valley decide how those partners will think about the art that we hold dear?