PRINCES OF THE APOCALYPSE PDF ASSISTANT LICENSE
PRINCES OF THE APOCALYPSE PDF ASSISTANT SERIES

They put fairly forgettable generic fantasy covers on the first two and pushed them out into the market, where they disappeared, leaving barely a ripple. Tor UK did indeed take on the Merchant Princes series. 'Charlie! You'll never guess what's happened! Peter Lavery has changed his mind. Two weeks later I got a phone call from New York. And that was the sum total of my sales pitch, aside from telling him my name when he asked. Firstly, it's SF, not fantasy, and secondly, I'm not American.

PRINCES OF THE APOCALYPSE PDF ASSISTANT SERIES

I believe that about eighteen months ago Tom Doherty and David Hartwell visited you and tried to convince you to take on a fantasy series by a hot new American writer. 'I don't want to waste your time,' I explained, 'so I'll keep this short. It's a bit like your reflexive response to being approached by a random drunken stranger.) (See, editors have a reflexive response to being approached by random drunken strangers. Peter nodded at me, only slightly warily. 'Hi,' I said, 'I believe you're Peter Lavery?' (Reduce the stupidity coefficient if the publisher is also drunk.) But I didn't see that I had anything to lose, and in any case, I had a hypothesis. It is especially stupid to do so when drunk. Now, it is generally stupid for an author to cold-sell to a publisher.

Three half-litre bottles of Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier later, I was chatting with friends when I happened to spy someone who matched a description, standing around in amiable companionship with a bottle of wine. So I cut out the middle-man and headed out for an evening on the town. It was a first novel by a local writer, published by Macmillan, and while I couldn't make the launch and reading, everyone was converging on a bar afterwards. So I was getting ready to talk to my agent about getting our rights back when, as happens, I ended up at the pub crawl after a book launch in Edinburgh. Back in the prehistory of ebooks and self-publishing this wasn't a good idea, but it was better than nothing. Tor's lock on non-North American rights had a sunset clause as I recall, if they couldn't publish within two years we had the right to ask for those rights back and try to sell it ourselves. Peter won't take it, so we're doing the rounds everywhere else.'Īround 2006, my agent and I were getting fed up. I kept asking: 'any news on the UK rights?' And David kept telling me, 'it's really bad. But I didn't know this at the time - all I knew was that David Hartwell, and his boss (Tor's CEO, Tom Doherty) had the rights to my series and would try and sell it in the UK. In those days, SF and fantasy at Macmillan was run by one of the grand old men of British publishing, Peter Lavery (now retired), and his assistant editor.

So Macmillan in the UK established a Tor imprint as a sidecar hanging off the PanMac SF publishing side of the operation. but according to their marketing research, had less of a reputation (in the UK!) than the foreign imprint, Tor. In the UK, their sibling company was Macmillan, whose SF imprint, Pan, was quite successful.

PRINCES OF THE APOCALYPSE PDF ASSISTANT LICENSE

So, traditionally, what they do is license the territorial rights to a local publisher.īy 2002, Tor was part of Macmillan, a large English language publishing group which was in turn part of Holtzbrink, one of the big six global publishers (the German one, in case you hadn't guessed). They don't generally have the sales, distribution, marketing, or accounting infrastructure to sell it outside of North America. Now, when a US publisher buys world English language rights to a book, this does not mean they're going to publish it worldwide. When you're in an auction and that happens, suddenly it's a monopsony: which is how David Hartwell scooped up world English language rights for Tor US. We had high hopes for the series: it was designed, near as I could, to go front list, or even (we hoped) bestseller. * On the political determinants of economic development in the Merchant Princesįinally, some words that didn't make it into any of those essays: a subjective recollection of the UK sales track of the series.īack in 2002, when my agent sold the rights to 'The Family Trade', she tried (as is usual) to run an auction in New York. I am too lazy to cut and paste and reformat everything, so I'm going to deep-link to Tor, and hope they don't drop the files: When Tor UK were getting ready to relaunch the series, my editor Bella Pagan asked me if I could write some essays for the Tor UK blog, discussing the books.

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