A day or so before setting off for CelsiusCon I had a rather exciting phone call. The person on the line was Ian Whates, founder and director of NewCon Press. He was calling to say he’d just finished reading my novel The Race and wanted to discuss it with me. To cut a long story short, Ian loves the book, and we’ve now agreed a deal for NewCon to publish it. The novel will be released next summer, with an official launch at the Worldcon in London.
To say I’m over the moon about this is something of an understatement. This book has been a long time coming, it’s very close to my heart, and contains the best of my writing to date. It’s genuinely thrilling to know that people are finally going to get the chance to read it.
Equally thrilling is Ian’s enthusiasm for the book, his obvious commitment to publishing it with love and care. Ian has published stories of mine before, including my collection Microcosmos for NewCon Press’s Imaginings series, so he clearly knew something of what he would be getting when he opened the manuscript. But when we spoke on the phone, one of the first (and most pleasing) things Ian said to me was that even if he’d never read a word of my stuff before, reading The Race would have convinced him on the spot.
The world of publishing today is fraught with problems. Cutbacks in the support industries (publishers’ readers, sales reps, in-house copyediting) and a general unease and uncertainty around the changes wrought by the introduction of new media are certainly not helping, but the biggest hurdle faced by new novelists, it seems to me, is the general risk-averseness of the larger publishers. I sometimes get the feeling that commissioning editors for the big houses don’t really want to mess with novelty, they want more of the same thing they bought last week, only slightly different. A product they know already they can sell, in other words. And so bland orthodoxies are born.
I do have some sympathy with their predicament. Having worked at the selling end of the book industry for some years, I know something of the devilish difficulty that exists in persuading punters to take a chance on a new name, a new imprint, a new approach to writing. I’m certainly not one of those writers who insist that the ‘big boys’ are out to get them, to suppress new talent and innovation wherever they find it, because that’s clearly rubbish, a sentiment too often expressed by those who haven’t yet perfected their end of the deal – the damned book, in other words – sufficiently to have it seriously considered as a publishable prospect. But there is a certain nervousness abroad, particularly at the edge of genre, that can feel frustrating when you encounter it, a conservatism that’s just a little too… conservative.
That’s why having the support of a publisher like NewCon Press is such a valuable gift. Ian Whates knows the genre and he knows the business. I know he’ll do great things for The Race, and I sincerely hope The Race will do great things for him.
I’ve created a new page for The Race here at this site, where you can read a brief outline of the novel and a bit about how it came to be written. I’ll be adding more details – cover images, pre-ordering information etc – as they become available.