[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”252” caption=”“Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, Polish tobacco farmers near Windsor Locks, Connecticut” (Jack Delano, 1940)”]
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The article came out a week or two ago, but I forgot to mention it here. Over at Publishers Weekly is an interesting article on my esteemed publisher, called “Minotaur Moves Beyond Genre,” and it features Yours Truly.
But the article is interesting beyond my presence, as it shows the attempts by a major mystery imprint to redefine itself in the book world:
[Minotaur publisher Andrew] Martin’s goal is to drive home the message that Minotaur, while it is about genre fiction, is also about big fiction.
big
Noting that his outlook on publishing was changed by the years he spent working at Sterling, owned by Barnes & Noble, Martin has devised a schedule in which Minotaur publishes one big book a month that is backed by a major marketing push and a 75,000-copy to 200,000-copy first printing.
Liberation MovementsIstanbul Variations
The other route involves cherry-picking writers from Minotaur’s backlist (aka the farm team)—many of them accomplished genre authors the imprint has steadily done 5,000-copy print runs for. Olen Steinhauer is one such writer. Steinhauer’s The Tourist, published in March, is his sixth book, but the first in a new trilogy, which Martin said was key to giving the Edgar-winning author a higher profile. “[Steinhauer] had great literary chops,” Martin elaborated, “but I can’t make him great on book four or five of a five-book series.” (The Tourist, which has sold 51,000 copies to date, was also acquired for film by George Clooney.)
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Check it out