Quote:
Originally Posted by carandol
My ex, Jo Walton, has written two (with a third on the way) brilliant AH novels, Farthing, and Ha'penny, which have been getting rave reviews and oodles of award nominations in the US, where they're published by Tor. They're set in an alternate 1940s where Britain made peace with Hitler in 1941, and written in the style of period murder mysteries (with added creeping fascism!). But despite the fact that they're set in Britain, and have a very British feel to them (Jo's British, now living in Canada), she can't get a British publisher. The SF publishers say they're not SF enough, the mystery publishers say they're too SF, the mainstream publishers won't touch a genre writer. I've recommended them to lots of people who don't read SF and they've all come back praising them to the skies, but the publishers over here seem so locked into their genre subdivisions that they daren't publish something that doesn't fit their neat categories.  |
<sigh>
You know, I was just thinking about a couple of other examples like that, such as Robert Harris's _Fatherland_, published over here as a mystery. Same premise: Nazi Germany won WWII, and the protagonist is a German cop tossed into the middle of a nasty mystery.
A friend of mine is British SF/Fantasy writer Liz Williams. She's still getting published in the UK by Macmillan, but was dropped from the roster by US publisher Bantam/Spectra. Liz had a similar problem. Her stuff is brilliant, but every book was different. She built a cult following, but Bantam/Spectra is the largest mass market PB house, and they need much more than cult sales. She's currently being published in the US by small press Night Shade Books, who are doing well with her "Detective Inspector Chen" novels, set in a near future where Singapore has spawned a franchise -- Chen is a police officer in Singapore3. It's fantasy because Chinese mythology is very real in Singapore3. Chen is the "snake agent" -- the department specialist in crimes involving the supernatural. His wife is a demon, and he finds himself partnered with Zhu Irzh, a Seneschal of the Ministry of Vice in Hell. Hell has laws too, and demons whose job is to enforce them. I'm reading the third one now, and it's a delight. The series is doing well enough that Night Shade is happy to issue them. (And I've met the Night Shade folks. They are delighted to be able to publish Liz.)
Liz ran into the same problem as Jo, but on this side of the pond: too hard to neatly classify, pigeonhole, and sell.
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Dennis