by James Wymore, Immortal Works Press Acquisitions Editor
Immortal Works Press, a new publishing company centered in Salt Lake City, Utah, is now open to submissions. Focusing on genre fiction for general audiences, we intend to distinguish our work from other small presses by focusing on a very specific reader audience and producing entertaining books of higher moral quality. We want our readers to know they can count on us to deliver what they are looking for every time. If our books were movies, they’d be the lighter side of PG-13. Every book we release will be released in all the e-book formats, in addition to trade paperback and audiobook.
So what’s different? We want to produce books that everybody over the age of 12 can enjoy, regardless of the age of the protagonist.
In the book world, all fiction has been classified and pigeon-holed ad nauseum. Everybody is analyzing what sells and building formulas to capitalize on trends. Over time they have come up with audience age groups based on marketing—something like letting the cart push the horse. They found that people tend to prefer reading books with protagonists about the same age as they are. In order to match the books to the right group, they began classifying them by difficulty level and the main character’s age. For a long time, books were separated into three groups: Children, Young Adults, and Adults. But recently, bestsellers like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson introduced a middle group between Children’s and YA. They started calling this Middle Grade (MG). They also found a group of older teens in early college years and called them New Adult (NA).
Of course there are always anomalies like Ender’s Game. However, as the definitions solidified, the expectation for authors to write books where the main character’s age matched (or was slightly above) the reader’s age became standardized. It’s always possible to write a book that is an exception to the new rule, but it can be hard to get an editor to take it seriously. Yet they overlook the fact that The Hobbit was written for teens.
This has always bothered me, personally. It puts an artificial constraint on creativity. Some of the books I have written were intended to reach a wider range of readers, but if I label it YA or Adult, it will exclude some of the people I intended it for. I’ve talked to several authors with the same concern. That’s why, when we founded Immortal Works Press, I suggested we publish books with a different end in mind: General Audiences. Why can’t a teen reader enjoy Agatha Christie’s mysteries? Is there any reason a middle aged mom shouldn’t love the Harry Potter series? A good book is good to a much wider range of people than just eleven to thirteen or fourteen to eighteen. Like a good movie, a good book will resonate with a very wide age-range of readers.
Well into adulthood, I relished A Series of Unfortunate Events. I read Asimov to my kids when they were young. If a reader can imagine a centuries old vampire hunting victims in a city’s underground, why can’t they imagine they are young again, or old before their time? Maybe marketing has to be done by the defined age groups, but we believe readers of all ages will appreciate a good story regardless of the classification it’s sold under. That’s the difference between a normal book and our Immortal Works.
Hi James,
I think one of the pressures for categorizing books is simply that there are so many more books out there. Book categories provide (at least in theory) a way of limiting the pool that readers will need to look at. That said, I agree that age (and often genre) categories don’t do a good job of reflecting what people actually like. I also think the whole publisher-run filtering system is largely broken, and we have yet to see where the future is in terms of how books and readers get connected to each other.
That said, what are your plans for getting books out there and into the hands of potential readers? That’s not an area I know a lot about — far from it — but I do know that distribution and publicity tend to be areas where new small publishers run into problems.
It’s not entirely clear to me who your “very specific reader audience” is, unless that’s the people who want to avoid works that are on the darker side of PG-13 or R-rated material. I’m not sure how much potential there is in this kind of negatively defined audience (i.e., an audience defined by what it doesn’t like, as opposed to what it likes). I also dislike the idea that “higher moral quality” can be equated with an absence of questionable content.
What particular triggers are the ones you’re going to be more sensitive to here. Sex? Language? Violence? It’s my experience that readers who shy away from sex and language often don’t seem to have as much of a problem with violence, unless it’s particularly graphic…
Finally, as a potential writer: what kinds of editorial support are you looking to provide? Increasingly in the publishing world, authors are being expected to act as their own editors and/or to arrange for their own editorial reviews (paid or on a swap or friendship basis) in order to get the kind of in-depth review and guidance that publishers used to provide. Looking at your website, it looks like essentially you want a publishable product when it comes in the door (as does everyone, of course). What do you do to make it better?
Sorry, I lied. I just realized I have another question, which is whether you are offering standard publisher-type contracts (advance and royalties, with all post-acceptance costs borne by the publisher) or one of the various types of hybrid contracts (e.g., no advance, author contributes to the cost of publication). That’s really important to know.