Friday, August 1, 2008

Another one bites the dust

Well, I guess I can mark down an attrition reject for Evil Outfitters, Ltd. I subbed it to Wizards of the Coast Discoveries during their open call last fall, and in December got a request for full. But now Discoveries has been closed after only one year.

This sucks on any number of levels, and not just for me and other agentless authors who had a shot at making it in on the ground level of a new large publisher. It sucks in a big way for the authors signed by Discoveries--including J.M. McDermott, whose book Last Dragon came out this spring--and especially for authors who were signed but haven't had their books released yet. I hope they all got at least part of their advances.

The most monumentally crappy thing about this is that Discoveries was doing really well. Its first releases got great reviews and deserved them. But from what I hear, Hasbro--which owns WOTC--wants to focus marketing on their new edition of D&D, and apparently they only have about fifty bucks allocated to marketing and just can't do two things at once. It probably cost more to start and shut down Discoveries than they will save in the next ten years by not having the imprint.

Now where am I gonna send Evil Outfitters, dammit?

3 comments:

Cate Gardner said...

Oh, that's a shame.

Evil Outfitters, Ltd is such a cool title.

K.C. Shaw said...

Thanks! Considering that I am in awe of your titles, that's high praise. :)

J m mcdermott said...

Don't worry about the authors, Katherine, (including you). If the book is good enough to sell once, it will be good enough to sell twice.

Believe it or not, there's not really as many truly great writers out there as there are slots for publication. I'm not kidding. I'm on the Nebula Novels Jury. The crop of crap I've gotten in the mail is fascinating on many levels, and the pile of "truly great" is exactly three books high so far.

Just keep writing, and keep submitting, and keep writing, and keep submitting.

I know that's what us Discoveries authors are doing.