SFRevu Information

SFRevu: Looking back over the UK titles we've reviewed I notice that we've found a lot of Gollancz stuff we've liked. What is Gollancz about and how are you different than other UK publishers? Simon Spanton: We've built our business over the last three years by securing, whenever we can, world rights in the authors we publish. This has been important because it allows us to set our advances against foreign rights revenue and therefore take chances on authors, where perhaps a UK sale alone would make an advance more of a risk. It's been possible because we have a superb rights team who have built up relationships across the international publishing industry and are consequently able to realize those rights - there's no point having them if you're just going to sit on them. It's worked very well and we've been able to give most of our authors a good few of those wonderful phone calls where you call them up and say "Hey we got a deal in Somewherestan!". These deals are rarely going to buy you a villa (or even a camper van) on their own but they do add up and everyone likes good news. This has allowed us, encouraged us even, to concentrate on UK based writers (tho' not exclusively - Scott Lynch hails from Minnesota and last time I looked that wasn't in the UK), a record of which we're very proud. It has also placed even more of a premium on finding new authors. As for us having published a lot of stuff that you've liked there's not much I can say about that except "Thank you!" I don't think we're different from other UK publishers in any fundamental way when it comes to taste in books. When I fall in love with a book I'm not saying to myself, "ah but is it a Gollancz book?" We push much harder for world rights than our colleagues elsewhere in the industry and that is a difference but it's not one based on differing taste. SFRevu: How long have you been at Gollancz, and what's your role there? Simon: It's a long story. I've been at Orion Books since 1996. I started off with a wide role that encompassed fiction, ...