We’ve got some pretty exciting news for anyone who likes to stand at the forefront of the genre, reading the latest releases and discovering the newest talented authors: Gollancz are to release every single one of their 2014 debuts at the special price of £1.99. You’ll have to be quick and paying attention though, because this price will be for the ebook editions of their novels only and will be a promotion that runs from each individual release date running for just one week.
Our presumption is that Gollancz are hoping that it will help propel that author up the eBook charts and draw attention to them as a bestseller. In addition, it could mean that people who wouldn’t usually invest £7.99 on a debut author (instead choosing a safe bet lil say Joe Abercrombie or Trudi Canavan, etc) might be more tempted to pick up the book seeing as it will cost them less than a cappuccino. Certainly, the single debut I’ve read on the list, The Boy With The Porcelain Blade, is worth well over the £1.99 price that Gollancz are set to ask for it.
Here’s the official word from Gollancz explaining the decision and listing the titles that will be included in this promotion throughout the year:
One of the great joys of publishing is the discovery of a new writer. For the editor reading the submission, the growing feeling of excitement is like a happy virus that first infects the commissioning editor and then – in true evolutionary fashion – demands to be spread to others. Editorial colleagues, senior management, Sales, Marketing and Publicity all need to be won over, so that the entire company shares the excitement of the commissioning editor.
Only after all of those people in-house are brought on board can we begin the rewarding but tricky process of convincing you, the reader, that you should be as excited by the book as we are. The challenge, of course, is that we’ve read the book and know how good it is, whereas you have to trust us. There are any number of reasons for you to trust us – you’ve enjoyed the previous debut authors we’ve published, you’re a fan of the writer who’s given this new book a testimonial, you trust the instincts of the reviewer who’s seen an advance reading copy – but in the end, it all comes down to trust.
That makes it tricky at the best of times, and we can probably all agree that these are not the best of times. The financial climate is challenging, and money doesn’t stretch as far as it used to. If you have allowed yourself a certain amount to spend on books, we need to convince you to spend that money on a new author you may not like, rather than an old favourite you know you will. As we said: tricky at the best of times, but we think we can help.
We will publish a number of exciting debuts over the course of 2014 and we’re confident that all of them are wonderful new talents that you should read. We’re so confident, in fact, that we’re prepared to put our money where our mouth is and make it possible for you to try these books for less than the price of a cup of coffee.
We have decided to reduce the price of the eBook editions of Gollancz debuts this year to £1.99 for the week of publication. What’s more, we’ll make this price available for pre-order as well, so, in effect, if you decide to purchase one of these books at any time up to a week after it’s been published, you’ll do so for less money than a Saturday newspaper.
And the first of these fabulous debuts is coming up soon! On March 20th, we will publishDen Patrick’s hotly anticipated debut novel, The Boy With The Porcelain Blade, already likened to the works of both Scott Lynch and Robin Hobb. If you order it now – or at any time until a week after publication – you can do so for just a shiny £2 coin and have a penny left over to buy . . . er, whatever it is you can buy for a penny, these days.
Here is a list of Gollancz’s 2014 debuts, with some words from Commissioning Editor, Simon Spanton:
March 20: The Boy With The Porcelain Blade by Den Patrick
The Boy With The Porcelain Blade steps into our lives courtesy of Den Patrick. Den has written for Gollancz before (his hugely entertaining fantasy race war manuals came out in 2013) but this is his first novel. It’s a beautifully wrought story of a young man finding his way through the dark heart of fantasy state not unlike a Renaissance Italian city state. There’s an intriguing back story, terrifying levels of deceit and a horrifying secret at the centre of it all but the star of the piece is the brilliantly engaging hero: Lucien.
May 15: In Dark Service by Stephen Hunt
A fantasy adventure set in a far-future Earth where the passage of time has erased almost all memory of our current world from history. Electricity is now unreliable and classed as a dark power, with many of the nations of the world existing at a Victorian level of development and relying on steam-power, mechanical nanotechnology and biotechnology to survive and prosper. It is a world of strange creatures, flashing blades, steammen servants, airship battles and high adventure.
June 19: Barricade by Jon Wallace
Meet a very different protagonist at the heart of a very different novel. Jon Wallace’s first novel, Barricade, is a brutal road-trip of a novel through a world we’ve destroyed in the company of a character who wants to kill us all. But it’s also a search for a personal truth buried in the past. Imagine Richard Morgan writing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and you are some of the way towards imagining just how exciting this novel is.
July 17: The Seventh Miss Hatfield by Anna Caltabiano
[This] novel written by Anna Caltabiano [will be published] when she was only seventeen. The Seventh Miss Hatfield is Anna’s second novel (she published her first on her own, ending up with over 200,000 twitter followers as a result). The easiest way to describe this clever and enchanting story is that it charts a search for the secret of immortality and a love affair between a young woman and a young man conducted over a gap of a hundred years.
August 14: The Incorruptibles by John Hornor Jacobs
“You can join two mercenaries employed by a vast and corrupt empire as they pursue a party of natives who have kidnapped a woman. But, as you would hope, nothing is quite as it first seems in John Hornor Jacobs’ wonderfully different epic fantasy, The Incorruptibles. This is a tale of troubled courage and steadfastness in a world where there are no moral certainties. This is a fantasy with a world quite unlike any you have travelled through before. There are surprises at every turn.
Sept 18: The Relic Guild by Edward Cox
“Let Ed Cox take you into the Labyrinth of The Relic Guild. With its split time-line, superb characters and bewitching setting of a vast city cut off from the realms around it where magic is ruthlessly supressed this is a dark and exciting fantasy set in a city which itself becomes a living, breathing character. It’s a remarkably original tale for any writer to have come up with, that it is Ed’s first novel is even more remarkable.”
Jennie Ivins
I had the knee-jerk reaction of WTF, its a race to the bottom. But it will–it has helped raised the profile of these debuting authors. And it has been limited to the first week of publication. My concerns then lie with the way books seem to have been devalued with the rise of Amazon. In fact, one of the criticisms is exactly that you can buy a novel–which some poor soul has slaved over for often a year or more–at the price of a latte, or cappuccino or whatever hot drink takes your fancy. More than that this has led to the expectation of coffee house prices, and the sense of entitlement that goes with it, so that if a book is more than a latte, people think it expensive and find themselves reluctant to buy. This does not help, then, in that regard, even if it does boost the authors’ profiles, get them sales and word of mouth, and so on. It’s been a worrying trend that’s created a feedback loop. But saying that, I’m a hypocrite, I still bought The Boy with the Porcelain Blade last night: poor people can’t afford to be too conscientious. Really hope the negatives are offset by the sales.
Caltabiano has over 100k followers, not 200k. Great article, will be looking out for these books!