Anne Perry on launching new SFF imprint Arcadia: 'We want to appeal to a broader reading public'
A champion of science fiction and fantasy for a number of years, LA-born Anne Perry has cheered the genre’s recent commercial and critical revival—and now she has a Big Five imprint to build on that success
Anne Perry has been in the science fiction and fantasy game for some time and, let’s be honest, for a good portion of her career the genre has not been held in the highest esteem by many in the trade. But my, how the worm has turned. SFF—and particularly of late, that final F—is the hottest category in trade publishing and a good chunk of acquiring editors roaming Olympia this week will be on a fetch quest for the next Sarah J Maas, Rebecca Yarros or R F Kuang.
When I suggest, towards the end of our Zoom, that SFF has been disrespected in the past, Perry demurs. But not vehemently. She then adds: “I find it restorative at the moment. It was difficult early in my career to feel that the books I was publishing were not being considered seriously—even if they made a lot of money and had fanatical followings. The superstructure around books rewards the literary, crime novels and commercial fiction with an upmarket bent, not SFF. And there has always been this ridiculous view that people who read and enjoy SFF are just not challenging themselves enough.”
Perry cheers the imprints coming into this space, citing Tor as one example, with the Pan Macmillan arm’s recent romantasy (Tor Bramble) and horror (Tor Nightfire) launches. She says: “That’s after 20 years in the trenches, when the imprint was basically two or three people. It’s wonderful to see this growth and expansion, and the Big Five [publishers] embracing SFF’s possibilities and rewarding editors who find these books that make all this money. But beyond that, these imprints are bringing people into reading. Those who love fantasy are truly fanatical. That’s what we want as publishers: people with a love of reading.”
There has always been this ridiculous view that people who read and enjoy SFF are just not challenging themselves enough
There is a Big Five reward for Perry, too, as today (12th March) Quercus announced her new SFF imprint Arcadia, a relaunch of the Hachette division’s existing Jo Fletcher Books (JFB) using the name of the indie publishing house founded by the late, great Gary Pulsifer, which Quercus acquired in 2021. Perry joined Quercus in 2022 to run JFB after Fletcher left the imprint she founded 11 years previously.
The relaunch aims to reflect a widening out from the list’s wheelhouse. Perry says: “There is a lot of great JFB epic fantasy—Jo has great taste—that we will be continuing with. But we felt that we could bring more to the list: we wanted more cosy fantasy, romantasy… we wanted books that appealed to a broader reading public.”
The native Californian speaks enthusiastically and in full gulps of paragraphs. She leans in: “I’m going to go off on a tangent, but when I started out there was this term thrown around that SFF had a ‘core genre audience’; that there was only a fixed group [of SFF buyers]. But there were a few of us waving our fists and saying: ‘No, the market’s bigger than that.’ Finally we have evidence that there is this huge swathe that reads fantasy, in particular—titles that get on bestseller lists and make authors household names. We wanted to make sure our list represented that expanded audience.”
The right blend
But why Arcadia? Pulsifer’s company was largely literary, and when it was initially bought by Quercus it was incorporated into the fiction-in-translation imprint MacLehose Press. That was partly because Perry did not want anything “too science fictional” or specifically fantasy to avoid pigeonholing, and partly because Perry, quite frankly, wasn’t aware of Arcadia or that it was owned by her employer (understandable, as the list had been more or less mothballed).
She says: “We had brainstorming meetings when you give yourself permission to do lateral thinking. I came up with ‘Arcadia’, googled it, and discovered not only was it already a publisher, it was owned by Quercus. Then I looked into Arcadia and it had this reputation for being bold and ahead of its time with diversity, inclusion and representation, which is important to us. There was some concern people might associate Arcadia with Elizabethan poetry, but it struck me as being the right blend of literary and magical.”
Continues...
The continuing authors “are the beating heart of the list” and include Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Andrew Caldecott, and Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. The last two are the duo behind This Is How You Lose the Time War, the time-travel love story that won an armful of awards after its 2019 launch, but unexpectedly hit the stratosphere last year after a tweet praising the book—by a user whose display name is “bigolas dickolas wolfwood”—went viral. This, friends, is the sometimes random nature of SFF fandom.
But a big push, which continues Perry’s work since she joined Quercus, is expanding the list in different directions. The first issue under the Arcadia brand is James Logan’s “epic fantasy, but with a very modern twist” début The Silverblood Promise. Perry did not have to go far to find Logan: he is commissioning editor at Hachette SFF division Orbit, whose offices are about 200ft away from Quercus at Hachette’s Carmelite House headquarters.
Last year, Perry spearheaded a big move into romantasy, such as formerly self-published Kate Golden and her The Sacred Stones series. An upcoming Arcadia début roughly in this space is John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In, a queer, cosier-end-of-fantasy story about a shapeshifting monster who falls in love with a human. Perry says: “[Wiswell] is a queer, disabled author from the US. And when this incredibly moving, very powerful, but also very funny and dark novel crossed my desk, I knew immediately it would be sort of a bellwether for what the list could be.”
The launch pad
Perry was born in LA and grew up near San Francisco before moving to Chicago in her teens. After studying history at the University of Chicago, she did a law degree then began a history PhD. During that time she met her British now-husband, who convinced her to move to London. He freelanced while she was doing her degree “and we spent a lot of time sitting across the table from each other with time on our hands, so one day we thought: ‘Wouldn’t it be jolly good fun to start our own press?’ ”
The industry has become much more thoughtful and proactive about producing work that is truly representative of a diverse society
Perry quickly discovered that she liked publishing more than academia and ended up running that indie, Jurassic London, for five years before deciding to move to a bigger publishing house. SFF was not her sole focus but a definite interest: Jurassic published a lot of it, and she had co-founded the genre-fiction prizes The Kitschies, of which SFF is a big part. She got her first corporate gig at Hodder’s SFF arm, working there for five years before moving to Simon & Schuster, adding crime commissioning to her SFF remit, before crossing the aisle to the Ki Agency (where she had to style herself Anne C Perry, as the agency represented the crime author Anne Perry). She loved agenting and would have stayed had Quercus not come calling with the offer to run her own imprint.
There has been “a complete sea-change” in how the trade views SFF now compared with when she started out. She says: “I absolutely love the fact that Waterstones has an SFF Book of the Month now. Or that you see books with speculative and fantastical elements that get shortlisted for the biggest literary prizes. But I think SFF’s success—and you can see the evidence in the type of SFF books that are doing well—is really a part of a broader change in the industry, which has become much more thoughtful and proactive about making sure that what it produces is truly representative of a diverse and multicultural society. And I am glad that SFF is right there, helping to lead the way.”
Anne Perry on…Subscription boxes
“Subscription boxes can shoot an author from nowhere to the top of the bestseller list. Some of those authors have some staying power—but some don’t. Of course we acquire books that have potential for a sub box, but I would never buy just because we might get on one, as that’s a disservice to the author and their longer-term career. Sub boxes should be thought of as a fantastic sparkly icing on a cake, never as part of an initial strategy.”
