Spotlight on Anne Perry of Arcadia
You’re the publishing director for the SF/F imprint at Quercus in the UK (formerly known as Jo Fletcher Books). We understand you’re relaunching with a new vision and name. Tell us about it.
I was very lucky when I started at Quercus; Jo Fletcher Books was 11 years old and well-established, and had a reputation for being particularly strong in epic fantasy, having launched authors like Sebastien de Castell, Peter McLean and David Hair. JFB also had a well-earned reputation for finding superb, unusual projects and making them work incredibly well; books like Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar, and Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott. But SFF publishing has changed substantially over the last few years, and we felt it was time to expand the list and bring in more subgenres, particularly romantasy and more mainstream commercial work with a speculative or fantastical edge. As our publishing began to evolve, we felt it was time to change the name of the imprint to reflect our changing ambitions and list.
We settled on the name Arcadia after a lot of discussion; we loved the idea of the mythical forest being home to everyone that finds their way there, and saw that as a lovely metaphor for what we want the list to be. Our new colophon is a fox, which represents not only our London location (urban foxes are endemic here!), but stands for everything we want to be: the fox is bold and agile, easily recognisable, and yet, at the same time, an almost otherworldly creature from fantasy and folklore.
Does your imprint have a mission statement, or is there a particular niche you aim to fill?
We aim to be as diverse, representative and inclusive as our readership, and bringing underrepresented voices and stories to our list is a big part of our publishing vision. We want to be like our fox logo: fearless and fantastical.
What major titles and authors can we expect to see from your line in the near future? Anything you’re especially excited about?
The first book publishing under the new colophon is James Logan’s debut fantasy, The Silverblood Promise. We’re publishing John Wiswell’s queer cosy fantasy debut Someone You Can Build a Nest In; Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s new novel of Golden Age Hollywood, The Seventh Veil of Salome; the Sacred Stones romantasy trilogy by Kate Golden; a new series by Sebastien de Castell, Court of Shadows; the next literary science fiction novels by Adam Oyebanji (Esperance) and EJ Swift (The End Where We Begin); cult-hit Meg Shaffer’s astonishing portal fantasy The Lost Story; and a few projects I’m afraid I can’t mention by name yet, but which speak to everything we hope to accomplish!
SF/fantasy titles overall have been selling quite well recently. Why do you think this is a good moment for that kind of genre fiction?
This is such a good question, and the answer is so long and complex I’ll only be able to touch on a few big points. I think we’ve got the mainstream commercial success of shows like Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time to thank for getting the current upswing going; that proved to publishers that long-running and beloved SFF properties could become bigger than just genre fans. Social media has played a huge part in the current success of SFF titles; word of mouth can travel at the speed of light now – just look at what a single Tweet from Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood did for This is How You Lose the Time War last summer! The success of self-published books, especially in fantasy, has proven that a much broader audience exists out there than what traditional publishing had pinpointed (for decades) as the mainstay behind SFF publishing. Finally, subscription boxes have proven that readers a) love a beautiful special edition of a book and b) are loyal to particular subgenres, and c) love to show their collections off.
SFF readers have, for generations, been folks who are loyal to authors and to series, who read a ton, and who love gorgeous editions of books; we’re now seeing a new generation of readers for whom all of the above is true, but who also want to read more than epic fantasy and space opera. And they want the books they read to reflect themselves and their lives. SFF has always been miles ahead of commercial publishing in terms of its diversity and representation, and that’s even more true now.
You’ve been in the business for a long time. Tell us a bit about your history in the field and how you came to your current position.
I never expected to become a publisher; I was in grad school finishing a PhD when my husband and I started a review blog (Pornokitsch) and then spun off a small literary SFF prize (The Kitschies), and finally a small press (Jurassic London). I enjoyed editing and publishing more than I was enjoying my PhD program, so I applied for a job as an assistant editor in SFF at Hodder & Stoughton, never expecting to get so much as an interview. Happily, they hired me, and I spent five years building up Hodderscape before I moved to Simon & Schuster. I was there for four years, then spent two years as a literary agent before Quercus came knocking to ask if I’d be interested in going back over to the editorial side of things. I started at Quercus in late 2022 and the rest is history!
Talk about some of the changes you’ve seen in the SF/fantasy field during your career.
When I started out, SFF publishing was limited to acquiring and publishing for what was called “the core genre audience” – which was exactly what you would think: men, aged 35-55, being considered the main audience. As a life-long SFF fan who did not in any way meet any of that criteria, I railed personally and professionally against this way of segmenting the market. I’m thrilled that in the time I’ve worked in the industry, that way of understanding SFF readership has changed so radically; publishers are now hyper aware of the fact that SFF readers are a huge and wide-ranging segment of the reading public, and are doing a much better job publishing great books for them.
What changes do you foresee in the future? How are you positioned to respond to those changes?
It will be interesting to see how the subscription box market continues to force SFF publishing to evolve; I think more changes are coming. TikTok has been a massive influence on creating huge word-of-mouth hits but, as a platform, has a lot of issues, and as our jurisprudence about data and privacy continues to evolve, that will change how TikTok and social media in general work, which will in turn change what books take off, and why, and how. Finally, of course, AI is here, and it’s here to stay; big tech is committed to integrating AI into our everyday lives, and we are already seeing AI junk-publishing on self-publishing platforms and controversies about AI-generated covers and content. I can hardly begin to imagine how AI is going to be changing the industry in the years to come.
The best – the only – way to respond to these changes is to continue to publish great books well, irrespective of trends and fads.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you or the work you do?
Jo Fletcher Books has always proudly been open to unagented submissions, and we will continue to remain open to unagented submissions as Arcadia. Some of the biggest successes in my career have been unagented books that I found simply by reading broadly and with an open mind.
–Anne Perry
