Monday, 24 May 2010

"Ask an Editor..."

Hi all,

Here's the thing. We get good reading figures: hundreds of individual visits every month, scores of unique visitors every day. That's the dedicated blog readers; there are hundreds of you that visit the main Solaris page every day and presumably read the most recent posts. There's basically a metric assload of readers. But we don't seem to hear lots from you; there are a smattering of comments, and we get the odd email. A little more traffic on the Twitter feed.

And we'd like to hear from you. To that end, we're declaring "Ask an Editor..." Day! Post a comment here with a question, and Jenni, Jon or I will answer. Maybe seriously, maybe frivolously, maybe even slightly offensively, but you will get an answer. Just for one day.

Get posting, Abaddonians!

Cheers,

David
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5 comments:

Harry Markov said...

If you could find yourself in an outrageous parody of three popular movies, which three movies would you choose?

I want a frivolous answer, but offensive works, too.

24 May 2010 at 15:02
Mihai A. said...

How important is the cover artwork in the editing process? Is more important the originality of the artwork or the pattern that had success before?

24 May 2010 at 15:48
Mark West said...

Related to Mihai's query - do you suggest ideas for artwork yourself, as you read the ms, or do you leave that to the designers?

Bonus question - will you be re-opening submissions for the Tomes Of The Dead series?

25 May 2010 at 10:36
David Moore said...

@Mark West: Look who's late to the party!

Right, one quick freebie after the deadline, then.

It totally varies. We ask the author if they have a preference, and they usually do. It's often pretty vague ("Can I have a spaceship or something?") but can be incredibly specific ("Can I have a biker punching out a grizzy bear?").

Sometimes we think of something while reading the MS. Sometimes we pitch to the designer and ask them what they think. We mostly just want something that looks striking and cool.

And: We generally poke our tame authors to see if they have any ideas, but occasionally we're moved to see if anyone's got anything. You can always send a query on the "Contact Us" tab on the site; we may well not get back to you for ages, but we won't generally delete you out of hand.

25 May 2010 at 16:12
Mark West said...

Thanks, David, sorry for being tardy!

25 May 2010 at 16:28

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