In November, John Joseph Adams was named by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as editor in chief of John Joseph Adams Books, its new imprint for science fiction and fantasy titles.
Adams’s first three titles are Hugh Howey’s Beacon 23 and the Wool trilogy’s Shift and Dust. (The U.S. print rights for the first volume, Wool, are currently held by Simon & Schuster.)
- With more than thirty projects to his name, New Jersey native Adams is known as a leading anthologist and curator of science fiction, particularly for his work with Joe Hill on Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. He holds two Hugo Awards and has been nominated nine times. Adams says science fiction takes the raw facts of our present existence and puts them “into a different context where it’s easier for us to relate emotionally to what’s going on inside the minds of the characters.”
- Film and television is rife with science fiction and fantasy, which is naturally buoying to these genres in books. “I wish that there was more serious science fiction” like Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, he says, but he concedes that it’s hard to know how receptive the marketplace is to serious work as well as to more entertainment-oriented work.
- He points to the U.K.’s (Channel 4) Black Mirror series. “We can have both” serious concept and entertainment, he says. “It just takes more effort. I think something like Christopher Nolan’s Inception does a wonderful job of melding everything we’d want…. It’s definitely an action movie, but it’s also got a really hardcore science-fiction concept behind it. And it isn’t spoon-fed to you at all.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
