London Book Fair
Company Spotlight
11th March 2025
Kimberley Young ( 2) have launched a unique imprint (the name of which has not been confirmed at the time of writing) that will meld Transworld’s commercial heft with FairyLoot’s design flair – demonstrated with its collectable, bespoke editions – and trend- setting curation. "I think that's exactly what traditional publishing needs to continue to move forward and evolve: just do things that have never been done before,” says Young. The approach aligns with the “renegade spirit Transworld has always had”. Being “sort of new” to the division after
moving over from HarperCollins to replace long-serving Transworld boss Larry Finlay in March 2024, one of Young’s goals was to grow the division’s science fiction and fantasy list: “It’s obviously such an exciting area. My experi- ence at HarperFiction had been looking after the fiction list, but also HarperVoyager and [digital-first list] One More Chapter. It was just, ‘Okay, who could I go and tap into? Who’s one of the creative tastemakers?’ Obviously, Anissa was first and foremost.” During her 12-year tenure at HarperCollins,
Young displayed a canny knowledge of commercial appetites. She oversaw the launch of One More Chapter, The Locked Library subscription box and the Young Adult, SFF and horror imprint Magpie Books. “When I started One More Chapter, it was like: ‘What could we do that nobody had done before?’” Young adds: “I think I bring a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit of doing things differently.”
1 Company Spotlight
Anissa de Gomery leads disrupter FairyLoot’s second act
A new imprint aims to combine Transworld’s commercial heft with FairyLoot’s SFF fandom nous. Katie Fraser reports
T
he announcement that the Penguin Random House division Transworld and fantasy subscrip- tion box FairyLoot would be launching a joint imprint “took
people by surprise”, says Anissa de Gomery ( 1). The surprise was not necessarily that a move into publishing was off the cards; quite the opposite, but the general assumption was that de Gomery, co-founder and CEO of FairyLoot, would follow in the footsteps of sub-box competitor Illumicrate and launch an independent publishing arm. Taking a different path, de Gomery and Transworld’s managing director
30
Breaking the rules The new imprint’s first yet-to-be-revealed titles will be published from this autumn, and the list will comprise of “anything under the fantasy umbrella” in YA and adult fiction. “FairyLoot’s books will give you a good idea of what we will be looking for,” explains de Gomery. “At the start, it will be a small, curated list,” adds Young. Crucially, and likely good news for many other publishers (and poten- tially slightly bad news for Transworld), not every book published under the imprint will be guaranteed a place in a FairyLoot subscrip- tion box, but the company “will always” produce a special, exclusive edition that will differ from the main-market version. A large part of FairyLoot’s “mystique”, as
Young terms it, is its secrecy. Subscribers do not know which book they will receive in any of FairyLoot’s three, soon to be four, monthly boxes, though the company releases teasers across social media to whet appetites. Balancing FairyLoot’s mystery alongside the lengthy campaigns publishers usually rely on will be an “exciting publishing challenge”, says Young. “Equally it is thinking about what the readers want… I think it’s changing the life cycle of a book.” Author care will be at the centre of the imprint’s ethos, with an eye to growing author
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
