Welcome Paula Guran, the editor of Juno Books (www.juno-books.com), an imprint of Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. Juno features contemporary fantasy with female protagonists. Guran has contributed reviews, interviews, and articles to numerous professional publications. She’s also done some other stuff and won some awards. Here’s what she had to say:
Let’s start by talking about Juno. How did it get started?
Diamond Comic Distributors expanded into book distribution a few years back and had picked up Prime Books and Wildside Press for national distribution. They were looking for ideas for another trade paperback imprint. Sean Wallace of Prime, John Betancourt of Wildside, and the crew at Diamond-headed by Kuo-Yu Liang-they thought this “paranormal romance” stuff was hot, not that any of them knew much about it. I got involved in early 2006 and things developed into the Juno Books imprint-which wasn’t paranormal romance but rather a broader idea: a variety of fantasy with female protagonists. Wildside/Prime had already acquired a few titles that would fit in with that idea. The plans were for at least 12 books-really they wanted even more at first-a year, so I was to acquire a lot very fast and for very little money.
Our first books came out in fall 2006.
Juno was experimental. We made mistakes, but we had the room to learn from them for a while. Sean oversaw the printing and production end of things. Stephen Segal, who’d actually been hired by Wildside to be managing editor of “Weird Tales” magazine, wound up designing our covers. Both of them worked out of the Wildside offices in Maryland. I’m in Akron, Ohio.
How many hats did you wear before the deal with Pocket?
Just about anything Sean and Steve didn’t do (although we always had each other to consult and also worked together on things): I acquired, edited, and, yes, typeset the books. We did have an outside copy editor. I did publicity, wrote copy, and built and maintained the Web site. I even designed the Juno logo. We were lucky enough to have Timothy Lantz doing many of the covers for us or using his ready-made art if it fit, so I even acted as art director in some respects. We all did marketing meetings with Diamond and the chain buyers.
What kinds of books did you buy?
Everything from reprints of some fantasy books from the eighties to romantic supernatural suspense to Christian fantasy to erotic fantasy to literary feminist novels…and everything in between.
How did Juno do?
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