2012 - 09/2012 Meeting

Page Created: 07/2012. Last Updated: 10/09/14.

TRICIA NARWANI

Tricia Narwani is the Editorial Director and Transmedia Producer for Del Rey Books, the Science Fiction and Fantasy imprint of Random House. She has worked with such authors as Ben Aaronovich, Peter V Brett, Kevin Hearne, Greg Keyes, Drew Karypshyn and Karen Lord. Prior to Random House she was employed at Penguin Group USA. She is a graduate of New York University. Her interests include writing, gaming, comics, animation, science fiction, fantasy and Victoriana.

LINKS

Tricia Narwani at Linked-In: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tricia-narwani/b/738/b89

Suvudu: The Random House Del Rey / Spectra Site for Science Fiction & Fantasy: http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/

MEETING SUMMARY

Meeting Date: September 8, 2012.

Meeting Site: Panera Bread Community Room, Ramsey, New Jersey.

Official Attendance: 38 .

Meeting Program: Talk by Editor / Transmedia Producer.

Notes:

Newsletter Account:

The S F A B C General Meeting on Saturday, September 8, 2012 was to some degree a victim of its own success. The meeting was held in the Community Room of Panera Bread in Ramsey, New Jersey. The venue was chosen because our normal meeting site, the Saddle River Valley Cultural Center in Upper Saddle River, raised its rental fee. By relocating the September and October meetings to places which do not charge a fee, the club was able to offset this expense.

Panera does not normally allow groups to book the Community Room on a Saturday night. I persuaded the store manager to make an exception in return for a promise of at least 15 - 20 dinners. I then booked a name speaker as a draw and did lots of promotion work to make sure we exceeded our quota.

Our speaker was Tricia Narwani, the Editorial Director and Transmedia Producer for Del Rey books, one of the most important science fiction publishers. Between the importance of the speaker and the heavy promotion, we actually wound up with more people than we wanted. We filled every seat in the room and had people seated outside the doors listening to our guest.

Ms Narwani was an avid reader as a child, but it was J R R Tolkien's THE HOBBIT which made her a fan. What really caught her ten-year-old eye was the map in the front of the book. "I want to read books like THAT!" she decided and promptly zeroed in on works in the fantasy and science fiction genres. Our guest graduated from New York University as an English Major and ended up at Del Rey when she forwarded her resume in response to an on line posting.

Tricia Narwani has been at Del Rey for six years. As the Transmedia Producer for the company's Intellectual Property Development Group, she consults and develops properties across multiple media including games, movies, television and comic books. Del Rey is heavily involved with tie-ins to Lucas Films in general and STAR WARS in particular. Other projects include working with a game company to produce the story bible for a post-apocalyptic game featuring the Four Horsemen and with Dynamite Comics to produce graphic novels based on George R R Martin's Game of Thrones Series. She stated her belief that we are just at the beginning of developing interactive comic book stories.

On the editorial side of things, our guest functions both as an editor of her own group of writers (35 - 40 titles by 15 authors) and as Editorial Director for Del Rey Books, a position which oversees three additional editors ("I have a lot of worlds going on in my head at once").

Ms Narwani spoke about a number of innovations and changes to hit the company and the industry in recent years. One is the rapid launch of titles whereby instead of issuing one book in a series per year, three or more works by a new author like Naomi Novak or Kevin Hearne are published a few months apart. This can help to create a buzz, to spread advertising costs over a greater number of titles, and to sell copies of several books by the same author at the time of purchase. When Del Rey releases a new book in an ongoing series, the company attempts to reissue the earlier works in the series to go with the new release.

Another recent development has been the oversized mass market paperback. While the format is more profitable for the publisher, it has flopped with certain markets such as romance. Our speaker believes that this is because these books do not fit comfortably into the handbags carried by many women.

Electronic books are changing the publishing paradigm in many ways. E-book readers are impatient and want new books from their authors faster than once a year. Traditional publishing requires an 8 month production cycle, but turnaround for e-books is only 3 months. The emergence of Amazon as the dominant bookseller requires that book covers must be designed to work on their website's smaller display area.

Del Rey is currently looking for big, gritty, dark fantasy works and military science fiction. They would also love to see alternative histories in the vein of Harry Turtledove. Tricia Narwani personally is a fan of all things Victorian and loves well-done steampunk.

We close with a hodgepodge of comments from our guest. Del Rey attempts to debut four new writers per year, one for each of the publishing seasons. Most reading and editing occurs after working hours; 9 to 5 is mostly handling production matters (this is a comment which has been made by other past Association speakers). Del Rey wants authors who are positive and exciting when promoting their work through social media, disparaging one's readers and publisher is not a smart thing to do. When writers bypass the traditional publishing process to self-publish, they must allocate time they could spend writing to production and marketing.

While our speaker was very interesting and informative, the large turnout created some problems. Our best meetings are those which develop a group dynamic with the speaker. Here we had a collection of individuals attending a talk, with many newcomers who have never attended another Association gathering, so it was a bittersweet event.