Guest Blogger: An Editor Speaks

Over the next few weeks, we're going to be opening the floor here at the authonomy blog to some guest bloggers. They'll be tackling a range of subjects to do with authonomy - as well as publishing generally - which we hope you'll find interesting. This week we've asked one of our editors to write about her list and, more importantly, the kind of books she's looking for right now.

I’m an editor at Avon, the new commercial fiction imprint here at HarperCollins. We currently have three Avon editors in London crawling the authonomy site for fresh new talent. We launched in the UK in July 2007 and we publish books across the most popular genres, namely commercial women’s fiction and crime and thrillers, appealing to the supermarket book buyers as well as those on the high street and internet. Our slogan is ‘Escape the everyday with AVON’. As we are a recently formed imprint, we are actively looking for new and inspiring authors so the launch of authonomy has been fantastic for us.

At the moment we are looking to expand our crime and thriller list – we believe there are definitely slots for new voices in this genre, whether it’s a serial killer thriller, a police procedural or a historical epic. We have recently signed up Lee Weeks – she writes disturbingly addictive crime thriller fiction and is being hailed as the female James Patterson. Lee’s books have a real sense of place and her short, sharp and shocking chapters resonate with the reader long after you have put her books down.

We’re also keen to read high quality, atmospheric women’s fiction which transports us to either another historical period or sumptuous location. While there has been discussion on the value of books in today’s society, we strongly believe there is no substitute for getting lost in a good novel; therefore creating a sense of escape convincingly is one of the key things we look for in a book.

It is crucial that the blurb put forward is punchy and entices the readers; if an author can’t manage to write convincingly here, it doesn’t bode well for the book. When reading a manuscript it is extremely important that the first few chapters grab our attention and the concept itself is exciting. We look for a strong voice, in-depth and memorable characterization and a vivid sense of time and place.

The categories that are relevant to Avon are crime, thrillers and women’s commercial fiction, and books that fall into these categories are the ones we'll be looking out for on authonomy.