I’m excited for my two novels to be published by Immortal Works!
To recap:
- Abnormally Abbey: 14-year-old Abbey has always been able to see ghosts and when she’s stranded at camp in River Falls, Wisconsin, she needs to use her abilities to solve a mystery and save the lives of friends. Publishing in September 2020.
- Killer Blonde: After playing cat and mouse with a serial killer in the Twin Cities, investigator Cade Dawkins begins to suspect he just may be the mouse. Publishing in February 2021.
But who is this mysterious publisher, Immortal Works? I found an article with all the 411.
Introducing Immortal Works Press by James Wymore, Immortal Works Press Acquisitions Editor
Immortal Works Press, a new publishing company centered in Salt Lake City, Utah, is now open to submissions. Focusing on genre fiction for general audiences, we intend to distinguish our work from other small presses by focusing on a very specific reader audience and producing entertaining books of higher moral quality. We want our readers to know they can count on us to deliver what they are looking for every time. If our books were movies, they’d be the lighter side of PG-13. Every book we release will be released in all the e-book formats, in addition to trade paperback and audiobook.
So what’s different? We want to produce books that everybody over the age of 12 can enjoy, regardless of the age of the protagonist.
In the book world, all fiction has been classified and pigeon-holed ad nauseum. Everybody is analyzing what sells and building formulas to capitalize on trends. Over time they have come up with audience age groups based on marketing—something like letting the cart push the horse. They found that people tend to prefer reading books with protagonists about the same age as they are. In order to match the books to the right group, they began classifying them by difficulty level and the main character’s age. For a long time, books were separated into three groups: Children, Young Adults, and Adults. But recently, bestsellers like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson introduced a middle group between Children’s and YA. They started calling this Middle Grade (MG). They also found a group of older teens in early college years and called them New Adult (NA).
Of course there are always anomalies like Ender’s Game. However, as the definitions solidified, the expectation for authors to write books where the main character’s age matched (or was slightly above) the reader’s age became standardized. It’s always possible to write a book that is an exception to the new rule, but it can be hard to get an editor to take it seriously. Yet they overlook the fact that The Hobbit was written for teens.
This has always bothered me, personally. It puts an artificial constraint on creativity. Some of the books I have written were intended to reach a wider range of readers, but if I label it YA or Adult, it will exclude some of the people I intended it for. I’ve talked to several authors with the same concern. That’s why, when we founded Immortal Works Press, I suggested we publish books with a different end in mind: General Audiences. Why can’t a teen reader enjoy Agatha Christie’s mysteries? Is there any reason a middle aged mom shouldn’t love the Harry Potter series? A good book is good to a much wider range of people than just eleven to thirteen or fourteen to eighteen. Like a good movie, a good book will resonate with a very wide age-range of readers.
Well into adulthood, I relished A Series of Unfortunate Events. I read Asimov to my kids when they were young. If a reader can imagine a centuries old vampire hunting victims in a city’s underground, why can’t they imagine they are young again, or old before their time? Maybe marketing has to be done by the defined age groups, but we believe readers of all ages will appreciate a good story regardless of the classification it’s sold under. That’s the difference between a normal book and our Immortal Works.