Sean Wallace, who is the senior editor and founder of Prime Books, has announced that he has reacquired the imprint from publisher Wildside Press, and will be relaunching it as an independent publishing house—Prime Books, LLC—in May 2009. Wallace originally founded Prime Books in 2001; in 2004, it became an imprint of Wildside Press. The break is going to be a clean split (Prime and Wildside will be completely separate companies). Prime will, however, continue selling books it produced as a Wildside imprint, while Wildside maintains control of those titles. And between five and ten books that had been scheduled to appear under the Prime imprint (which have already been solicited by Wildside) are being canceled and resubmitted as Prime books under new ISBNs. Wallace also says that national distribution will be handled by Diamond Book Distributors.
Differentiating the company from its Wildside roots, Wallace expects to publish 8-10 books per year, all nationally distributed, and he doesn’t expect to do any print on demand titles.
Prime’s schedule, from launch through the end of the year, has already been set (except for one or two books, the contracts for which are still being negotiated). The company’s debut title, in May, will be the trade paperback anthology Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams, which was previously announced (see this article). Following that, the company has scheduled:
The Early Work of Philip K. Dick, Volume One: The Variable Man and Other Stories by Philip K. Dick (August hardcover)
Queen of Hearts by Daniel Homan (September trade paperback)
The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith by Clark Ashton Smith (September trade paperback)
Northwest Passages by Barbara Roden (October hardcover)
Worlds of Fantasy: The Best of Fantasy Magazine edited by Cat Rambo, Paul Tremblay, and Sean Wallace (November trade paperback)
The Early Work of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two: Breakfast at Twilight and Other Stories by Philip K. Dick (November hardcover)
The acquisition also includes the online weekly Fantasy Magazine. Subscribers to the print incarnation were moved to Weird Tales some time back, when the magazine was moved to the web. Wallace expects to continue Fantasy Magazine as is.