Confirming rumors floating around the internet, Games Workshop PLC announced its intention to sell its Solaris Books publishing imprint. Solaris is the company’s second imprint under the BL Publishing banner. It publishes about 20 original science fiction, fantasy, and horror titles a year, after launching in 2006.
George Mann, Games Workshop’s Head of Publishing, said “In recent years our Black Library imprint has more than doubled in size and scope and we have decided that we should focus all our attention in growing this core part of our business. Whilst we see plenty of growth potential with Solaris, we are looking for a buyer who is interested in developing this global brand.”
BL Publishing’s North American Sales Manager Vincent W. Rospond added to SFScope: “We’ve had some inquiries about its sales which has prompted this.”
Black Library is the main publishing line. It publishes fiction set “in the dark fantasy worlds of Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 settings. It has seen consistent double digit like-for-like growth over the last three years.”
Rospond said of their immediate plans for Solaris: “We are publishing out our books through January 2010, with no drop in attention or quality.”
[Added later in the day: In response to several questions from SFScope, Rospond said “At the moment we have had interest from buyers, but I can’t go into who. We are not accepting new material and the present plan is to publish out our announced list that goes to January 2010. We may move some books forward to finish out trilogies and promote our authors. If we have no buyer by then, we will have a plan in place before the January date.”]
Solaris launched as a simultaneous US/UK publisher, with their distributed by Simon & Schuster on both sides of the Atlantic. Solaris recently published Ellen Datlow’s anthology Poe: 19 New Tales of Suspense, Dark Fantasy, and Horror Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and Nick Gevers’ steampunk anthology Extraordinary Engines. They’ve announced the upcoming publication of Jetse de Vries’s anthology Shine, and have published books by Eric Brown, Mark Chadbourn, David Louis Edelman, Simon R. Green, Brian Lumley, Gail Z. Martin, James Maxey, Adam Roberts, Chris Roberson, Jeffrey Thomas, and more.