Lou Aronica

Last updated

Lou Aronica (born 1958) is an American editor and publisher, primarily of science fiction. He co-edited the Full Spectrum anthologies with Shawna McCarthy. As a publisher he began at Bantam Books and formed their Bantam Spectra science fiction and fantasy label. Later he moved on to Avon and helped create their Avon-Eos science fiction and fantasy label. [1]

Contents

Career

Aronica started the Spectra imprint at Bantam when he was 27 years old. [2] His first acquisition for Bantam Spectra, David Brin's Startide Rising, won a Hugo and a Nebula award. [2] Bantam Spectra went on to publish New York Times bestsellers for Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, Raymond Feist, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Neil Gaiman. [2] During this phase of his career, Aronica acquired five consecutive winners of the Nebula award. [3]

His Full Spectrum anthology series ran 5 volumes. Full Spectrum 4, co-edited with Amy Stout and Betsy Mitchell, won the 1994 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. [4] He also started the Star Wars book publishing program. [2]

As mass market publisher for Bantam, he launched the Crime Line mystery imprint and worked with bestselling authors Elizabeth George, Robert Crais, and Diane Mott Davidson. [3]

After leaving Bantam in 1994, he became publisher of the Berkley Publishing Group, where he started two imprints, Boulevard and Signature. During this time he acquired and edited futuristic mysteries by J.D. Robb (a pen name of author Nora Roberts). [3]

In 1995, Aronica became senior vice president and publisher for Avon Books, where he launched the Eos science fiction and fantasy imprint and expanded Avon's romance books program. The author list at Eos has included Raymond Feist, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, Sheri Tepper, and Dennis Danvers. [1] He left Avon in 1999 after the acquisition of the company by The News Corporation. [3]

Since leaving Avon, he has co-authored several books, including The Culture Code with Clotaire Rapaille. [5] His novels The Forever Year and Flash and Dazzle were published under the pen name Ronald Anthony. [3] In 2003, he established The Fiction Studio, a creative development company with a publishing imprint for new authors, and in 2008, with literary manager Peter Miller, he established The Story Plant, www.thestoryplant.com , a small commercial imprint for strong genre authors. [6]

Works

Books edited

Anthologies

The Bantam Spectra Sampler (1985)

The first four books of the Full Spectrum series:

Nonfiction books co-authored

Fiction books authored

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Blish</span> American science fiction and fantasy author (1921–1975)

James Benjamin Blish was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is best known for his Cities in Flight novels and his series of Star Trek novelizations written with his wife, J. A. Lawrence. His novel A Case of Conscience won the Hugo Award. He is credited with creating the term "gas giant" to refer to large planetary bodies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Brin</span> American scientist and science fiction author (born 1950)

Glen David Brin is an American scientist and author of science fiction. He has won the Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Awards. His novel The Postman was adapted into a 1997 feature film starring Kevin Costner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bantam Spectra</span> Science fiction division of Bantam Books

Bantam Spectra is the science fiction division of American publishing company Bantam Books, which is owned by Random House.

HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Corp. The name is a combination of several publishing firm names: Harper & Row, an American publishing company acquired in 1987—whose own name was the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company—together with Scottish publishing company William Collins, Sons, acquired in 1989.

Shawna Lee McCarthy is an American science fiction and fantasy editor and literary agent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Leigh</span> American science fiction writer

Stephen W. Leigh is an American science fiction and fantasy writer, artist, and musician. He also works as a lecturer at Northern Kentucky University, teaching creative writing. He has published speculative fiction as Stephen Leigh, as S. L. Farrell, and once as Matthew Farrell.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bantam Books</span> Publisher from the USA

Bantam Books is an American publishing house owned entirely by parent company Random House, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House; it is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. It was formed in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and Ian and Betty Ballantine, with funding from Grosset & Dunlap and Curtis Publishing Company. It has since been purchased several times by companies including National General, Carl Lindner's American Financial and, most recently, Bertelsmann; it became part of Random House in 1998, when Bertelsmann purchased it to form Bantam Doubleday Dell. It began as a mass market publisher, mostly of reprints of hardcover books, with some original paperbacks as well. It expanded into both trade paperback and hardcover books, including original works, often reprinted in house as mass-market editions.

Tim Pratt is an American science fiction and fantasy writer and poet. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his short story "Impossible Dreams". He has written over 20 books, including the Marla Mason series and several Pathfinder Tales novels. His writing has earned him nominations for Nebula, Mythopoeic, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker awards and been published in numerous markets, including Asimov's Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Strange Horizons.


Harper Prism (1993–1999) was launched by John Silbersack, Publishing Director, in 1993 as the first science fiction and fantasy imprint of HarperCollins Publishers in the United States. Prism's early authors included Stephen Baxter, Terry Pratchett, Isaac Asimov, and Clive Barker as well as many media and gaming tie-ins such as Magic: The Gathering and The X-Files.

<i>Plot It Yourself</i>

Plot It Yourself is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1959, and also collected in the omnibus volume Kings Full of Aces.

Lisa Mason is an American writer of science fiction, fantasy, and urban fantasy. She lives in Piedmont, California with her husband, the artist and jeweler Tom Robinson. She is a Phi Beta Kappa scholar and graduate of the University of Michigan, the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts, and the University of Michigan Law School. She practiced law in Washington D.C. and San Francisco. To have more time to write, she transitioned to Matthew Bender and Company, a national law book publisher, where she started as a legal writer and rose to an executive editor. Many of her novels take place in the vicinity of San Francisco, California, either in the future or in the past through time travel. Her early works are recognized as cyberpunk. She has also written paranormal romance, historical romantic suspense, comedy, and a screenplay.

Thomas Franklin Deitz was an American fantasy novelist, professor, and artist from Georgia. He was best known for authoring the David Sullivan contemporary fantasy series, though he also authored three other fantasy series and a standalone novel set in the same universe as the David Sullivan series.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Picacio</span> American artist

John Picacio is an American artist specializing in science fiction, fantasy and horror illustration.

Chris Moriarty is an American science fiction and fantasy writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lou Anders</span> American journalist

Lou Anders is the author of the Thrones & Bones series of middle grade fantasy novels. Anders is a Hugo Award-winning American editor, a Chesley Award-winning art director, an author and a journalist.

Gilbert Clotaire Rapaille, known as G. Clotaire Rapaille, is a French marketing consultant and the CEO and Founder of Archetype Discoveries Worldwide. Rapaille is also an author, who has published on topics in psychology, marketing, sociology and cultural anthropology.

Mark L. Van Name is an American science fiction writer and technology consultant. As of 2009, Van Name lives in North Carolina.

<i>Full Spectrum</i>

Full Spectrum is a series of five anthologies of fantasy and science fiction short stories published between 1988 and 1995 by Bantam Spectra. The first anthology was edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy; the second by Aronica, McCarthy, Amy Stout, and Pat LoBrutto; the third and fourth by Aronica, Stout, and Betsy Mitchell; and the fifth by Jennifer Hershey, Tom Dupree, and Janna Silverstein.

A partial bibliography of American science fiction author Nancy Kress.

References

Footnotes
  1. 1 2 White, Claire E. (December 1997). "Interview With Lou Aronica". The Internet Writing Journal. Retrieved 15 April 2011.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Aronica, Lou. "Lou Aronica Biography". The Fiction Studio. Retrieved 15 April 2011.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "Lou Aronica Bio". Goodreads . Retrieved 15 April 2011.
  4. ↑ World Fantasy Convention. "Award Winners and Nominees". Archived from the original on 1 December 2010. Retrieved 4 February 2011.
  5. ↑ "Lou Aronica Biography". Author Interviews & Appearances, Authors in the News & More. Canada: Simon & Schuster. Archived from the original on 12 August 2011. Retrieved 15 April 2011.
  6. ↑ Aronica, Lou. "The Fiction Studio Homepage". The Fiction Studio. Retrieved 15 April 2011.
Sources
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.