Juno Books

Nice post on Ecstatic Days today about Matt Cook’s Blood Magic books: Blood Magic and Nights of Sin. I quite agree, the third book should find a publisher.

Juno has other orphans, too…

Note: Since one well-intentioned person already misunderstood this post, let me make some clarifications. As most of you know, Pocket Juno has been from its conception a mass market paperback urban fantasy imprint. I’m thrilled with that.

The original small press version of Juno did a variety of fantasy. We experimented. We evolved. We failed in many ways and succeeded in a few. We may not have been the right publisher for all the books we did do. It is moot now because that Juno no longer exists. I’m very glad it’s “daughter” — Pocket Juno — exists and publishes what it publishes.

Now: Back to the original post…

Dru Pagliassotti’s Clockwork Heart is still finding readers (and making news), has been picked up for German publication. She, too, has another book in the same world underway that I hope finds a home, not to mention another non-Clockwork fantasy. (She does have a nonfiction book coming out on her academic specialty, yaoi.)

Another orphaned series is Margaret Lucke’s Supernatural Properties. House of Whispers was well-summed up by Amanda Killgore for Huntress Reviews: “Like Barbara Michaels, Phyllis Whitney, and Victoria Holt, Ms. Lucke weaves a spell around her readers. Unlike modern urban fantasies, the pacing is very deliberate, taking time to build, rather than running at a perpetual motion machine, with constant action that never lets you take a breath. House of Whispers blends the old and new effectively, efficiently, and no pun intended, hauntingly.”

Margaret’s series premise was also intriguing — her psychic real estate agent keeps running into supernaturally challenged properties. She had books planned in a Victorian mansion in San Francisco that had once been a whorehouse and another at a locale in California wine country. With the right publisher, I think her romantic supernatural suspense would find an audience.

And Lillian Stewart Carl is one of the most underrated and under-published authors working today. Blackness Tower was evocative of Mary Stewart and blended historical mystery with the supernatural. Again, I feel the readers are out there, but…

Jamie Craig’s Chasing Silver not only has a sequel, Touching Silver, I’ve edited it and know there’s a third I haven’t read. The writing team that is Jamie Craig is still writing hot sex in e-books, but the Silver books were also entertaining noirish adventures. Perhaps they will be rediscovered.

Lynn Ceser was hardly discovered to start with. She had two books planned past Apricot Brandy. As I understand it, her tale took on truly epic proportions past that first book.

The just-give-him-a-chance-to-be-prolific Chris Howard has a prequel and all sorts of tales related to his world of Seaborn that deserve to find readers.

Even though Sylvia Kelso’s Riversend, the sequel to Amberlight was (barely) published, there is at least one more book in that series (and, I think, more). Yes, dammit, *I* would like to know what happened to Tellurith, her two husbands, and the rest of the lot! What a terrific world Sylvia built…

Things change. The original small press incarnation of Juno was highly experimental. Publishers do not always find the right readers. Readers do not always find books they might enjoy. I’m sure your mum told you life wasn’t fair. She was right. Of course, she probably also told you that you never know what tomorrow brings. Both are true. Heck, things even turned out fine for our illustrated orphan Cosette in the end…

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