With demand for mass market paperbacks withering, Berkley/NAL, the mass market paperback division of Penguin, will launch a new e-book imprint in January that will operate much like a mass market paperback publisher. InterMix will focus on titles in traditional mass market genres—women’s fiction, romance, mystery/thriller and science fiction/fantasy—and will release a mix of reprints and titles from new authors.
For its January launch, InterMix will publish 11 Nora Roberts’s titles for the first time as e-books. The titles, which originally had been published by Silhouette, will be priced at a mass-market like $6.99. In February, InterMix will bring back to life an old mass market line, Signet Regency, releasing six books as e-books for the first time. Three additional Regency-set romances will be released each month throughout 2012. While Berkley/NAL will publish new authors under the InterMix imprint, no new authors were announced. It also wasn’t clear how many titles InterMix will release over the course of 2012. Additional titles signed for 2012 are seven more Roberts’s titles and four Jayne Ann Krentz-writing-as-Jayne Castle novels in the Guinevere Jones series.
Berkley said that all InterMix titles will be completely repackaged with new cover art and interior designs as well as “creative marketing, publicity, and advertising campaigns.” Leslie Gelbman, president of Berkley Publishing, said she sees InterMix as “an extension of what we’ve been doing, providing a way for original voices to reach readers.” Berkley/NAL, Gelbman stressed, is “fully committed” to its print program and noted that some of InterMix’s original e-book authors could be republished in any or the three print formats.
