Dorchester Publishing is tweaking its publishing program; beginning later this year the company will add thriller and teen fiction lines to its romance, western and horror series. Beginning in September, Dorchester will publish one mass market thriller and one teen fiction title per month.
Alicia Condon, Dorchester editorial director, said the company decided to enter the teen fiction segment with the Smooch imprint (see p. 87) because of indications that bookstores were giving more space to the genre. "With our background in romance, we thought a line for girls was the way to go," Condon said. She added that if Smooch is successful, Dorchester is prepared to increase the number of titles it publishes under the imprint and may consider doing trade paperbacks.
Don D'Auria, who oversees the company's horror line, will head the expanded thriller program. Condon said Dorchester has been doing well with the four thrillers it was releasing annually and decided to expand the program "to make sure we weren't missing out" on additional sales. The Hour Before Dark will kick off the program.
To accommodate the additional titles and stay at its usual schedule of 15 titles per month, Dorchester is reducing the number of adult romances it publishes every month from four to three. Condon said that after taking the top two titles from its list, most major accounts were "cherry picking" from the rest of the list, making it harder to get placement for all of the company's romance books.
The success of Dorchester's year-old sales force was a contributing factor in the decision to add two new lines. The publisher formed its own sales unit last May after its former distributor, the Hearst division COMAG, abandoned the book market (News, May 20, 2002). Tim De Young, senior v-p for sales and marketing, said he has been "very pleased" with the operation, particularly its success in entering the independent bookstore market. Because COMAG had called only on the ID market, Dorchester had had no presence at independent stores. The creation of the sales team has also solidified Dorchester's relationship with wholesalers, De Young said.
