Out in the real world, I’m straddled between last weekend’s Balticon and next weekend’s StokerCon, but here on the Eating the Fantastic timeline, I’m still back attending Eastercon. So please join me in Birmingham and take your seat at the table for my dinner with John Jarrold.

Jarrold ran three science fiction and fantasy imprints in the UK since 1988, and over the years worked at Orbit Books, Macdonald Futura (now Little, Brown UK), Legend Books, Random House UK, Simon & Schuster, and others. Starting in 2002, he began acting as a script doctor for agents and new authors, and did freelance editing for publishers including Hodder & Stoughton, Random House, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Transworld, Simon & Schuster, Orion/Gollancz, Constable & Robinson, and Time Warner. In 2004 he launched the John Jarrold Literary Agency, which he still runs today.

I could provide a list of the authors he’s worked with over the years, but it would make for a shorter list if I told you who he hasn’t worked with.

We discussed his first Eastercon 53 years ago, his “obsessive” love for J. R. R. Tolkien, the best commercial deal he ever did, how to dispassionately judge the writing of people you already know, his editorial encounter with Michael Caine, the bidding war over George R. R. Martin’s  A Game of Thrones, how he learned to write editorial revision letters writers would understand, the ways in which working with authors of science fiction is different than in the wider world of publishing, when it’s time for an author to reinvent themselves under a pseudonym, splitting one’s time between the business and artistic sides of publishing, what he means when he says getting published “is the jam on the bread, it’s not the bread,” the sorts of submissions he’s seeing too much and too little of at his agency, plus much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Brightsmith on the Water — (more…)