Angry Robot’s goal is to be a genuinely global  genre imprint, and when we were lucky enough to sign up the wonderful Kaaron Warren for her first three novels we knew we’d partially fulfilled our aim.

An Australian by upbringing, Kaaron now resides in Fiji, which is a long, loooong way from the London/Nottingham bases of the Robot.

Today, the incredible Slights is launching in Fiji, and they’re putting on quite a show for what I confidently predict will be the most wonderfully extreme horror novel not only in Fiji this year, but anywhere.

If you’re in Fiji, you won’t be able to miss the noise about the book – and you can get your copy from the USP Bookshop run by the wonderful Armin Kullack.

Where this is going to go I can’t exactly tell, but in our all-round embrace of the social media age (ie, er, this blog), I thought the Robot gang should be able to tweet to the world whenever and however we want to.

So we have a Twitter account, and may even use it over the months and years ahead. Follow us, if you do such a thing, and we promise to follow you back…

Even if we don’t, I got a computer-generated thank you from Barack Obama yesterday for all my help getting him elected … really, he shouldn’t have!

I’ve also discovered (a year after the rest of the world), that Stephen Fry is the most fanatic twitterer in the universe. Seriously, he should write books, make TV series, write newspaper columns, appear on the radio and write/direct films or something.

Oh.

After posting last week on our C.E.O’s upcoming speech at Kings College London, it’s with a sense of renewed excitement I can report back on what she said:

She described the linear model of a publisher producing books to be ultimately consumed by a retailer as “becoming circular”. Readers are now playing a greater part in the publishing process, interacting with one another, the authors and producing content themselves. “We need to have two models to deal with that therefore – what we do now, adding value by selecting, nuturing, marketing and finally selling content to the consumer – in whatever form they demand,” she said. “And a second model whereby we create value in the experiences around that content and facilitate the dialogue between writers and readers.”

Vicky’s argument is about how we reach consumers as a publisher, and how we change our operational model as a business underneath it to meet those needs – as a corporate guy, that gets my juices flowing…

Despite this, she said that digitisation offered new openings for publishers. “The new opportunities this throws up are an end to piles of unwanted inventory, no more returns (book publishing remains one of the few remaining sale or return businesses), no more out of print titles and more value attached to the “long tail” of obscure or niche titles,” she said.

There’s lots of scope for change in the world of SF&F publishing – lots of new things to do, lots of new ways of operating.

But when it comes to the big decisions, basically there’s only two things you can do in business (and publishing is a business, for better or worse) - diversify or rationalise. Angry Robot is a product of a decision to diversify – creating a parallel space to HarperCollins‘ Voyager imprint, and the individual publishing of Tolkien, in which to work with different publishing and business models.

And if we think diversification is the way forward, that doesn’t mean rationalising isn’t the right way either. So it was no surprise really to see that Hachette in the US have pulled Orbit and the graphic novel/manga imprint Yen Press into one operation under the overall Orbit brand.

It makes sense – Orbit goes from strength to strength, they do fantastic things for readers and the business as a whole.

Rationalising another imprint under their brand that does different media gives them a platform to go in another direction: diversification under a single brand umbrella, if you like.

So basically, good luck guys!

I love Newgrounds, the user-generated casual gaming and viral site – it’s a smart business, and finds a whole bunch of great content. Not least this super-dumb, super-fun Futurama-goes-Death-Wish vignette. Check it out.