because every Bond movie (or novel) needs a Bond-sized plot device, doesn't it?īy this time we were into late October 2005. Which then left me pondering what to write. We decided to auction the new book, along with paperback rights to 'The Atrocity Archives', and ended up cutting a deal whereby Golden Gryphon would publish 'The Jennifer Morgue' in hardcover while Ace rolled 'The Atrocity Archives' in trade paperback, and eventually in mass market. It would have to be the Movie Bond franchise, for most people these days don't grow up on the original Ian Fleming novels (the way I did) the humour would come from the incongruity of Bob Howard in James Bond's shoes. She proposed a sequel, and James Bond was so obvious that I don't think I even considered any alternatives. This success coincided with a French publisher making an offer for translation rights to 'The Atrocity Archives', which in turn got my agent's attention. (And the performance anxiety that had been haunting me for years-'I'm not a real writer, I'm just winging this'-went away for a while.)īut anyway. I don't know if that's what did the trick, or if there were additional home-mover effects from the Worldcon in 2005 being held in Glasgow (thus bringing more British voters in than normal) but at the end of August that year I became the dazed and surprised owner of a very shiny trophy.

GG had only sold around 3000 copies of the book the other novellas on the shortlist had all appeared in magazines or anthologies with four to ten times the number of copies sold! After some hurried email consultation, Gary and Marty at GG agreed to let me put the whole novella on the web, to make it more readily available to the Hugo voters. Then, to everyone's surprise, the additional novella I wrote for the book ('The Concrete Jungle') made the shortlist for the Hugo award in 2005. It went gold, going into reprint and becoming their second-best selling title at the time.

The novel my agent initially thought was unsaleable sold to Golden Gryphon, a small but respectable Lovecraftian publisher in the United States.

In the case of 'The Jennifer Morgue', the first seed was the surprising success of 'The Atrocity Archives'.

The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross