Thanks!

Please see our latest blog post, which will hopefully answer your questions in further detail, but we do like historical fiction and if it’s a time period that isn’t covered much, we’d be interested in seeing it, but we’d like our launch books to be science fiction/fantasy rather than realistic.

Katharina, it depends. As we said above, most fantasy is already based on Western European culture, and so we’re not looking for stories that do what other books are already doing well. Eastern Europe, however, might be interesting. There is a confluence of cultures in certain areas of Eastern Europe (Turkish influences, Muslim influences) that is interesting. With Eastern Europe, I’d take it on a case-by-case basis. Something set in western Russia, for example, might be more Western than something set in Siberia. Something set in (or inspired by) the former Czech Republics or Albania would be really interesting, I think, because these are cultures that we don’t see written about very often–and the characters featured there could also be people of color, depending on the character you choose. Gypsy culture might be another interesting culture, if it’s handled in a way that doesn’t resort to stereotypes.

However, if the race of the main character isn’t mentioned, yet the race of other characters is, you are then in the position where the reader assumes the “default” skin color is white. See this post by Bookavore about that: http://bookavore.com/2009/11/30/in-which-i-get-frustrated-and-plead-with-authors/. This is not what we’re looking for.