- Something Wicked Issue 18 (February 2012)
- Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #87 Rajan Khanna et al.
- Lightspeed Magazine Issue 21 John Joseph Adams et al.
- Delia Sherman, The Freedom Maze
- Maureen F. McHugh, After the Apocalypse
- Ginn Hale, Wicked Gentlemen
- Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo
- Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories/ Angelica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial / Kelley Eskridge, Solitaire
Icarus down a wing?
Or: get 50% off Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction using this code:
Icarus
What else is on sale? Check here. You can also re-order the whole site by lowest price.
We also added a few more Lethe Press titles, including Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction (with stories by Georgina Bruce, Jewelle Gomez, Michelle Labbé, Steve Berman, Rachel Swirsky, Ellen Kushner, Zen Cho, Csilla Kleinheincz, Catherine Lundoff, Nora Olsen, N. K. Jemisin, & more):
. . . tales—from new voices as well as award-winning authors—that celebrate the spirit of Russ’s fiction: stories of sorceresses and spectral women, lost daughters and sisters of myth. The transformative power of the written word becomes magic and tests the boundaries of gender, identity, and a woman’s dreams.
Tachyon got off to a great start last week with Eileen Gunn’s Stable Strategies and Others being the most popular.
And we added a new Small Beer title: Three Messages and a Warning—34 newly translated Mexican SF&F stories. Irresistible! And it includes two stories translated by none other than Weightless’s own Michael J. DeLuca! We’ll have a couple of the stories on the Small Beer podcast (and two more will be on Podcastle) and yYou can get a taste of the book here:
Claudia Guillén, The Drop
Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Photophobia
This week it will also be all about new issues of magazines. We’ll post them as soon as we get them. Here are the mags already released:
Welcome: Tachyon Publications!
We’re very happy to announce that we’ve added another great publisher: Tachyon Publications! Tachyon are based in San Francisco and are responsible for all those great anthologies you’ve seen in recent years: Rewired, Steampunk II, that kind of thing, as well as tons of other great books. Most of their ebooks come in epub, mobi, and pdf flavors. So yay, yay, and yay!
We also added a dozen or so new titles from Less Than Three Press—we now have 60+ of their books! Dance in the Dark is the most popular so far.
Two Marshall Moore titles, The Concrete Sky and Black Shapes in a Darkened Room are on sale at 99 cents each as a promotion until his new book, The Infernal Republic, releases in February.
Next week we have sale coming on all Steve Berman’s books and then it will be time for the February magazines to begin dropping—always the busiest time of the month around here.
I am heading (with Kelly) for Australia and New Zealand next month—can’t wait to say hello to Brisbane, Adelaide, Wellington!—which will mean Michael will be holding up 100% of the sky. He’s done it before and will do it again, at least until the end of the world later this year.
Over in Small Beer land, we have a new email newsletter (shiny, tidy!) which will sometimes feature Weightless stuff and the second paper printing of Maureen McHugh’s Philip K. Dick Award finalist After the Apocalypse is now in stock. Fortunately it was never out of stock here. Ha.
Ebooks are apparently going to make up 214% of all book sales by this time next month.* As long as people are reading and people running interesting indie presses, we’re happy.
Ciao!
* Statistic brought to you by some analyst whose mother received a Kindle for Christmas.
SOPA/PIPA Blackout Day
Maybe you saw our big black splash page on your way here?
SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, PIPA is the Protect IP Act. What I and a lot of other people fear the passage of either of these bills by the US Congress will actually do is allow broad and arbitrary censorship of the internet.
I like an open internet very much, and I think all you Weightless patrons probably do too, so for the 24 hours of January 18th, 2012, Weightless is going to pitch in and show that black splash page you probably already saw in hopes that some of you will click the links (or the ones above), learn what’s at stake and do something about it. And if not, I hope you won’t be too bothered by it.
Thanks very much for your time!
–Michael and Gavin
Welcoming Space & Time
Happy New Year!
Our Kick Out the Old Year sale was a huge success—everyone around here was kept on their toes. We also let it run into the new year mostly because at midnight neither Michael nor I wanted to be bothering with the website—which made a bunch of late-night readers happy. Especially those who were gifted ebooks . . .
So now it is 2012 and we are welcoming our first new publisher: Space and Time, a quarterly fantasy, horror, and science fiction magazine first published in 1966 by Gordon Linzner. Space and Time has been continuously published under the same name for 45 years(!). Each issue contains original short fiction and poetry fiction from up-and-coming and established authors, as well as nonfiction articles, interviews, and artwork, and 4-issue subscriptions are only $10.
We added a few new books, Maurice Broaddus’s huge anthology Dark Faith (from Apex) and two debut novels, Jameson Currier’s Where the Rainbow Ends and Ayize Jama-Everett’s The Liminal People, no doubt helped by the first three chapters being up on sbp.com.
Bestselling star editor John Joseph Adams is now the head honcho of Lightspeed Magazine. To celebrate, he’s released a free ebook: Lightspeed Magazine, 2012 Ebook Sampler, which is available in the usual epub and mobi formats.
Magazines are very successful on Weightless and we appreciate you all coming back again and again. These are, er, interesting times for publishers of all stripes and we’re intent on creating a strong, independent space online where readers can find great books, no matter what flavor their ereader. 2012: year of fun, here we come!
December 31st sale: 33% off everything
To celebrate the end of 2011 we’re having a 33% off everything sale.
No, we won’t chop the last third off the book you’ve ordered, for 24 hours (until 11:59 p.m. EST on December 31st, 2011), we’re chopping 1/3 off the price!
The sale will last as long as this here almost-dead-and-gone year and it will be 366 days (2012 being a leap year) until we even think of doing it again.
So: thanks for reading, thanks for buying, and most of all thanks for spreading the word about this tiny and growing D R M-free ebookstore. We appreciate it!
And, of course, Happy New Year!
Give the gift of ebooks!
Coming in under the wire as promised, we now have a working Gift Purchases feature! Running out of shipping time left to get those pesky printed books to your loved ones in time? Give them Weightless Books instead!
It’s easy: just add ebooks to your cart, then check that new box above the Checkout button (see screenshot at right) that says This is a gift order, enter the name and email of the person you’d like to send ebooks to, and check out as usual. The lucky gift recipient gets download links sent to her email address, you get a receipt and the warm fuzzies of generosity.
And in other news, Apex Book Company has a new imprint, Zombie Feed Press, and a new $0.99 title, The Fields by Ty Schwamberger. Might we suggest gifting a copy to the zombie fan on your list?
Rifter 10! Here!
Wow, what a ride! Hundreds of readers are right now reading the final installment of Ginn Hale’s epic, The Rifter. What more can we say? Not much, besides thanking Ginn and everyone at Blind Eye for being so lovely to work with. Michael and I will miss the excitement of Rifter day on the second Tuesday of every month and I hope Ginn’s readers will stick around and try some of the other books around here.
Besides the above, we’re adding three more Aqueduct Press titles, including the extremely popular, Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward.
And now that it’s December, you can pick up the 2011 Working Writer’s Daily Planner ebook for 99c. (There will be a 2012 edition which will appear just before 2012!)
Last week we got an email from Jason Lundberg in Singapore asking if we’d like to carry his new collection, Red Dot Irreal, so here it is!
We also talked more with Tachyon Publications and it looks like we will be adding their excellent titles here soon. Feel free to suggest additions to the site—or to suggest to your favorite publisher that their books might make a good fit with Weightless.
We’re also proud to bring you new ebooks and a subscription from Mike Allen, the indefatigable publisher of Mythic Delirium. We are launching MD’s first electronic subscription as well as two issues, #20, and the latest issue, #25, featuring Catherynne M. Valente, Sonya Taaffe, a translation by Lawrence Schimel, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Darrell Schweitzer, Mary A. Turzillo, and more.
Besides all that we have the first volume in the ground-breaking, genre-bending, boundary-pushing Clockwork Phoenix anthology series, featuring many favorite authors, including: Catherynne M. Valente, David Sandner, John Grant, Cat Rambo, Leah Bobet, Michael J. DeLuca, Laird Barron, Ekaterina Sedia, Cat Sparks, Tanith Lee, Marie Brennan, Jennifer Crow, Vandana Singh, John C. Wright, C.S. MacCath, Joanna Galbraith, Deborah Biancotti and Erin Hoffman.
This is for the Rifter fans
There’s a Goodreads party where they’re getting ready for the release of Book 10: The Holy Bones and an ebook giveaway on the Facebook Rifter Fan Page. They’re giving away one copy each of:
— Kathe Koja’s Gaylactic Spectrum Award winner Under the Poppy (Small Beer Press)
— That Famous Happy End: “Nothing is sweeter than following a story and its characters through all the ups and downs, the trials, the pains, and seeing them finally reach that moment, that day, that place they worked so hard to gain. Be it by way of murder, magic, misunderstanding, mischief, or mayhem, we like to see them suffer. We want the struggle, the grief, the fight. We want to see them angry, confused, hurt, battered, and on the verge of giving up.” Edited by Samantha Derr (Less Than Three Press)
— The Irregulars, an anthology about a” secret international organization operating in cities on every continent. It polices relations between the earthly realm and those beyond this world, enforcing immigration laws, the transfers of magical artifacts, and crimes against humanity” featuring Astrid Amara, Ginn Hale, Josh Lanyon, and Nicole Kimberling—read an interview about the book with Nicole, Astrid, and Josh here).
And here you can read an interview with the main deal herself, Ginn Hale. To win you have to be on The Rifter Fan Page!
New Prime titles, Lightspeed/Fantasy update
Today we had a huge release: Prime Books and Apex Publications are working with us to get all of their titles onto this here tiny mighty site. Prime also dropped the prices on all their titles (apart from Rudy Rucker’s Ware Tetralogy) to just $4.95.
New titles here today from Prime: collections by Sarah Monette and Richard Parks, many anthologies edited by Paula Guran, Heart of Iron by Ekaterina Sedia (Publishers Weekly starred review: “Superbly blends novel of manners, alternate history, and le Carré–style espionage with a dash of superheroes and steampunk.”), and, very excitingly, R. A. MacAvoy’s first book in many years, Death and Resurrection.
Apex Publications tend to run a lot darker, although Lavie Tidhar’s HebrewPunk is proving popular already and Paul Jessup’s Dead Stay Dead looks worth an, er, look(!).
Out there on the internets there is a huge fundraiser for one of our heros: Terri Windling. Please check it out and maybe someone on your holiday list will be lucky, lucky, lucky! (There is so much good stuff! So tempted!)
Also of note: Cheeky Frawg now have a, yes, cheeky new website.
I think all the monthly magazines have gone out. They don’t all go out on the same day: some of them are the first day of the month, some are the first Monday or Tuesday, thank god Michael can keep it straight. Also, with Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine merging into a one, new, bigger Lightspeed, perhaps you might consider subscribing before Jan. 1, 2012, when the price will go up!
Next week we will be bringing on Mike Allen’s Clockwork Phoenix anthologies as well as his long-running magazine, Mythic Delirium. We’re also talking to more magazines about getting them on board.
And, fingers crossed, we may yet have gift certificates available by the time the holidays roll around. If not then, we should have them by Robert Burns Day—well known in poetry circles as the day to not only share a haggis, whisky, and poetry with friends and family, but also the day to go out an buy an ereader in the post-post-holiday electronic stores sale-of-desperation and fill it with ebooks from indie ebooksites. Mmmm . . . veggie haggis.
The Rifter is coming to an end
What a year it’s been! When we talked to Blind Eye Books about this last year, I had no idea how The Rifter would go.
A huge novel about, what, 400,000 words long, delivered in 10 parts? Sure! We can do that, right? But thanks to Ginn Hale and Blind Eye hitting every deadline and Michael building a delivery system, we did. Woohoo! And there’s even a Goodreads group about it (I knew we didn’t need forums on this site!): What Will Happen Next in The Rifter.
That was fun. Maybe we’ll do another some day. Maybe! In the meantime, there will be an online party (with giveaways) to celebrate the release of the final part, His Holy Bones, on December 13. More on that TK as we get closer to that long awaited date.
Last day of sale!
Today is the last day of our ***50% off*** Small Beer ebooks—and 25% off anything else and the Apex (win a Nook Tablet) subscription drive!
Engines = 50% off Livia Llewellyn’s Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors
Small = 50% off all Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House titles!
WELCOME = 25% off ANYTHING!
It’s also the last day of the Apex subscription drive where there are tons of free books on offer as well as a chance at a Nook Tablet.
Next month we have the last installment (there will be wailing, gnashing of teeth, and more!) of Ginn Hale’s The Rifter. There will be an online party—with giveaways—and we will point you toward it.
The sale shook things up and the November Bestseller list (so far) is:
Get your ebooks here—with coupons!
This is a holiday week in the USA and we are celebrating by releasing some coupons into the aether. And why would you bother shopping here? Diversity, baby!
Cheryl Morgan pointed me toward the second episode of Live and Sassy, where Jonathan Strahan and Alisa Krasnostein talk with Alan Beatts of the excellent Borderlands Books in San Francisco and Cheryl goes on to say:
“Assuming that bricks and mortar books stores do vanish, where will we buy books in future. Amazon obviously. ABE books for second hand? Oh, they are owned by Amazon. The Book Depository? Oh, they are owned by Amazon. See where I’m going with this?”
Which is where someone like Wizard’s Tower or us come along! We’re in it to keep the world a more interesting place: we want to make sure that indie books don’t get delisted, recategorized, or made unavailable by one huge retailer.
Besides: we have some excellent coupons for the holidays—these are good through 11:59 p.m. EST on November 30. (Will we have a post-Xmas sale? I don’t know . . . tell me if you’re interested!)
Engines = 50% off Livia Llewellyn’s Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors
Small = 50% off all Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House titles!
WELCOME = 25% off ANYTHING!
Enter the coupon exactly as above once you’ve filled your cart and you will receive your lovely discount.
Cheers!
Michael is interviewed!
on the Small Beer Podcast — and then reads a story (which he translated) for the forthcoming Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic.
2nd to last Rifter, more Aqueduct, new Valente, Nook Tablet
Wow, we are getting down to the wire with the Year of Ginn Hale. We just released the ninth installment, The Iron Temple. Next month when the last one goes out there will be a wailing and a gnashing of teeth!
Also this week, Wyrm Publishing’s latest title, Myths of Origin by New York Times best-seller Catherynne M. Valente which collects four of her early short novels which “deconstruct, and ultimately explode the seminal myths of both East and West, casting them in ways you”ve never read before and may never read again.”
We also have seven new titles from our friends at Aqueduct Press and soon we’re expecting to add a whole passel of titles from Circlet Press—whose Sense and Sensuality: Erotic Fantasies in the World of Jane Austen is proving very popular.
And don’t forget the Apex Magazine subscription drive: besides the discount on the annual subscription, the 2 free books, and the prize drawings for more books, they just upgraded the top prize: if they reach 200 new subscriptions Apex will award one random subscriber a new and shiny B&N Nook Tablet.
Apex subscription drive
Western MA happens to be buried under 20+ inches of snow this November morning. Though Weightless floats above the mess, its lowly supporters under the drifts are operating at half-capacity. There may be a more elaborate/official announcement when the power comes back on, but for now:
November is Apex Magazine Subscription Drive month! Subscriptions are 25% off the regular price of $19.95, and at the end of the month, each new subscriber will recieve two free eBooks, Descended from Darkness Vol 1 AND Descended from Darkness Vol 2, the anthologies that gathered the first two years of Apex Magazine.
Ten random subscribers will also win a trade paperback of Apex’s Stoker Award-nominated anthology DARK FAITH (featuring Jay Lake, Catherynne M. Valente, Mary Robinette Kowal, Brian Keene, Lavie Tidhar, Ekaterina Sedia, Tom Piccirilli, Alethea Kontis, and 23 others!).
And! If they reach 200 new subscriptions (this will include readers who add 12 months to their current subscription and new subscribers), Apex will award one random subscriber a . . .
. . . new and shiny Barnes & Noble Nook Color Nook Tablet!
And as if all that wasn’t enough… we’re welcoming two new presses this week! Circlet Press starts off with three titles of speculative erotica edited by J. Blackmore, and Twelfth Planet Press with the first two volumes of their Twelve Planets novel series (which they promise will be available as a single subscription starting with the third volume), and a pawn-shaped poem from Karen Joy Fowler (!).
Shakespeare who?
Look: there’s a movie about Shakespeare! And, not at all accidentally, we have a new book about a possible Shakespearean poem! And, at least until the movie’s been out a few days, it’s only a buck! After that, prices rise!
Also this week: tons of new books from Lethe Press and Chelsea Station Editions. Of note, The Temperamentals and The Gay Man’s Guide to Timeless Manners and Proper Etiquette have not been produced in other ebook formats other than pdfs, and these pdfs are not for sale anywhere else!