- Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and PM Press are working with Jef Smith of Think Galactic to put together a Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology.
- The Baffler magazine is relaunching—with fiction from Kim Stanley Robinson, Chris N. Brown, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (translated by Anna Summers) and tons of smart nonfiction. I loved—and was successfully baffled by—The Baffler in its previous incarnations so I am bouncing with happiness that it is returning.
- John Joseph Adams, editor of Lightspeed and all those huge anthologies, is going to edit a horror magazine! Back Nightmare Magazine and get ahead of the curve.
- Ginn Hale, Josh Lanyon, Astrid Amara, Nicole Kimberling, Irregulars
- Kickstarter prodigy, Fireside Magazine
- Melissa Scott, Lisa A. Barnett, Point of Hopes: A Novel of Astreiant
- Nancy Kress, Fountain of Age: Stories
- Lightspeed Magazine subscription
- Ginn Hale, Josh Lanyon, Astrid Amara, Nicole Kimberling, Irregulars
- Kickstarter prodigy, Fireside Magazine
- Melissa Scott, Lisa A. Barnett, Point of Hopes: A Novel of Astreiant
- Nancy Kress, Fountain of Age: Stories
- Lightspeed Magazine subscription
- PayPal transactions cannot be completed
- Something Wicked Issue 18 (February 2012)
- Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #87 Rajan Khanna et al.
- Lightspeed Magazine Issue 21 John Joseph Adams et al.
Electronical Velocipede
Yay and verily we can at last recommend that ye get on your electronical bike—aka your Electric Velocipede—and take a quick spin through some back issues. The excellent John Klima just sent us a couple of double issues: 15/16, 17/18, and a couple of singletons—19 and 20—as well as the latest ish, No. 23. Check out Thom Davidsohn’s excellent cover art for each issue here. Electric Velocipede has always been a really visual mag so I hope you enjoy the design as well as the contents.
For fans of DRM-free stuff (and who isn’t? Did you see O’Reilly sold 22K ebooks on DRM-free day? Awesome!), here’s a link to Defective by Design’s page of DRM-free suggestions.
We also added more Wildside Press titles as well as Rebecca Ore’s Becoming Alien trilogy, newly released as ebooks by Aqueduct Press. (They have a bunch of books I need to pick up, can’t decide whether to get print or ebook. Ha!)
Thaddeus suggested we add Night Shade Books, so we’ll give them a shout and see what they say. Night Shade are another press with a bunch of books I need to pick up! Wish I were going to WisCon where I’d be able to get them from some fave booksellers in the dealer’s room. Something I hope to do for years, no matter how popular ebooks—and this lovely site—become.
Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology TK. In the meantime, these:
Wow! Our International Anti-DRM Day 1/2 day sale was super popular. Just shows that there is a huge market for DRM-free books, especially if the price is low low low. We sold hundreds of books and I hope took the DRM-free word out to a whole new audience. Thanks as ever for spreading the word about Weightless.
Today we sent out the latest issue of N. Carolina-based Bull Spec as well as posting a triplet of fascinating Lethe Press books, including Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on Their Muses. We also added a couple more Wildside megapacks—they are just flying out of here. They’re almost free, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise.
Other books that are doing well: another of Lethe’s recent titles, Point of Hopes: A Novel of Astreiant by Melissa Scott & Lisa Barnett and Andrea Hairston’s Tiptree Award winner, Redwood and Wildfire.
We’re always happy to hear from you—reviews are welcome in the comments—about new publishers you’d like us to add or new features.
And, did you see these excellent Kickstarter projects?
Every day is an International Day Against DRM
Hey, it’s . . .
International Day Against DRM!
Which, as you know, Bob, is every day at Weightless.
So we’re jumping on the bandwagon (thanks for the idea to the great peeps at Angry Robot!) and—for today only—we’re offering 50% off all ebooks in the store. Use this coupon:
DRMFREE
once you’ve added all the books to your cart. Here’s our April bestsellers to start with:
DRM? Pah! Plus: Shimmer, Locus, Apex, LS, & much more
DRM-free ebooks are in the air (as it were) with MacMillan announcing that all Tor books will be DRM-free by July of this year. We’ve always thought that DRM-free ebooks are the only way to go as they’re the most reader friendly so we’re super happy to see Tor make this great choice. Yay! Well done to everyone involved! We’ll talk to Tor and see if we can get their titles up here once they’re available.
New this month to Weightless is Shimmer magazine. We have their current issue, #14, available in (yes, DRM-free, ok, ok, I’ll stop) pdf, epub, and mobi, and will be adding pdfs of back issues in coming months. (Ping us if you have a fave issue you’d liked added and we’ll see if we can get those sooner.) I’ve always enjoyed the physical Shimmer—it’s well designed and feels great in the hand—and am looking forward to seeing how it translates into an ebook.
We just posted the May issues of Locus (interviews with Seanan McGuire and Nick Mamatas, reviews galore), Apex (fiction by Rachel Swirsky, Nnedi Okorafor, et al), and Lightspeed (fiction from Linda Nagata, C. C. Finlay, Nicola Griffith, Catherynne M. Valente, Kage Baker et al, excerpts from new novels by Paolo Bacigalupi and Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as interviews with Vernor Vinge and Michael Chabon). New issues from Clarkesworld and Beneath Ceaseless Skies will also go up in the next couple of days.
I was talking to a friend who publishes a quarterly magazine recently—naming no names in case it doesn’t work out—and it looks like we may have a nice announcement about that in the works. We’re always happy to add new magazines and indie publishers. We hope to add NYRSF soon.
Elsewhere on the site, Wildside are selling a lot of those megapacks and Aqueduct have promised us more ebooks very soon—although like many people we know they are busy, busy with WisCon prep. So sorry we won’t be there this year. Hope to get back soon. We will have a table (courtesy of David J. Schwartz) and will co-sponsor the Genderfloomp dance.
Since we’re now well into the second quarter of the year, we dropped the price of A Working Writer’s Daily Planner from $3.99 to $2.99 and the Almanac edition from $4.99 to $3.99.
April Bestsellers
In sadder news, we’re sorry to say Something Wicked announced they are officially stopping their monthly publication schedule. We refunded all subscribers and are happy to point readers to their website where they will continue to post individual stories, reviews, and interviews. Back issues are available here—and with luck more back issues will be added as spring goes on. It was a brave run and we wish Joe and Vianne the best of luck with future projects.
These continue to be interesting times in ebook land with Microsoft and bn.com teaming up together, Google giving everyone the boot (boo), Tor going DRM-free and so on. Weightless exists so that indie publishers and readers could find one another. Thanks for reading, for supporting indie publishing, and for spreading the word, it’s much appreciated! We’re always happy to hear from readers and encourage reviews and comments.
That’s it. Happy May Day!
We are bees
We’ve been busy bees here at Weightless—which immediately distracted me into wondering whether anyone had ever taken any bees into space: yes! (That’s not a very exciting video, maybe there’s better one somewhere. I’ll add that to the to do list.)
Last week we added 100+ from our friends at PM Press including books by Cory Doctorow, Ursula K. Le Guin (we have big Small Beer Press news about Le Guin TK soon), Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as books of Banksy’s art, a collection of Rad Dad, and much more. Now we even have some cookbooks!
And then today we added 100+ titles from Wildside Press as well as new books from Prime (lots of John Shirley and Robots and Witches) and Lethe Press (Point of Hopes: A Novel of Astreiant by Melissa Scott & Lisa A Barnett looks interesting).
Maybe the biggest news for many of our readers is the release of the first issue of Fireside Magazine. Fireside was a Kickstarter project and as a launch-day promotion, Wired.com’s Underwire blog is running Tobias’ story, Press Enter to Execute, for free today. It’s been fascinating to see a new magazine launched with such great support and I’m going to enjoy following the story of Fireside as well as reading the mag itself.
Check out Toby’s story, come back and subscribe: it’s a steal at only $8 for 4 issues.
Bzz. Bzz.
Remember, Paypal is down April 19th
Paypal will be down on Thursday the 19th of April between 9:00 PM PDT (Apr 20, 5:00 AM BST) and April 19, 11:00 PM PDT (Apr 20, 7:00 AM BST):
Fireside, PM, Wildside
Next week’s going to be a big week here: we’re going to be adding 100+ titles from the fab West Coast publisher PM Press. You might know them from their novella+ books they’ve published by Ursula K. Le Guin, Cory Doctorow, and more, but they publish tons more. Last Christmas I gave someone Pistoleros!: The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg — how can you wrong with the real story of a Glasgow boy dropped by chance into Barcelona’s revolutionary underworld at end of the Great War—and now writing his memoirs as fast as he can because he fears he’s next on the assassin’s list? They have tons of great books on their list and we’re proud to be bringing them to you, as ever!, DRM-free.
Over the next week or two we’ll be adding something like 500(!) Wildside Press titles. A lot of them are titles that it is awesome that they are in available as ebooks. More on those as we get them online. (For publishers only: we’re now working with Ingram CoreSource, so we can now get your titles from them. Ooh!)
And: we just added a new magazine, Fireside, which will launch on April 17th.
I first heard of Fireside’s Kickstarter campaign on a blog (Genreville?) and figured it would be worth supporting and I was happy to be one of 254 backers who pledged $7,000+ to get the first issue out the door. Of course once there was one issue . . . there had to be another, so now we are also selling subscriptions (which only seem to be $8 for 4 issues, which is 50% off the issue price, just saying . . . ).
While I’ve been slowly writing this post Fireside has been outselling Irregulars. Will it be able to keep up the pace? It’s a challenge!
Anyway, it’s the weekend (well, in publishing Friday afternoon = the weekend) so I hope y’all have something good to read!
New Icarus, Nancy Kress, J. M. McDermott, Weird Tales
Everyone but everyone is reading Irregulars right now. How about you? (I know what our #1 March bestseller is going to be!)
We have a couple of interesting new books this week that hit a lot of our readers’ interests: sf, glbt sf&f, & weird stuff. While I can’t guarantee the weirdness quotient will be high enough for you, there’s a good chance it will be in J. M. McDermott‘s new collection of stories: Disintegration Visions. As Apex Book Co. puts it:
“‘Sometimes it’s not what you say, but how you say it.’ These are the words of Crawford Award-nominated fantasy author J.M. McDermott (Last Dragon and Never Knew Another). McDermott says it with aliens, magical frogs, and the Berlin wall.”
SF&F readers of all stripes can pick up the latest issue of Icarus which features Scot D. Ryersson, James Bennett, Alex Jeffers, Warren Rochelle, and Steve Berman. “Plus all our usual sweets—reviews, gossip, and Tom Cardamone’s column on forgotten gay books.” Icarus is quarterly and you can subscribe here.
Nancy Kress’s latest collection Fountain of Age comes out from Small Beer Press in a couple of weeks. We have an exclusive on the ebook until then. You can also go ahead and listen to two of the stories “End Game” and “The Kindness of Strangers” and read the awesome caper (and Nebula Award winning) title story here. There will be another story on the Small Beer podcast next month.
In other Small Beer news, we dropped the price of Lydia Millet’s The Fires Beneath the Sea to $6.99—the paperback edition comes out next week and we have the second novel in the series, The Shimmers in the Night coming out in July. (Things get dark!)
And the very first Big Mouth House title is about to come out in paperback: Joan Aiken’s The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories. That’s a book we’re very proud to have published. We still get emails from people telling us how happy they are to have it. (Which is how we felt when we were working on it and when we published it, too.)
Last week we added the second Clockwork Phoenix anthology with critically-acclaimed and award-nominated stories by Claude Lalumière, Leah Bobet, Marie Brennan, Ian McHugh, Ann Leckie, Mary Robinette Kowal, Saladin Ahmed, Tanith Lee, Joanna Galbraith, Catherynne M. Valente, Forrest Aguirre, Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer, Kelly Barnhill, Barbara Krasnoff and Steve Rasnic Tem (quite a few faves in there) as well as the latest issue of that stalwart of the field, Weird Tales. Issue #359 (!) is the last to be edited by Ann VanderMeer and includes an interview with Laird Barron and stories by Stephen Graham Jones, Evan J. Peterson, Tom Underberg, Leena Likitalo, Joel Lane, and Conrad Williams and more.
And that’s it for this week. Next week: magazines! Locus, Lightspeed, Apex, Clarkesworld, and many more. After talking to David Hartwell, Alex Donald, and Kevin Maroney at ICFA, it looks like we’ll be adding The New York Review of Science Fiction quite soon. The more the merrier!
I also backed a recent Kickstarter (I love Kickstarter—I think we found a potential Small Beer project for it) by the people at Logoswitch which might mean we have a new logo for Weightless. They’re doing 50 logos in 50 days (eek!) so we’ll see what happens. You never know!
Keep in touch.
DRM-free non-hostage ebooks
Yep, that’s us. While some superpowered gorilla WalMartian internet superstore is out there holding books hostage and trying to push bigger and bigger discounts on its suppliers, we are selling books. I like it! Tachyon Publications (and hundred of other publishers) are in the unhappy position of having the buy button disappear on their books on Amazon. The good news for Tachyon: their books are still available on Indiebound, bn.com, Google, and of course, here!
Which is good news if you are jonesing after the latest Tim Powers novel, Hide Me Among the Graves, but want to check out the sort of related The Stress of Her Regard first. Or if you want to get stuck into Booklife, Stable Strategies, or call up The Bible Repairman, you can.
This here hostage-taking of buy buttons is one of the reasons Weightless exists. The free market says Amazon can do what they want to their suppliers . . . and their suppliers can do what they want, too.
Which means we can make the books available here, here, here, and not worry if they take them away there, there, there. La de da. Happy Monday!
Crossed Genres, BCS Science-Fantasy
This week we’re pleased to add five new titles from the excellent Crossed Genres, until recently a genre-juxtaposing online magazine, now a small press publisher of genre-juxtaposing anthologies like Subversion and Fat Girl in a Strange Land.
March 2012 is Science Fantasy Month at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Issue #90, out today, features stories and interviews from Chris Wilrich and Anne Ivy, and rumor has it there will be some themed book giveaways as well.
Still to come this month, new issues of Something Wicked and Apex, even more science fantasy, and hopefully lots of other interesting stuff. Plus, Gavin returns from the night side with tales of reverse-draining toilets.
Two by Tenea
Just in case you missed it, this week I’m happy to spotlight two new titles from up and coming author Tenea D. Johnson:
Smoketown is published by our friends at Blind Eye Books (yes, the publisher of Ginn Hale, just saying). As they say, “Told through their interlocking stories, Smoketown delves into the invisible connections that rival magic, and the copst of redemption.”
R/evolution is Tenea’s latest book and Jeff Ford says:
“The history of class struggle and racial injustice collide with the future of biotechnology in a tale that offers a prescient view of where America may be headed. It’s immediately engrossing and moves like a rocket.”
Next week we have a ton of new titles from Less Than Three and we’re working with another international magazine to see if we can add them.
Cheers!
Infinity Plus Singles, e-Locus Is a Hit
This week we have ten new short story singles from UK publisher Infinity Plus, all at the low low price of 99 cents! These are part of a numbered series, including some brand new stories and some classics. Hopefully we’ll have more of them in the not-too-distant future.
Meanwhile, electronic issues of Locus, the Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field have been selling like gangbusters since we added them last week. Just seven days and they’re already our bestseller for the month (!), thanks in no small part, no doubt, to a boingboinging.
In other news, Gavin is away in Oz for the next month, which leaves me, Michael, to do things like add new titles and write updates.
Which allows me to share with you the following (hopefully) helpful troubleshooting hint: Locus ebook files are big, upwards of 15 megabytes, due to the array of wonderful color photos and book ads which are part of what make each issue great. Unfortunately this is a little too big for some email servers to handle, including ours. This means the best way to get them onto your ereader is by downloading the files to your computer and loading them via a cable rather than trying to send them wirelessly.
Welcoming Locus Magazine
Weightless Books is very happy to announce that they have added the digital edition of Locus Magazine, “The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field.”
Subscriptions and individual issues are available as well as back issues going back to January 2011.
As with all Weightless Books titles, Locus is available DRM-free. Readers can choose either pdf, epub, or mobi format.
Locus is a monthly magazine which has covered the science fiction and fantasy field since 1968. Locus publishes news of the science fiction publishing field with extensive reviews and listings of new science fiction books and magazines. The magazine is published from Oakland, California. It was co-founded, published, and edited by Charles N. Brown until his death in 2009; the current editor-in-chief is Liza Groen Trombi.
The latest issue is the February 2012 issue which features:
— the annual Year in Review essays
— the Locus 2011 Recommended Reading List
— an interview with Joe Haldeman
— reviews of new books by Tim Powers, Ted Kosmatka, William Gibson, Catherynne M. Valente, Sarah Monette, Matthew Hughes, Cory Doctorow, and more.
Icarus down a wing?
Or: get 50% off Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction using this code:
Icarus
Updated: this code is now fixed! (Sorry, I broke it.) Reader who went ahead and paid the full price have been refunded and we have
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