Dum de Dum
Tags: site update blatherings, Tansy Rayner Roberts
Tomorrow: new books from Prime and FableCroft, today, well, definitely inside brewing.* We updated the Slightly Weighty links on the left hand side to include links to the mailing list (i.e. where to sign up to get the weekly sale email) and a link to dollar ebooks (i.e. 99 cent ebooks) as we don’t want readers to miss when books such as Splashdance Silver by Tansy Rayner Roberts go on sale. (It’s 99 cents to celebrate the third book, Ink Black Magic, coming out tomorrow.)
Anyway, here’s an exciting replica of the menu with exciting additions:
What I Didn’t See + Unicorns! Pegasus! Kittens!
Tags: Fairy Tale Review, free ebooks, Ginn Hale, Karen Joy Fowler, site update blatheringsToday we’re very happy to release the ebook of Karen Joy Fowler’s awesome new collection What I Didn’t See and Other Stories. Karen’s stories are some of the best you’ll read in any genre: science fiction, fiction, historical, alternate history, fantasy. . . . Two of the stories here received Nebula Awards and “The Pelican Bar” received the Shirley Jackson Award. It’s a subtle and stunning collection and I think this might be the first site the ebook is available on (I’m probably wrong!). Hope you enjoy it!
We’ve been working away on a few things trying to see how we can bring lots of presses on without us having to put in more than the occasional afternoon every three or four weeks (come on, it’s publishing, we’ve got tea to sip and deep obscure novels to flash around coffeeshops).
And: we’ve been talking to Blind Eye Books about making 2011 the Year of Ginn Hale and being able to publish something new every month. It will be gobsmacking! All will be revealed later this fall. It will be huge! A rift will form in space time! (At least in yours and ours!)
The new Red Issue of Fairy Tale Review is coming soon. We also need to add Michael’s (et al) Homeless Moon chapbooks. There are more magazines to bring on board. Still working on electronic subscriptions—anyone who has a good fix for this, feel free to email us!
I remembered a story that Kelly and I published a while ago, “Sea, Ship, Mountain, Sky” in Altair, that I doubt will ever end up in any book (besides The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror) so we’ll probably put it up here as an ebook. That will be an interesting experiment to see if we should do more of that sort of thing. What do you think the price should be?
In the meantime there are Unicorns! Pegasus! Kittens! What does it mean? I have no idea! But you should go here (check out this url: http://unicornpegasuskitten.com!) and download the DRM-free completely free ebook with stories from Wil Wheaton, John Scalzi, Cat Valente, Rachel Swirsky, and many others. The book is free but please consider making a donation as it’s a fundraiser for the benefit of the Michigan/Indiana affiliate of the Lupus Alliance of America. You can also donate and get a tax receipt for it here on Gretchen Schafer’s donation page.
Micropayments
Tags: at last, micropayments, Paypal, site update blatheringsWe’re switching this website over to Paypal’s new micropayments system which will cut fees on our side and I hope make payments easier for readers. It has some kind of buy-now-pay-later option which looks useful.
While the switch should go smoothly, I sort of expect it will mess things up. Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience and do email me at weightlessbooks @ gmail.com if you have any problems. Paypal says it can take up to 2 days to sort this out—if that’s “business days” that may mean Monday. Hope not!
When I googled the PayPal Micropayments (and should I worry that I had to sign up through Paypal labs—is this some experiment that will die once it gets out of the lab and online?) one of the sites talked about the emotional attachment of gamers to digital objects. Do ebook readers feel the same way? (And by “readers” I mean people, not the Nook, iPad, Kindle, Sony, etc.) I read a fair amount of news, blogs, fiction, manuscripts, etc., electronically but so far I’m not feeling that love for most of these digital objects. You?
ETA: Wow! Those PayPal labs people are fast! 2 days? Schmoo Days! It’s done. Done! (Now if only we could get them to work on this site!)
Feral Machines, updates
Tags: Feral Machines, Ginn Hale, LCRW 22, site update blatherings, TK TK TK, Wicked GentlemenI know that in the lonnggg years since Wicked Gentlemen came out, a lot of readers have been waiting for Ginn Hale‘s new book. The good news is that her huge new novel, Lord of the White Hell comes out in print next week—although it’s so big it’s a two-parter, and the second part comes out in September. It won’t be out as an ebook for a while but for the nonce we have the next best thing: an exclusive ebook of her novella Feral Machines from the Tangle anthology.
This week sharp-eyed readers might have noticed some updates around here. A neat one is the addition of Google Previews: this means that any book on Weightless (or at least for now, those with ISBNs) that’s also in the massive Googleplex database—such as Hiding Out or Redemption in Indigo—can now be previewed on the site. Yay for excerpts and browsing!
We tidied up the sidebar so that you can instantly get results for authors/titles/&c. and added a featured book at the top—starting things off with that bestselling Wicked Gentlemen seemed like a good idea. We also have a “lifetime” bestseller list running in the sidebar. That should change over time into a weekly list, but for now it’s a note on the overall bestsellers on the site. Sort of wacky to see that LCRW 22 is on there. But, hey, great ish of a great zine.
Next week, no promises, but we hope to have Fairy Tale Review for you. It’s a beautiful journal full of excellent stories and art—there may even be a free issue you can check out first. And soon we’ll have the new Daily Planner 2011 and Karen Joy Fowler’s awesome collection of stories, What I Didn’t See (get the print book here). But those are all the future: for now, enjoy Feral Machines!