- Next February we will publish Juan Martinez’s debut Best Worst American. It is great, well, obviously. Curious? Read a story:
“Domokun in Fremont” (TriQuarterly)
“The Spooky Japanese Girl is There for You” (McSweeney’s)
“The Coca-Cola Executive in the Zapatoca Outhouse” (Conjunctions) - Today is publication day for The Winged Histories, Sofia Samatar’s second novel. It is immersive, overwhelming, beautiful. If you are piloting a plane and have a few minutes to read, do not pick this book!
Also, if you’re in LA or going to the AWP conference, come join us at a reading. - We just added epub and mobi editions of Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller:Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.
Storyteller came out in 2005 and won both the Hugo and Locus awards! - Locus, May 2013
- Lord of the White Hell Book One & Book Two, Ginn Hale
- Ginn Hale et al, Irregulars
New York Review of Science Fiction #296
Clarkesworld Magazine – Issue 80
A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar
- Electric Velocipede, issue 26
- At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson
- Lightspeed (which seems to get bigger every month! Fiction by Kelsey Ann Barrett, John Langan, Maggie Clark, and Simon McCaffery; reprints by Eileen Gunn, George R. R. Martin, Seanan McGuire, and Tim Pratt; the second, final part of Jeffrey Ford’s The Cosmology of the Wider World; and excerpts from David Brin’s Existence and N. K. Jemisin’s The Killing Moon.)
- Clarkesworld (stories by Aliette de Bodard, An Owomoyela, E. Catherine Tobler and an Another Word column by Daniel Abraham).
- Apex (fiction by Brit Mandelo, Ian Nichols, and Geoff Ryman)
Locus (Featuring interviews with the excellent Genevieve Valentine and William F. Nolan as well as tons of news and reviews)
Small Beer Humble Bundle
Tags: Humble Bundle, Small Beer PressThere are less than two days left on the Small Beer Humble Bundle — get 21 ebooks for $15 or more . . . And please consider adding Franciscan Children’s under the Choose Your Own Charity, we thank you very much!
SBP Ebook Updates
Tags: ebook nookery, Juan Martinez, Kate Wilhelm, Small Beer Press, Sofia SamatarToday we 1) post a new forthcoming ebook, 2) publish a(n e)book, and 3) update a 10-year-old ebook!
Travel Light on sale
Tags: Desirina Boskovich, Lightspeed, Naomi Mitchison, Small Beer Press, Ursula K. Le Guin, Zhao HaihongCelebrating the lovely NPR write-up by Amal El-Mohtar, Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light is on sale for 50% off this week: now only $2.99!
Also of note among all the new magazines that went out somewhat late on January 1st (as expected and no one seemed to mind!): the new ish of Lightspeed has reprints Zhao Haihong’s LCRW story “Exuviation”—which the author translated herself. Plus, they are reprinting Ursula K. Le Guin’s recent Tin House story “Elementals.” Ok, but wait, there’s more! There are interviews with Hyperbole and a Half’s Allie Brosh(!) and Scott Lynch as well as a reprint of M. Rickert’s “The Chambered Fruit” and novel excerpts from Dru Pagliassotti, Chuck Wendig, and my Western Mass. neighbor James L. Cambias (his novel is getting great pre-pub reviews).
Another big seller is It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction edited by Desirina Boskovich. Who could resist 15 Finnish short stories??
In other news, Happy New Year! At some point I’m going to post the December 2013 bestseller list as well as the 2013 list and the first and last ebook sales for 2012 (here’s First and last for 2012). This week was busy with paperwork (er, not much paper yet): Massachusetts sales tax (paid! thank you Massachusetts readers!); 1099 prep (takes a while), and fourth quarter Weightless royalties—should be paid on Monday or Tuesday. Love sending out monies big and small! Thank you all readers! We had a great year and it was awesome to see how many ebook gifts were sent over the holidays.
Happy weekend and if you’re getting the same seasonal stormy weather as me, here’s our always always applicable storm list from last year.
Updates, we gots updates
Tags: FableCroft, Prime Books, Small Beer Press, Tachyon
Hey, that was a fun week. We ran a quick test on the upcoming Weekly Weightless One-Day sale and it was very successful. Suffice to say I think I know which book will be #1 this month. We’re skipping next week (it being Thanksgiving!) and WW1day1book sale will be back on December 5th with a bang!
Two collections came out this week and immediately found happy readers: Kabu, Kabu by Nnedi Okorafor (the reviews on this are terrific) and Beyond the Rift from Canadian (“banned in the USA) science fiction writer Peter S. Watts. Kage Baker fans should not miss her final collection, In the Company of Thieves.
There are four new books from FableCroft—getting in all these Australian publishers’ work is awesome!—and a couple more from our friends at Aqueduct, including Lori Selke’s The XY Conspiracy which kicks off from this intriguing UFO-hunter’s question: Why Are There No Women in Black?
Over at Small Beer we launched another book into the litmosphere, Alan DeNiro’s new collection Tyrannia and Other Renditions. You can listen to an interview with Alan and hear him read from the book on this KFAI interview.
And in more price chopping news: Livia Day’s foodie mystery (the one with the fun video) A Trifle Dead has dropped to $6.99.
May 2013 Bestsellers
Tags: Bestsellers, Clarkesworld, Electr, Ginn Hale, Locus, NYRSF, Small Beer PressThe May issue of Locus was last month’s bestseller, no doubt helped by the focus on indie publishing (yay!). You can read more about it here. Ginn Hale, superstar, took 2nd and 3rd place—and The Rifter popped up again on the Subscription List: maybe I missed some kind of Ginn Hale news? The books were followed mostly by magazines: props to the new issue of Electric Velocipede for making the list! Wearing my (nonexistent, maybe I should get one?) Small Beer Press hat, it’s heartening to see Sofia Samatar’s dense and beautiful debut novel A Stranger in Olondria and Kij Johnson’s very different At the Mouth of the River of Bees on the list.
In subscriptions Clarkesworld once again had a heck of a month—surely powered by all those awards and nominations—and their 80th issue was packed with all the goodies. At the moment, Clarkesworld is also the most popular magazine on Weightless.
For comparison here are the last couple of month’s bestseller charts—March, April—and for real fun, May 2011!
Books
Subscriptions
This week: Kij Johnson, Lydia Millet, BCS, more
Tags: Beneath Ceaseless Skies, BookCyclone, Flipside Publishing, Small Beer Press
Weightless readers have already received their preordered copies of two new Small Beer books, Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees—which includes the Hugo and Nebula Award winner, “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” and Lydia Millet’s second Dissenters novel, The Shimmers in the Night.
Dissenters, wha . . .? Who . . . ? You can catch up with the first book in the series, The Fires Beneath the Sea for only $2.99!
We’re excited to feature our first title from Flipside Publishing in the Philippines, How to Traverse Terra Incognita, writer/editor/agent provocateur Dean Francis Alfar’s second collection of short fiction. DRM-free titles from around the world! Between Flipside and BookCyclone, you can really get a taste of the great fiction coming from the other side of the world (from me, in Massachusetts, YMMV, of course).
Meanwhile, New York Review of Science Fiction readers and subscribers from all around the world are making the switch to Weightless. Welcome aboard! Glad to have you. Hope you poke around and find some other books and mags you like.
Come Tuesday, no doubt we will have more new books but a little bird tells me that Michael and Scott are working hard on a fall subscription drive for Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Look out for that in the latter half of the week!
Welcome NYRSF!
Tags: Chris N. Brown, Lee Thomas, Lethe Press, NYRSF, Small Beer Press
We’re very happy to add The New York Review of Science Fiction—commonly known as NYRSF (“Newrsif”)—to Weightless. We’ve launched with a subscription (of course) and about a dozen back issues or so. I’m particularly pleased to be able to point readers to Chris N. Brown‘s essay “Science Fiction in the Edgelands” which is linked off the April issue page. Chris passed through Massachusetts recently and it was excellent to catch up with what he’s been up to since co-editing Three Messages and a Warning.
Isn’t it lovely to see that the world is moving to DRM-free ebooks? It only makes sense that the book should be easy for the reader to read and move around between their reading devices.
Don’t forget that Fireside Magazine is running their second Kickstarter for issue 2 and beyond.
To celebrate Lee Thomas’s The German (congratulations Lee!) winning the Lambda Award, for a limited time Lethe Press has slashed the price of by 50%!
This week also brought new issues of:
LocusLast week we added quite a few Small Beer Press pre-orders—order them here and they will be delivered to you before any other electronic reading site!—including our amazing two-volume Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin. Ms. Le Guin selected the stories and working with her has been fantastic. These books have been three or four years in the making and I can’t wait to see them in hardcover but they’re going to be excellent ebooks to have with you forever, too.
This post brought to you with a time-machined 1980s soundtrack by Fitz and the Tantrums.
New Icarus, Nancy Kress, J. M. McDermott, Weird Tales
Tags: Ann VanderMeer, Apex Book Company, Clockwork Phoenix, Icarus, J. M. McDermott, Lethe Press, Mythic Delirium, Nancy Kress, NYRSF, Small Beer Press, Weird TalesEveryone 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.
Get Invisible (Publishing)!
Tags: Apex Magazine, Invisible Publishing, Small Beer Press
This week we have more. More? Well, turns out the same way I keep getting hungry despite previously having eaten, people need new books despite having previously bought others. . . . So this week we have:
More books from Canada’s best, Invisible Publishing, including:
—Homing, the story of Leah, a woman who’s grown afraid of the outdoors; a ghost that’s lost its way; a musician who’s trying to find his; and Sandy and Harold, a pair of homing pigeons who help get them all back home.
—The Art of Trespassing explores the systems and structures that frame our everyday lives. Contributors imagine networks, neighbourhoods and relationships, exposing them as both confining and liberating.
—The Transits collection embodies what Invisible Publishing is all about: encouraging storytellers, helping new and emerging writers develop their craft and find an audience. Featuring the work of ten new Canadian writers, this is not a collection of travel stories, but stories in which movement is central—stories exploring the pace(s) and places of our increasingly decentralized lives.
And!
More backlist issues of the very-popular from Apex Magazine. I should point you toward #18, “Our special Arab/Muslim themed issue,” which features Nebula Finalist “The Green Book” by Amal El-Mohtar.
Last week’s Sub Press additions are proving quite popular with Connie Willis and Elizabeth Bear sneaking out into the front as most read so far.
Price Cuts
We dropped the prices on many backlist Small Beer Press titles by 30%! And while were at it, dropped the price of a couple of Lethe Press from $5.99 to $2.99!
More new LCRWs and many Small Beer epubs
Tags: Carol Emshwiller, conversions, epub, LCRW, Small Beer PressHey, did you see that story on Slate about how “Digital publishing levels the playing field for small publishers“? We had fun talking with Jill Priluck and it was great that she gave a shout out to Featherproof, Small Beer, and, yay!, Weightless.
And to celebrate we added a few things that readers have been asking for—but not everything, otherwise what would we do next week? First there were a bunch of improvements that Michael did on Friday: pages have shorter line-lenghs for increased visibility, there’s a new featured title, we started tagging posts for easier findability, and we did some technical jiggery pokery stuff as well. And we talked to a couple more indie presses whose books we hope to add. We’re hoping to build a tempting palace of wonder made of electrons and indie presses. We’re on our way!
In the meantime, today’s (Tuesday’s, just) update just went up*. First we added four issues of our zine, LCRW, (12, 13, 14, 15). These are all epub/mobi/lit files—but, in a reversal of the normal, no PDF! We also added epubs to most of the rest of the LCRWs: 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. So now you can get many versions of those issues going back to 2003—It’s old back there!
We also added multiformat (epub/mobi/lit) files to many Small Beer titles including Couch, Meeks, Trash Sex Magic—not going to list all of them, but many, I tell you, many! More TK, but slowly, you know how it is.
And finally (at last!) we added Carol Emshwiller‘s first novel (which is fantastically funny and weirder than ever) Carmen Dog in multiformat (again, no PDFs—maybe later). As with Travel Light, we’ve put Carmen Dog up at a lovely low introductory price of $5.95.
Next week might be the week we get Fairy Tale Review (books and mags) up here—they are amazing, and the pricing is irresistible. The paper edition of the journal is $10-$20 (depends on who’s selling it). Suffice to say the ebooks will be much less. Much! They’re going to be PDFs and I’m not sure if there will be more formats because as with the Featherproof books (have you seen them, they are crazy wonderful designed!) the pages are part of the package. We’ll see. After Fairy Tale, we have more more more. Come back. Tell your friends. Tell us what you think. Thanks for reading!
* Apologies for the delay. I’d love to say it was Scott Pilgrim related, but, sadly, haven’t seen it yet (darn it!). It’s just that the baby is too too much and insists on being played with. Apparently baby trumps computer every time!
