Books

Happy Solstice – Time to Get Green!

~ Cheryl


Happy Winter Solstice, everyone! Here in the Northern Hemisphere the days will be getting longer and it is time to welcome the green back into our lives. Down south it is summer, and hopefully not too parched, Australia.

What better way to celebrate than with the Green Man? In view of which Juliet and I have decided to put The Green Man’s Heir on sale for the rest of December. Thanks to an unlikely coincidence of exchange rates you should be able to find it for £0.99, $0.99 and €0.99, though some stores may adjust dynamically through the month. Prices in other currencies will be scaled accordingly.

Update: The sale is live on Amazon as well now.

Of course when I say that you can find it there’s always a catch. Kobo, Google and Barnes & Noble have already adjusted their prices as I requested. Amazon tell me that it could take up to three days to make the change.

However, if you are a Kindle user there are many free tools that help you convert epub books to mobi, so if you really can’t wait that’s always an option. If that sounds scary, Amazon will catch up before the month is over, and doubtless it will take them time to change back in January.

Happy reading, everyone!

Wizard’s Tower in Bath Tomorrow

~ Cheryl


If you happen to live in or near Bath, you may be interested in Small Publishers’ Gathering which is taking place in the city tomorrow. Wizard’s Tower will be one of the publishers attending, as will our good friends Tangent Books who do all sorts of amazing titles about Bristol.

The event is taking place at the Friends’ Meeting House on York Street and will be open to the public from Noon for you to come any buy books. If you weren’t at BristolCon you should come along and pick up a copy of Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner. This is an author I have been longing to read since hearing about her at Gendered Voices last year. Kudos to Handheld Press for bringing out a new edition.

The Mere Wife on Tour

~ Cheryl

You only get to be on the Tiptree Jury for one year, which given the amount of work is just as well. However, one book I would have looked forward to reading this year would have been Maria Dahvana Headley’s feminist re-telling of Beowulf, The Mere Wife. Maria lives in the USA, but she’s doing a short UK tour this month, so you’ll have a chance to meet her.

On Nov. 6th she will be at Foyles on Charing Cross Road where she is being interviewed by Neil Gaiman, who knows a bit about Beowulf himself. Tickets are £15 but include a copy of the book.

And on Nov. 12th she will at at St.John’s College, Oxford where she is being interviewed by Professor Carolyne Larrington who knows one heck of a lot about literature from the Norse sagas all the way through the high Middle Ages. Prof. Larrington is also someone I’d love to meet, so I’m going to be wending my way over to Oxford for that one. I hope to see some of you there. It’s free.

Today on Ujima – Hugos, SF, Cricket, REWS & Aretha

~ Cheryl

Today’s show was centred around a tribute to Aretha Franklin. I played a lot of her music, and I’m sure you are familiar with much of it.

I did run through the list of Hugo winners, because with several of the major fiction awards going to black women that’s very much of interest to my listeners. And I had a woman science fiction writer on the show. That was Anne Corlett whose novel, The Space Between the Stars, I very much enjoyed.

The Listen Again system malfunctioned again for that hour. Apparently it is some sort of BT issue. But we have the archived audio and I have podcast the interview with Anne so you can listen to it.

My second guest was slightly late due to Bristol traffic so I kicked off with coverage of the Women’s cricket. That included my interview with Raf Nicholson which I did between the two matches on Finals Day.

Then I spent a happy half an hour talking to Shauna Tohill of the all-girl rock band, REWS. She was lovely, and I love their music.

Also there was more Aretha.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here. I will podcast the interviews with Shauna & Raf in due course.

The playlist for today was:

  • Aretha Franklin – Say a Little Prayer
  • Rumer – Aretha
  • Arthea Franklin – Eleanor Rigby
  • Arthea Franklin – Bridge over Troubled Water
  • Aretha Franklin – Rock Steady
  • Whitney Houston – My Love is Your Love
  • Tina Turner – One of the Living
  • REWS – Shake Shake
  • REWS – Miss You in the Dark
  • Aretha Franklin – Respect
  • Aretha Franklin – Spanish Harlem
  • Aretha Franklin – Wholy Holy

And, thanks to the magic of YouTube, here are the two REWS tracks that I played.

The Green Man’s Reviews

~ Cheryl

As well as selling ridiculously well, The Green Man’s Heir is garnering some great reviews. I have just updated the page for the book over at the Wizard’s Tower Press website. For sheer sound bite brilliance I love K.J. Charles’s comment: “So far up my street it could be my house.” However, the thing that really warms my little publisher heart is getting a review in F&SF.

It is not just any review either. Firstly it is by the acknowledged master of contemporary fantasy, Charles de Lint. If you have a book in that genre, and Charles says it is good, you know you are onto a good thing. But he doesn’t just say it is good, he says, “It’s one of my favorite books so far this year.”

Naturally Juliet and I are delighted. On the one hand, of course, the sales of the book have so far outstripped our wildest dreams that something like this is just icing on the cake. On the othe hand, almost all of those sales have been in the UK. The book has yet to come to the attention of the US market. Sales have picked up a bit since the review came out, but they are not yet at the level they were in the UK prior to Amazon picking the book for the Daily Deal so there is a long way to go. So if you are in the US and have read the book, please talk about it. If you havent read it, you can get it for Kindle, or as an ePub.

I note that people are asking about a sequel. Certainly Juliet and I have talked about it, but she’s got a lot on her plate right now. What I am going to do is make a hardcover edition, if only because I can finally do that thing of adding a page or two saying, “Praise for this book.” So if anyone else out there would like to be included in that, please let me know.

Yesterday on Ujima – Films, Muslim Women & Hugos

~ Cheryl

I ended up doing a bonus show yesterday. As I had to go into Bristol for the TV appearance, and I have nothing else urgent on that day, I figured I might as well spend some time in the studio. That meant putting together a show at short notice.

The easiest way to do that is with phone interviews, though it does mean using Skype which can mean very variable quality. I badly need an alternative means of doing phone interviews, especially as the latest versions of Skype actively prevent the use of third party call recorders. (Why anyone would produce a digital phone system and now allow call recording is a mystery to me.)

Anyway, there were people I could interview. In the first hour I talked to Jake Smith of Tusko Films. Jake was the directory for Talking LGBT+ Bristol, the film about the city’s LGBT+ community that we made for Bristol Pride. I figured that if Jake and I were going to be on TV for 3 minutes in the evening, we should have a longer chat about the film as well.

I also recorded an interview with Rivers Solomon because there has been some really exciting news about their next novel project. Getting to write a novel with clipping has to be a dream come true.

The Listen Again system appears to have been fixed, so you can listen to the first hour of the show here.

I did manage to arrange one live interview. On Tuesday there was a flash mob demonstration in the city protesting Boris Johnson’s appalling comments about Muslim women. I was very pleased to have Sahar from Muslim Engagement & Development (MEND) to explain about the different types of headgear that Muslim women wear, and why they wear them. She was joined in the studio by Lisa from Stand Up to Racism.

I had half an hour to fill so I rambled on a bit about the women’s cricket, and about this year’s Hugo finalists. You can listen to the second half of the show here.

While the show is available on Listen Again I won’t put it up on the podcast. But once it has fallen off those interviews will appear there (and in the case of Rivers on Salon Futura). I will try to get an old interview or two up on the podcast in the meantime. And if anyone would like to become a patron of the podcast I would be very grateful. We only need 8 more people at $1/month to cover costs.

If you would like to know more about the Jimi Hendrix album that I was playing tracks from, you can find some details here.

The full playlist for yesterday’s show is as follows:

  • Jimi Hendrix – Jungle
  • Jimi Hendrix – Woodstock
  • clipping – The Deep
  • Bootsy Collins – May the Force be With You
  • Bob Marley – Get Up, Stand Up
  • Santana – Riders on the Storm
  • Janelle Monae – Sally Ride
  • Jimi Hendrix – Georgia Blues

After the Flood

~ Cheryl

Following yesterday’s excitment, things are returning slowly to normal here at Wizard’s Tower. The Green Man’s Heir is no longer on sales at 99p, and is no longer receiving special promotion from Amazon. However, the effects of that promotion linger on. As I type this, the book is still ranked #6 in all fiction sales on Amazon UK, and is still #1 in science fiction and fantasy. That is still leading to a pleasing level of sales, though obviously nowhere near yesterday’s flood.

As a publisher, what interests me is the long-term effect of all this. How long will the sales rank stay high enough to keep the book easily visible on the Amazon website? How many of yesterday’s thousands of purchases will result in reviews, or returns? What will the effect be on the sale of Juliet’s other books? Only time will tell, but I will be keeping an eye on the data. Other small press owners may well be interested.

In the meantime I’m just going to keep staring at that screenshot at the top of this post. There are no Hugos for Best Publisher, but I’ll happily take that instead.

Best Seller!

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Much to the delight of Juliet and myself, The Green Man’s Heir has been selling very steadily ever since it was published. A couple of years back Kameron Hurley got a lot of notice for this blog post in which she explained that the average book sells 3000 copies in its lifetime. Given that Wizard’s Tower is a very small press, I’m not surprised that nothing we had published to date had reached that milestone. (Although of course we major in reprints and many of the books we published did sell that well in previous incarnations.)

The Green Man’s Heir was different. It was a brand new novel, something we had never done before, but from our best-selling writer, Juliet E. McKenna. I hoped it would do well, but didn’t have huge expectations. I was really pleased by how well it was selling. What I didn’t expect was what that would lead to.

Someone at Amazon clearly noticed that the book was doing very well, and that it was getting stellar reviews. They offered us the opportunity to be part of a promotion, though without giving much detail. I asked Juliet and she said yes, so we signed up and a week or so later we got an email saying that the book would be a “Daily Deal” at £0.99 on August 13th. Just the UK, one day only. Does that make a difference?

You bet it does. To start with there’s this, which I shall be proud of for the rest of my publishing career:

#1 in Fantasy

That, of course, is a result of numbers. Looking at the sales numbers, I am now confident the The Green Man’s Heir will sell 3000 copies today.

No, not that it will pass 3000 copies lifetime, it will sell over 3000 copies today, which will mean it is heading for 5000 copies lifetime.

The really interesting thing about this, however, is that the vast majority of the sales, both prior to today and during today, have been in the UK. US sales haven’t really taken off. The Daily Deal promotion is UK-only, but Amazon US have chosen to put the book on sale. Kevin reports that it is $4.16, down from a list price of $5.99. So why not get in on the act, America? Find out what thousands of British readers have been getting excited about.

UK readers, if you don’t have your copy yet, you can get it here.

US readers, the link for you is here.

Paper copies are available from both stores. If you are going to be at Worldcon you will be able to find the book in the Dealers’ Room on the Cargo Cult table.

Heather Child Interview

~ Cheryl

The interview that I did with Heather Child back in July is no longer available on the Ujima Listen Again system, so I have posted it to Salon Futura. In it Heather and I talk about her debut novel, Everything About You. This is a near-future science fiction novel which looks at what might happen if smart digital assistants know so much about you that they know you better than you do yourself. Have a listen.

I Get Royalties

~ Cheryl

It is always a pleasure to get royalties on a book you have been involved in. This time I am even more pleased, because I’m actually being paid for writing about trans characters in SF&F. My essay is part of a great book too: Gender Identity and Sexuality in Current Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Francesca Barbini. It includes Juliet McKenna’s BSFA Award nominated essay on the barriers for women and minorities in the publishing industry. Clearly other people have enjoyed the book (and I know that Luna Press sold out of the copies they had brought to Worldcon in Helsinki), so why not get a copy?

Today on Ujima – Birthday, SF, Basketball, Nudity & Sex Work

~ Cheryl

Today was Ujima’s 10th birthday, and I was lucky enough to be presenting the first live show of the day. Thankfully I had a line-up that lived up to the occasion.

My first guest was Heather Child, a new addition to Bristol’s superb collection of science fiction and fantasy authors. Heather’s debut novel, Everything About You, is available from Orbit and is a fascinating exploration of how an AI in a smart device can get under its owner’s skin if it knows more about you than you can remember yourself.

Next up was Emma from Bristol Flyers, the local basketball club. They will be running a summer camp for girls with a view to ramping up the quality of their female teams and entering them into the national leagues. Basketball is in an interesting position in the UK. It has the third largest level of participation of any sport, but very little government funding. That’s a shame. I might find the NBA rather dull to watch, but away from the top flight the sport is a lot of fun and very cheap and easy to play.

The first hour of the show is available on Listen Again here. The Ujima website is currently being renovated so you might see it say that there are 0 minutes to play, or that there’s an issue with Flash, but if you just click on the download link it should play fine.

I kicked off the second hour with a fair amount of giggling as Tamsin Clarke and I discussed the Naked Podcast. I very much enjoyed being a guest on the show, but of course I’m very relaxed about getting naked with groups of women because I have spent so much time in saunas in Finland. We also discussed Latin American football, and Tamsin’s next theatre project.

Finally we got to the serious politics discussion of the day. In Parliament today they have been discussing further regulation of sex work. There was a big demonstration outside, of sex workers protesting about losing their livelihood. In the studio I had Angelica from the Bristol Sex Workers Collective and Amy from One25, a charity that works with street sex workers in the city. We talked about the different ways in which women can end up in the sex trade, and the best ways to help them survive and get out. I hope our politicians will listen.

The second hour of the show is available on Listen Again here. As with hour 1, you need to click on the download link.

The music for this week’s show was as follows:

  • Americans – Janelle Monae
  • Every Breath You Take – The Police
  • Sweet Georgia Brown – Brother Bones and His Shadows
  • Jam – Michael Jackson
  • Totally Nude – Talking Heads
  • Strip – Adam Ant
  • Lady Marmalade – Patti Labelle
  • Backstreet Luv – Curved Air

As you can see, most of the songs were chosen to fit with the subject under discussion. The Janelle Monae song, however, was chosen specifically because it is July 4th today. Happy Independence Day, America. Here’s hoping you keep that precious freedom.

Green Men Can Fly

~ Cheryl


I don’t have a lot of time for doing Wizard’s Tower work right now, but I’m delighted to say that The Green Man’s Heir doesn’t seem to need my help. Copies are fair flying off the shelves. The latest rave review to appear is by Paul Weimer over at Skiffy & Fanty. And yesterday on Twitter the master of contemporary fantasy, Charles de Lint, described it as, “one of my favourite books so far this year”. Purchase links can be found here.

New Book from Zoran Živković

~ Cheryl

Well that has been a long time coming, and fans of Zoran may be disappointed to learn that this is not a new novel. However, it sounds like a fascinating book. Zoran has recently retired from his post as Professor of Creative Writing at Belgrade University. He’s very much a theorist as well as a practitioner. In this book, which is from an academic publisher, he takes on the themes of First Contact and Time Travel. Both sections are illustrated with stories of his own.

The title of the book, rather obviously, is First Contact and Time Travel: Selected Essays and Short Stories. The publishers say that this is the first volume in a series, so I’m already looking forward to later volumes on other themes.

Thankfully, despite the publishing channel, the book is very affordable. You can pre-order from you know who.

The Green Man’s Heir at Eastercon and Norwescon

~ Cheryl

Folks back in the UK will be heading for Eastercon around now. If you are looking for a paperback copy of The Green Man’s Heir then you are in luck, because Juliet has a box full of them. You will be able to find them in the Dealers’ Room at the Angry Robot table. Or corner Juliet if you can find her; she has a very busy schedule.

We haven’t managed to get any paper copies printed in North America as yet, but I have given the proof copy to Kevin and he will be at Norwescon over the weekend. If you’d like to take a look, track him down. I’m sure we can arrange to get copies to some US dealers soon.

If you are wondering what people make of the book, here are a couple of early reviews:

Also here’s a wonderful endorsement from the brilliant Garth Nix.

So if you want to know what a shuck is, go buy the book.

The Green Man Lives

~ Cheryl


Juliet E. McKenna’s new novel, The Green Man’s Heir, is now available from the usual ebook stores. You can find a list of links here.

The paper edition is also available, but Amazon will probably take their time listing it, and will say it is out of stock, because that’s what they do to small presses who don’t publish through them. You should be able to order it from any bookstore. The ISBN is 978-1-908039-69-9. I’d be really grateful if you could order it from Waterstones as that might encourage them to stock our books.

Bristol people, I plan to have copies available at the April Fringe. If you can wait that long, let me know and you can buy it at the heavily discounted convention price. Printers and post people willing, there should be copies at Eastercon.

US people, you should be able to order it from bookstores as well as it is available for printing in the USA. BASFA people, Kevin will be able to take orders for direct sales, though I’m not sure when he’ll next be at a meeting.

Who Runs the World – Spoilerific Review

~ Cheryl

These days I have the shouty parts of the Internet mostly blocked on social media. It can take me a while to catch up with Drama. I was rather surprised, therefore, to discover from some of my fellow jurors that an evil bunch of cis people had voted a deeply transphobic book as the winner of this year’s Tiptree Award.

Not that I was surprised at being characterized as an evil cis person, of course. But I figured that my fellow jurors had more credibility than that. Besides, how could anyone assume that a jury that had put the Dreadnought books, the Tensorate books and “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” on the Honor List was in any way transphobic?

I am not at liberty to discuss jury deliberations in public, but I did make sure before agreeing to be on the jury that I would be working in a group where I felt I could highlight problematic works and be listened to. During the process I felt that absolutely was the case, and I am very grateful to my fellow jurors for doing me that courtesy. Some of them know enough about trans issues to be able to occasionally question me, and that was useful.

Personally I think that if there had been problems with Who Runs the World? then my fellow jurors would have spotted them. However, as I recommended the book to the jury, it is down to me to explain why I liked the book. This necessitates a spoiler-filled review. If you don’t mind the spoilers and want to see what I think, you can read the review here.

My #IWD2018 Ujima Show

~ Cheryl

A day early for International Women’s Day, I devoted most of my show yesterday to feminist issues. However, I started out in Australia by welcoming film critic, Tara Judah, to talk about Sweet Country.

Tara is from Melbourne originally, so we had a lot to talk about. However, we did our best to keep the discussion to matters of race relations in Australia. Things continue to be pretty bad there, and I very much hope that this film shines a necessary spotlight on the situation.

After the news I started playing the interviews that I had picked up at the International Women’s Day event put on by Bristol on Saturday. They included comments from Penny Gane, Eleanor Vowles, Leonie Thomas, Rosa Taggert, Sian Webb and Elizabeth Small of Ra Cultural Consultancy.

Normally I would tell you to go to the Listen Again feature for all of this, but for some reason only 10 minutes of the first hour recorded. It is still worth it for a few minutes of Tara who is an amazing guest, but the IWD interviews are not there. Thankfully I still have the originals, and I hope to post them as a podcast at some point.

The second hour kicked off with more IWD interviews featuring No More Taboo, Sandra Gordon and Alex Raikes. The singers that Alex refers to are Pitch Fight, the Bristol University a capella group, whom you can find more about here.

The African Queens project that I talked about with Sandra is a project photographic Bristol women of color cosplaying famous women from African history. It was done for Black History Month last year. You can find out more about it here.

Finally I was joined in the studio by a couple of people I met on Saturday. Charlotte Murray is a young student who was interested in finding out more about radio, to I invited her into the studio. Jane Duffus is the editor of The Women Who Built Bristol, a fabulous collection of stories about the famous, and not so famous, women from the city’s history. If you are interested in buying the book, please order it through Bristol Women’s Voice because if you do all of the proceeds go to the charity.

Thankfully the second hour recorded correctly, and you can listen to it here.

The music for the show was as follows:

  • Walking the Dog – Jackie Shane
  • Natural Woman – Aretha Franklin
  • Make me Feel – Janelle Monae
  • Independent Woman – Destiny’s Child
  • Our Day Will Come – Amy Winehouse
  • We Are Family – Sister Sledge
  • Cyndi Lauper – Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
  • It’s Raining Men – Weather Girls

Sadly I had to cut off Janelle after a minute or so because I did not want to bleep out the swears. Once I have a copy of the clean radio mix I will be playing that song regularly.

Cover Reveal – The Green Man’s Heir

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Something else I need to do on International Women’s Day is celebrate living women, and who better to chose for that than my friend Juliet E. McKenna whose books I am honored to publish. Here, therefore, is the cover of her new novel, The Green Man’s Heir, which will be available once I have got a proof back from the printers and checked that it is OK.

Juliet has written about some of the inspiration for the novel here.

And while I am mainly talking about women today I should add that Ben Baldwin, who provided the art for the book, and for Shadow Histories of the River Kingdom, is an absolute joy to work with.

Crawford Award

~ Cheryl

As many of you will have seen, the winner of this year’s Crawford Award was announced this week. The book in question is Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, and it is one of the most remarkable debuts I have seen in a long time. Machado’s work has appeared in venues such as The New Yorker, Granta and Tin House. The collection was also a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award, the USA’s top literary award. You will guess from that that the stories are very literary, and you would be right, but they are also fascinating. I am seriously impressed.

However, I would also like to draw your attention to the short list which contains many more good books. Here it is:

  • City of Brass, S.A. Chakraborty (Harper Voyager)
  • Winter Tide, Ruthanna Emrys (Tor.com Publishing)
  • The Art of Starving, Sam J. Miller (HarperTeen)
  • The Tiger’s Daughter, K. Arsenault Rivera (Tor)
  • Spellhaven, Sandra Unerman (Mirror World)

I’d like to direct particular attention to The Tiger’s Daughter. The basic set-up is as follows: Shizuka is the heir to a fantasy version of imperial China; Shefali is the daughter of the queen of the nomadic Qorin; they are brought up together, fall in love, and together they fight demons. Rivera isn’t as accomplished a wordsmith as Machado, nor as off the wall, but this is a beautifully constructed novel and just the cutest lesbian warrior love story ever. I cried. I can’t wait for book two.

Both of these books have been recommended for the Tiptree, but the remit of the Crawford and Tiptree juries is very different and I have not said anything about the books’ treatment of gender.

Further details of the Crawford Award announcement are available from the IAFA website.