Wizard’s Tower

New Book, New Stores

~ Cheryl

Apocalypse ArrayThe new book from Lyda Morehouse, Apocalypse Array, is now working its way through the upload procedures at various stores. You should be able to buy it from most major venues soon.

I very much enjoyed doing the ebook conversion on this one, which I kind of expected as I loved it first time around. These days, however, it is seeming more and more prescient. For example, this recent report about a right wing radio host accusing trans people, and Laverne Cox in particular, of being agents of Satan could have come right out of the AngeLINK series. In fact I’m sure that Emmaline McNaughton would have been all in favor of Laverne.

Of course Emmaline is the Antichrist, but then we also have Ariel, the cross-dressing Archangel, to consider. You need to read the series to find out exactly what Mother (or God, or whatever you prefer to call Them) is up to.

Of course these books were written in simpler times before social media and trans activism. Lyda, bless her, asked me to include a foreword apologizing about her lack of knowledge of trans issues when she wrote the series. I’m pretty sure that we had a few conversations on such things at the time, but then the world has moved on a lot since 2004, and had Lyda come to me for advice before writing the books she would likely have produced something just as likely to upset modern-day activists than she did without me.

Anyway, I’m really proud to have published the AngeLINK series. All four books are now available so if you were waiting for that you can now buy them. And if not just buy them anyway.

Talking of which, while I can’t afford to run a fully-fledged ebook store, it is daft not to be able to sell Wizard’s Tower books direct to customers. So I have run up a fairly basic store using WordPress and a few plugins. I’m not confident using this to sell other people’s books, but for ours it should be OK. You can find that new store at the old address.

In addition I spent part of the weekend making our books available on Google Play. I’m not sure that Google is any less evil than Amazon (though the piranhas are trying really hard right now — click through and check out paragraph 2), but at least they are competition. Also, if your read primarily on an Android tablet (which I do) you can get delivery direct to your device, just like with a Kindle.

Coming Soon from Wizard’s Tower

~ Cheryl

Apocalypse ArrayI just need to do a few more things to our latest ebook release before sending it off to Lyda Morehouse for proofing. It should be out in a week or two.

I must say I’ve really been enjoying doing these books. I know I loved them when they first came out, but it is always good to see something stand up well to re-reading.

Of course I shouldn’t really be getting emotional over a relationship between two artificial intelligences; not at my age. I guess I’m just soppy. But there’s lots to think about in the AngeLINK series too. Also I’m really pleased to be re-issuing a 10-year-old series whose characters include a Egyptian Muslim hacker, a Jewish lesbian militia leader and a cross-dressing archangel.

Airships Over America

~ Cheryl

Thanks to Kevin, and to Dave Clark of Cargo Cult Books, copies of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion are on sale this weekend at BayCon, a large annual convention held in San José, California. Kevin tweeted this photo to show us what good company we are in.

Any other US bookstore who are interested in stocking the book, just ask. I can have the books printed and shipped within the USA.

A Review for Kontakt

~ Cheryl

Australian critic, Seán Wright, has posted a review of Wizard’s Tower’s anthology of Croatian science fiction & fantasy, Kontakt. It seems that he liked it.

Many thanks to Seán for doing this. Lots of people talk about diversity in SF&F, but nowhere near as many are prepared to back that up by looking at what people in other countries write.

Airship Ball Recordings

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Queenie GreenThe recordings of the readings from the Airship Ball are now available on the BristolCon podbean account. This is the event that we ran to celebrate the launch of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion.

It was a very fine event that featured music from Cauda Pavonis and a great number of fine costumes. The picture to the left shows Heike Harding-Reyland dressed as one of the fern people from Deborah Walker’s story, “The Lesser Men Have No Language”.

The recordings highlight three stories from the book.

First up John Hawkes-Reed talks about how to hack a steam-powered war elephant of the type featured in his story, “Miss Butler and the Handlander Process”. The sound quality is a bit poor, and John had a bunch of pictures on his laptop which obviously don’t come out very well in audio. However, the script for the whole presentation, including the pictures, is available to be read here (PDF).

Next up we have Deborah Walker’s dramatization of Jo Hall’s story, “Brass & Bone”. The cast is as follows:

  • The narrator: Joanne Hall
  • The Unfortunate Mrs. Angela Porter: Myfanwy Rodman
  • The Dastardly Mr. Howard Porter: Ken Shinn
  • Dr. Charles: Désirée Fischer

I must say that Ken is very good at being dastardly. 😉

The final recording is of Pete Sutton’s story, “Artifice Perdu”, which I believe Pete dramatized himself. The cast is as follows:

  • The narrator: Peter Sutton
  • Mr. John Loughborough Pearson: Duncan
  • Mr. George Merryweather: Scott Lewis
  • A sailor: Claire Hutt
  • A rude labourer: Ken Shinn

At the end there’s the embarrassing bit in which Jo & Roz present me with some lovely cheese as a thank you present for publishing the book. I have eaten the cheese. It was as good as I expected.

Tomorrow I’ll be uploading the readings from the last BristolCon Fringe, which is even more embarrassing because it includes a piece of flash fiction by me. Don’t say I don’t give you plenty to laugh at.

Ã…con Underway

~ Cheryl

All is progressing well here at Ã…con. Last night Karen Lord and I were on a panel about post-colonial SF, during which we managed to recommend many fabulous writers. I also presented by LGBT superheroes talk, which folks here seemed to enjoy.

Today this far we have had a panel on steampunk, at which I very quickly sold the small number of copies of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion that I carried with me. There will hopefully also be copies available at this year’s Swecon, which is steampunk-themed, and at Finncon.

And now I must rush, because I am interviewing Karen shortly.

The Warrior’s Bond Is On Sale

~ Cheryl

As promised yesterday, copies of Juliet E. McKenna’s fourth book in the Tales of Einarinn series is now on sale in the Wizard’s Tower store. Get your Warrior’s Bond here. It will be on sale in the other usual outlets in due course.

As with the other books in the series, this volume contains updated maps and a new introduction by Juliet talking about her thought processes in writing the book. You can learn more about it (and the rest of the series) from her blog.

Bookstore: End of the Road

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

As some of you will know, the Wizard’s Tower bookstore never made a profit (apart from that one amazing month when the Finns came to party). However, revenue had been increasing at a slow but steady pace throughout. I always believed that if I kept working away at it, that we’d get there in the end. I even had a bunch of big plans for improvements for this year.

However, the first few months of 2014 saw a significant drop in sales. The figures for March were around half what they had been for the same month last year. Sales for April thus far show every sign of being as bad or worse. Much as I enjoy selling good books to eager readers, I can’t carry on paying out money in hosting fees, and spending a lot of time running the store, if no one is buying books.

I’ve also noted that some of the publishers I stock have stopped sending me their latest releases. As a publisher myself, I totally understand that. There is no sensible distribution system for the ebook market, and small presses can only justify the time it takes to get books stocked in a store if that store is actually going to sell a significant quantity. But of course if I don’t get the latest books, that means fewer visitors to my store, which results in a downward spiral.

So I have decided to close the store at the end of this month. I’m not sure of the exact closure date because I’ll be heading off to Finland around the end of the month which messes up my schedule. However, I’ll definitely keep the store open for the next week because some people are still buying copies of The Secret History of Moscow in preparation for Ã…con and I don’t want Kathy to miss out on any sales. So if there is something that you had been planning to buy, get it now.

The good news is that this will not negatively impact the publishing business at all. I sell far more copies of Wizard’s Tower books through Amazon than I do through my own store. And for those of you who prefer not to buy from piranhas I’ll always make copies available through a few other stores.

I guess that it also means that I will have a bit more free time, but I may use that to try to be less exhausted and stressed, rather than start any new projects immediately.

If you have bought books from the store and manage to lose your copy, don’t worry, I have records of who bought what. Just email me and I’ll replace the file.

Finally, my huge thanks to everyone who supported the store during its lifetime, either by selling their books there, or buy buying them. I shall miss the happiness boost I used to get from checking my email in the morning and seeing that someone had bought a book I love.

Farewell, Readmill

~ Cheryl

The weekend provided that sad news that Readmill, the company who produced by far the best ebook reader, is closing down. Baldur Bjarnason has a few words to say about their fate here. By and large, I think he’s right. Their app was superb, but their business plan appeared to rely on getting people to read socially, and most people don’t want to be discussing what they are reading with random strangers.

From my point of view, the primary benefit of Readmill was that they provided an opportunity for customers at my bookstore to download purchases directly to customers, just as you can do on the Kindle. But of course few of Amazon’s competitors were interested in working with a third party. All of the big stores are trying to replicate the “walled garden” strategy. For small stores such as mine, losing Readmill blows a big whole in the shopping experience.

There is one small ray of hope in that Readmill’s development team has apparently been sold to DropBox. What they will be doing there is unclear, but if they do add ebook reading capabilities to DropBox, and we get a “send to DropBox” button that we can add to stores, that could be very useful. Fingers crossed.

Talking of the bookstore, Shopify has just produced a “reviews” app, so if you buy a book from the store you can leave a review of it. Please consider doing a favor for writers whose work you have enjoyed.

New From Aqueduct

~ Cheryl

Aqueduct Press has sent me three new books for sale. As always with Aqueduct, these look very interesting.

Alien Bootlegger and Other Stories by Rebecca Ore is a collection of feminist SF stories that examines what it means to be alien.

The Stone Boatmen is a fantasy novel by Sarah Tolmie that has a recommendation by Ursula K. Le Guin on the cover.

And the one that is the most interesting to me is New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett. First published in 1889, it is a “sleeper awakes” style of utopian novel. Our heroine finds herself in Ireland in 2472. The country is run by women, but as with most utopias it has aspects to it that will horrify modern day readers. You can learn more about Corbett and her books at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.

And yes, feminist science fiction was being written in 1889. What’s the betting Mrs. Corbett wouldn’t have been on the feature tables in bookstores either?

Potential Good News For Bookstore Customers

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

One of the things that has hugely irritated UK-based ebook stores is that, while they have been required to charge 20% VAT on all purchases, multi-national companies such as Apple and Amazon have been basing their European operations in places like Luxembourg where VAT on ebooks is much lower. In order to remain competitive, UK-based stores such as Waterstones (and presumably the Robot Trading Company) have had to swallow the additional tax that they had to pay.

That should now end. As per this report, George Osborne has actually done something to close a tax loophole. In theory, anyone selling ebooks in the UK will soon have to charge UK rates of VAT. I say “in theory” because “soon” happens to be from January 1st, 2015, which leaves Apple and Amazon plenty of time to find a new loophole, or to bribe the government to reverse the decision, but at least it is planned.

Ideally, of course, ebooks should be zero-rate for VAT, just like paper books are. And doubtless this ruling will lead to yet more complaints that ebooks are over priced, and that authors are raking in huge profits (because it is always easier to blame authors than faceless corporations). However, there is potential good news for Wizard’s Tower Books customers.

You see, we are small enough to not have to register for VAT. This costs me a bit of money, but saves me a huge amount of time doing VAT accounts and allows me to offer books for sale without charging VAT. As the EU has recently ruled that the “most favored nation” clauses, used by the likes of Amazon and Apple to prevent other companies undercutting them, are anti-competitive, I should be able to offer books rather more cheaply than you can buy them on Amazon.

From Jan. 1st, 2015. Assuming nothing changes before then.

New Airship Review

~ Cheryl

A review of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion has appeared on LibraryThing. It is by clfisha, who admits to knowing one of the authors very well. Here’s a brief snippet that made me very happy:

I was very taken with mechanical elephants and soul stealing in a story by John Hawkes-Reed, a tale that not only had great characters but also the best opening line, “I was hiding inside my father’s test elephant when they came looking for me.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Back On Air Monday @UjimaRadio

~ Cheryl

Ujima Radio chairman, Roger Griffith, has posted on Facebook that the station will be back on air on Monday (March 24th). Thanks are due to The Utilities Warehouse for being willing to work with us to get power restored as quickly as possible, to Mayor George Ferguson for his personal intervention in the case, and of course to all of you lot for asking George for help on our behalf. Well done, people!

Wednesday’s show will be mainly a Women And The Media special. Paulette has arranged for a number of special guests including Christina Zaba, who looks very interesting. For the final half hour, from 13:30 to 14:00, we’ll be joined by Jo Hall and Roz Clarke who will talk about Airship Shape and Bristol Fashion.

Kontakt on Weird Fiction Review

~ Cheryl

Weird Fiction Review has kindly offered to host a sample story from Kontakt, the anthology of Croatian science fiction that I have published. The story that they have chosen is “The Corridor” by Darko Macan, which is one of my favorites from the book. It is also the winner of the Lapis Histriae, an international short story competition open to writers from Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro. You can read it for free here. And then find many other fine Croatian stories here.

Welcome, Interzone!

~ Cheryl

I am delighted to announce that the UK’s leading short fiction magazine, Interzone, is now available through the bookstore. We also have the companion dark fiction magazine, Black Static. It will take Andy Cox and I a while to get everything available, but for now we have these two issues, and I’ll add new ones as I get them.

Glenda Larke Special Offer

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Glenda Larke’s debut fantasy series has been re-published by Fablecroft. The books are currently on offer at my bookstore. You can get all three volumes of the Isles of Glory series for the price of two. Why not take the opportunity to find out why I fell in love with Glenda’s writing back in Emerald City days.

New From Muse It Up

~ Cheryl

There being no new crises for me to deal with (yet) this week, I am getting caught up on adding books to the store. My apologies for the rash of posts that will happen this week. To begin with I have a whole pile of new titles from Muse It Up as follows: