Readmill, Anyone?

One of the big advantages that Amazon has over other ebook stores is the simple purchase process. When you buy a book, it is automatically sent to your Kindle account, and is available on every device where you have a Kindle app. If you are online the book will even synchronize to the last-read position when you switch between devices. It is all very convenient.

Of course Amazon has put a lot of money into providing a good shopping experience. There’s no way I can replicate that with my own store. But other people are trying to help small business like me compete. Enter Readmill. It is a German company, and their product is a cloud-based reading system that is trying to do for epub what Kindle does for its proprietary format. Currently their reader is only available for iOS devices (iPad and iPhone), but according to this report they are working on an Android app as well. Crucially they have a simple system for sending books direct to your library when you buy them. I have added it to my store.

The Readmill reader for the iPad is really nice. Someone has put a lot of effort into making sure that the books it renders look great. Personally I can’t wait for an Android app because I own a Mark I iPad which is rather too heavy for carrying around everywhere. I do most of my reading on my Google Nexus, and I prefer to use the Kindle app to read on that because the Android reading apps are so bad. Hopefully Readmill will come through with an Android app soon.

There are things that Readmill can’t do. In particular it can’t read books that are locked to a specific reading platform with DRM. But all of the books I sell are DRM-free so you won’t have that problem. As of now I haven’t found a way to download a book from the Readmill library. Of course if you buy a book from me you’ll be able to download a copy when you buy it, as well as sending a copy to Readmill, but an option to back up your Readmill library to local storage would be a good thing to have.

Has anyone out there got any experience of using Readmill? I have had a quick look around the Internet, but any bad things people are saying about Readmill are being drowned out by bad things people are saying about treadmills. Any feedback would be gratefully received.

Fallen Host – Live in the Bookstore

Fallen Host - Lyda MorehouseI wouldn’t normally release a book on a Saturday, but time is getting short. This one should have been out on either Thursday or Friday, but circumstances have conspired against me and as I’m leaving for Finland on Monday I need to get it out now.

Fallen Host is, of course, the second in Lyda Morehouse’s AngeLINK series. Satan is running a used bookstore in New York. The Vatican’s crack tech crime investigator is a woman. And the Four Horsemen are, well, that might be a spoiler. Not that such things should really matter in a book that has been out for more than a decade, but publishers are supposed to tease prospective readers so here I am doing it.

Needless to say, I love this book (and all of the others in the series). I’m not in the least bit surprised to learn that Lyda would go around exclaiming “I love Satan!” while writing it. He is a splendid character. Hopefully some of you who are new to Lyda’s work will come to love it too.

As for me, I have two more novels to convert. So once I have this one in all of the major bookstores I’ll need to get on with the next one. There will be a new Juliet McKenna coming soon as well.

May Magazines

The May editions of Clarkesworld and Lightspeed are now in the store. I’m in a bit of a rush as I need to get into Bristol to see Patrick Ness so this post will be shorter than usual.

Clarkesworld #80 features new fiction by James Patrick Kelly (“Soulcatcher”), Andy Dudak (“Tachy Psyche”) and E. Catherine Tobler (“(R + D) / I = M”). The classic reprints are from Liz Williams (“The Banquet of the Lords of Night”) and Michael Swanwick (“From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled . . .”).

Amongst the non-fiction, the interview with Yoon Ha Lee is already generating buzz on Twitter. Neil’s editorial tells about his unfortunate encounter with a giant, killer Japanese plant. The cover art is by Julie Dillon.

Lightspeed #36 has a novella from Eleanor Arnason as the ebook exclusive fiction. There are interviews with Gregory Maguire and Karen Russell, both of who very much write SF&F while being marketed as mainstream/literary.

As usual, both magazines are available in the bookstore.

Bristol Tomorrow: Steampunk, May Day & Bank Notes

I’ll be in Bristol tomorrow for the kick off meeting for Airship Shape and Bristol Fashion, the new Wizard’s Tower steampunk anthology. From 6:30pm we’ll be at the Shakespeare Tavern in Prince Street where Eugene Byrne will be entertaining us with tales of the more eccentric and story-worthy inhabitants of Victorian Bristol. Jo Hall and Roz Clarke will be on hand to discuss your story ideas. There’s a Facebook event page for those of you who do such things. I hope to see a good crowd there.

As I’m in town anyway I’ll also be doing Women’s Outlook on Ujima between Noon and 14:00. I don’t have any studio guests myself as this isn’t a planned appearance, but Paulette will have some interesting people coming in. One of the things on the agenda is May Day, and as Liz Williams will be in London for the Clarke Award ceremony I’ll be the emergency holographic neo-pagan.

Also on my list of topics for tomorrow’s show will be this petition which aims to ensure that there are always some women amongst the famous Britons from history featured on our banknotes. I think they have to be dead to qualify, but that still leaves plenty of wonderful women to choose from. Off the top of my head, we could have Agatha Christie, Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, Aphra Behn or Dorothy L. Sayers from literature; Ada Lovelace or Rosalind Franklin from science; Mary Wollstonecraft or Emmeline Pankhurst from politics. Feel free to add suggestions in comments; and sign the petition, of course.

Welcome Massimo Marino

As part of our mission of bringing you interesting writers from around the world, I’m delighted to welcome Massimo Marino to the Wizard’s Tower bookstore. Massimo is Italian by birth, but has worked at CERN, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories and Apple, so he has plenty of scientific credentials and lots of experience of writing in English. Daimones is his first novel, and seems to have been fairly well received thus far. There’s a sequel due out next month.

Oh, and just to prove he’s a real science fiction writer, Massimo has two cats, one of which is named Nutella because it is chocolate colored.

Ditmar Winners

The Ditmar Award winners were announced at the Australian Natcon yesterday evening. I can’t see an official announcement yet, but based on Twitter reports the winners are as follows:

Also announced at the ceremony (but Not A Ditmar) were the following:

  • Norma K. Hemming Award: Sea Hearts, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)
  • Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award: Nick Stathopoulos
  • A. Bertram Chandler Award for Outstanding Achievement: Russell B Farr

I’m delighted to see a Clarkesworld story winning the short fiction category. Also I note that Karen Warren’s double-winning collection is available in a bookstore near you.

I look forward to seeing long, angry articles from male fans complaining that the Ditmars are “broken”, and blaming it all on Alisa Krasnostein with her radical lesbian separatist politics. 😉

Update: Added the Chandler Award. See Sean the Bookonaut for a Storify record of the ceremony.

Award-Winning Horror

Perfections - Kirstyn McDermottI’m delighted to announce that a new publisher has joined the Wizard’s Tower store. Xoum Publishing is a fine Australian small press. They don’t publish a lot of SF&F, but what they do have is very impressive.

Top of the list has to be Perfections by Kirstyn McDermott which has just won the 2013 Australian Shadows Award for Best Novel. Kirstyn is, of course, also one of the co-hosts of the fabulous podcast, The Writer and The Critic and the wielder of the infamous Pointy Stick. She may decide to poke you with it if you don’t buy her book.

Also arriving from Xoum is Blood and Dust by Jason Nahrung, which is a vampire novel set in the Queensland outback. I’ve always felt that there are far too many things trying to kill you in Queensland already, so it hardly needs vampires, but you have to admit that Queensland has the coolest bats in the world. I can see why vampires might want to live there.

Finally we have something much less deadly. Irina the Wolf Queen by Leah Swann. Xoum lists this as a children’s book, so I’m assuming it is aimed at a younger market than YA. It is described as “Book I of the Ragnor Trilogy”, which should get the kids hooked nicely early.

All three books are nominees for this year’s Aurealis Awards, which is an impressive achievement.

New Anthology – Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion

Over at the Wizard’s Tower website I have posted a Call for Submissions for Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion, a new anthology that I’m producing in collaboration with the BristolCon Foundation.

This is what Colin Harvey would have called an “art project”. That is, the purpose of the book is to encourage and promote talented young writers. We don’t expect it to sell in vast quantities, and the money isn’t great. We decided not to use Kickstarter to fund it, because in order to run a successful campaign you need a bunch of high profile writers already committed to the book. That would go against the intention of using mainly people who are earlier in their careers. Much as I would love to have an Anastasia Sixsmyth story in the book, I know the book is well below Ian McDonald’s radar.

Because the book is steampunk I should doubtless note right from the start that we are well aware of the potential issues with the genre. Bristol’s history is by no means wholly glorious. Indeed, much of the investment in the city in the Victorian era came from the ridiculously large sums of money that the British government paid slave traders in compensation when their business was outlawed.

As we noted on the BristolCon website, we have arranged an event next week where local historian, Eugene Byrne, will talk about some of the city’s more colorful Victorian characters. Knowing Eugene, he won’t skimp on the less pleasant aspects of history. And knowing Bristol there will doubtless be the odd riot involved. The city does have a proud tradition of telling the upper classes where to go.

Usefully, Eugene has just written a book called Unbuilt Bristol, in which he talks about some of the crazier civil engineering projects that never quite made it into the city’s landscape. It is all good alternate history fodder.

Although the primary intention is to encourage local writers, we are happy to accept submissions from elsewhere. The stories just have to be set in or near Bristol. If you need help with research we can help.

I haven’t, as yet, set a publication date for the book. It would be nice to have it out around BristolCon, but we know from experience how crazy our lives get at that time of year so we’ll see how things go. We do, however, intend to produce a paper version of the book. And that means I need to get on with sorting out how we do that.

Australian Shadows Awards #WomenInGenre

Via Kirstyn McDermott I have seen the results of this year’s Australian Shadows Awards, which are juried awards for horror fiction. Kirstyn is quite rightly jumping up and down because she has won the Novel category with Perfections. However, I want to draw your attention to the Long Fiction and Collection categories. Long Fiction was won by a story called “Sky” by Kaaron Warren. That appears in a collection called Through Splintered Walls, published by Twelfth Planet Press, which happens to have won the Collection category. And you can buy it here.

Nice skull, Kirstyn. Try not to hit Mondy too hard with it.

A Finnish Fantasy Novel

I’m delighted to be able to offer a novel by a Finnish author in the bookstore. Fargoer by Petteri Hannila is the first in a series of fantasy novels that, “draws its power from the harsh, yet beautiful nature and folklore of Finland”. It is self-published, and presumably self-translated, but that’s understandable when you are operating out of a fairly small country with a language few people know. There are plenty of reviews available on Petteri’s website. Why not check it out?

Conservation of Shadows #WomenInGenre

The third in the new books by women that I have for you this week is a very exciting collection. Conservation of Shadows is by the Korean-American writer, Yoon Ha Lee. It includes her two Sturgeon Award finalists: “Ghostweight” (Clarkesworld) and ““Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” (Lightspeed). There are 14 other stores, one of which is unique to the collection, and an introduction by Aliette de Bodard. For further details, check out the bookstore.

Coming Soon – Fallen Host #WomenInGenre

Fallen Host - Lyda MorehouseLast night I finished the bulk of the conversion work on the next Lyda Morehouse book, Fallen Host. It still needs to go through proof-reading, but I’m planning to have it out this month. While you are waiting, you can feast your eyes on the lovely Bruce Jensen cover (and thanks again to Bruce for re-doing all of the covers for the ebook releases).

Of course if you can’t wait, you could always ask me for an eARC…


And if you still haven’t got around to buying Archangel Protocol, then you are missing out on a treat.

We Get Entranced #WomenInGenre

It is going to be a busy week as far as bookstore posts goes. I’ve just uploaded three new books. If you want to know what they all are, the Wizard’s Tower Twitter feed has details and links, but as we are doing this whole Women In Genre thing I wanted to give each one their own chance to shine.

Today I’m welcoming a new publisher to the store. Entranced Publishing covers a wide range of different genres, but with an emphasis on romance. We’ll be carrying their SF&F titles. Their first offering is Spirit World by Krystalyn Drown, which is a YA fantasy. Why not give it a try?

April Magazines

There is a new Clarkesworld out, and it is HUGE! Gardner Dozois has arrived with a bang, and there are no less than six stories in the issue.

Let’s start with the new material. The headline story is “Annex” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew. She’s a new name to me, which just goes to show that I should be reading GigaNotoSaurus and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, both of which I have heard lots of good things about.

Next up is “No Portraits on the Sky” by Kali Wallace, who has an even more impressive resume including F&SF, Asimov’s and Tor.com. How do people keep up with short fiction these days?

And then there’s “Melt With You” by Emily C. Skaftun, who has been in Strange Horizons, amongst others. And someone else whose name I hadn’t seen before.

I’ve only had time to skim these stories, but they look very much a Clarkesworld sort of thing. I guess my point here is that here are three very competent women writers, none of whom I’d heard of before Neil chose to publish them. And I figured I knew the field reasonably well. Sometimes the world is much more marvelous than you think.

And so to Gardner’s selections. Or at least the reprints. He’s not responsible for all of what follows. We start off with something which absolutely belongs in an issue that comes out on April Fools’ Day. Kij Johnson has done a new version of “Spar”, in which the girl and the tentacled alien, instead of having sex, spend all of their time eating bacon. It is quite bizarre, and apparently part of a charity anthology. “Spar (The Bacon Remix)” — I commend it to you.

The other two reprints, which Gardner did choose, are “Guest of Honor” by Robert Reed, which I’m not familiar with, and “Finisterra” by David Moles, which was a Hugo nominee. Reed is a favorite writer of mine, so I’m sure his story will be good. And that’s an excellent start to the reprint section.

Also, Neil said on Twitter that if he can add another 500 subscribers then there will be enough budget for a fourth original story. So if you haven’t subscribed yet, please consider doing so.

Meanwhile there is non-fiction, and Ken Liu has produced a fascinating article about translation. I feel for Neil having to do the layout on that with all the Chinese in it, but it was well worth doing. Goddess, I wish I had bought this article.

Jeremy’s interview is with Myke Cole, while Daniel Abraham gets his teeth into Grimdark in is usual, highly intelligent manner. Neil’s editorial talks about the Hugo nominations, and about the origins of the magazine.

This month’s cover is “The Awakening” by Alexandru Popescu, who is originally from Bucharest but now lives in London.

As usual, the magazine is available for purchase from the bookstore, and every purchase helps keen the authors paid, and the material free online for everyone else to enjoy.

We also have the new Lightspeed available. It has an awesome cover. It has fiction by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Robert Silverberg and Bruce Sterling, amongst others. The ebook-only material is a novella by Nina Allan. And most importantly it includes a brand new story by Karin Tidbeck. Go buy it now.

My Dear Watson

Here’s a treat for all of you slash fans. Lethe Press have sent me a new book about that well-loved couple, Holmes and Watson. In it Mrs. Watson invites the great detective to dinner so that she can confront the two men about their affair. You can read more about My Dear Watson, and read a sample chapter, at the bookstore.

Best of Australia

The nominees for this year’s Ditmar awards have been released. There’s a full list available here. I’m really impressed with how many women there are on the ballot. Clearly there is some sort of secret feminist cabal at work here. 🙂

What I want to do here, however, is highlight the very large number of fiction nominees that are available in my bookstore. Just look…

Best Novel

  • Salvage, Jason Nahrung (Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Novella or Novelette

Best Short Story

Best Collected Work

Tim Invents Brizzlewood

My friend Tim Maughan has made a short film of the opening scenes of his short story, “Paintwork”. It is a very low budget exercise, so it is all done with stills and animation rather than live action, but it looks fabulous. It has that “mean streets in the rain” look that cyberpunk does so well, but has Tim’s signature feature of having those streets populated by kids with spray cans rather than hackers with expensive electronics. The narration and sound track, done by some of Tim’s friends from the Bristol music scene, is really good too. Hey, and William Gibson liked it, which caused Tim to fangasm spectacularly.

Tim has made one fairly significant change to the story for the film, which had me smiling as I watched it. See if you notice.

There is more information about the people involved in the film at its YouTube page. And of course you can still read the full story for free at Tor.com. The short collection from which “Paintwork” is the title story is still available at the bookstore.