Wizard’s Tower

Anticopernicus on The Writer & The Critic

~ Cheryl

I’m still catching up with podcasts from the past two weeks. The latest episode of The Writer & The Critic sees Kirsten and Mondy embark on a two-part exploration of self-published books. I’m pleased to see that they are including two books that I have in the store. Next month they’ll be looking at Paintwork by Tim Maughan, but this month they took on Anticopernicus by Adam Roberts.

I’m delighted to hear that they liked it. Also they found some really interesting online discussion of the issues raised in the story. At just 86 pence, Anticopernicus is really good value.

New Clarkesworld

~ Cheryl

Hurricanes, it seems, cannot stop Clarkesworld from being published on time. Nor, for that matter, can heart attacks. See what I mean about Neil deserving a Howie? Anyway, issue #74 is now live online, and available in the store.

The fiction this month comes from E. Catherine Tobler (“(To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky”), Maggie Clark (“Aquatica”) and Brooke Wonders (“Everything Must Go”). The first story is SF about starships; the second SF about marine life; and the third something decidedly weird about houses. As usual, the first story is available in audio from Kate Baker, with the others to follow through the month.

Non-fiction includes an article by Mark Cole about psychohistory and whether it could ever be a real science, and article with Bristol-based writer, Mark Lawrence, and Lev AC Rosen talking about queer characters in SF&F.

Neil’s editorial contains the somewhat scary but hopefully long-term good news that he is to become a cyborg, and an announcement that Kate Baker, as if she wasn’t busy enough already, will be taking over as non-fiction editor. (If you need help, Kate, just ask.)

And finally, this month’s cover art is “New World” by Ken Barthelmey who is from Luxembourg (Hugo Gernsback, I hope, would be proud).

I don’t have the November Lightspeed yet, which maybe my fault as I’ve had my attention elsewhere for the past two weeks, and may be due to JJA being at World Fantasy.

No, No Wri Mo

~ Cheryl

Today is that start of NaNoWriMo. Many of my friends are hunkering down and starting to write. I’m not. I do have a huge backlog of books to read and review, but more importantly I have a backlog of books to edit. November’s task is getting Archangel Protocol done. It may not go on sale as I’ll be asking Lyda to check over it once I’m done, but progress needs to be made and now that BristolCon and Colinthology are out of the way I have to get on and make it.

New Anthologies from Prime

~ Cheryl

New in the bookstore this week are two fine themed anthologies from Paul Guran at Prime.

Ghosts: Recent Hauntings should be self-explanatory. It includes many stories by experts in creepy fiction, including Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Peter Straub, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Tim Powers and Margo Lanagan. The full table of contents is available here.

Rock On ranges more widely through genre, but the stories are united by their musical themes. Contributors include Alastair Reynolds, Elizabeth Bear, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Michael Swanwick and Charles De Lint. Hand and Kiernan and common to both books. Again for the full contents click here.

Colinthology Available

~ Cheryl

The one BristolCon event I need to report on immediately is the launch of the latest book from Wizard’s Tower Press. Colinthology is now available. You can buy it here. All of the proceeds go to charity.

New From Aqueduct

~ Cheryl

Aqueduct Press have sent us a whole lot of fabulous new books. To start with there are six titles in the Conversation Pieces series of chapbooks:

In addition there’s a novel from Rebecca ore called The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid. This is all about the (illegal) use of cloning technology to make supposed reincarnations of historical characters. The blurb sounds fascinating:

Simon Boyle, has a sideline making illegal copies: chimeras based on famous criminals, for rent. His Billy the Kid, a creation unable to comprehend or sometimes even recognize the sorts of things that didn’t exist before the 1880s, is quite popular for a night of historically convincing passion with rich women, particularly the part where Boyle (as sheriff Pat Garrett) guns him down. As the story progresses, Billy the Kid starts remembering things from his previous lives. One of Boyle’s clients sets Billy loose into the mean streets of the 21st century, where he struggles to seize control of the myths in his ROM.

Finally I’m delighted to announce that we have for sale the ebook edition of Gwyneth Jones’ excellent novel, Spirit. You can read my review of the book here.

New From Osier

~ Cheryl

I’m going to be offline quite a bit over the next couple of weeks because Kevin’s coming over for Bristolcon and a vacation. So as you don’t get too bored, I’m prepping a few posts in advance, mostly about what’s happening with the bookstore. This is the first one.

Osier Publishing have sent us Tea with the Demon by Isobel Herring. From the description it sounds like supernatural erotica. It’s the first book we’ve stocked where the publisher asked for an adult content warning.

Rolling Out The Thief

~ Cheryl

I spent some time last night and this morning uploading copies of The Thief’s Gamble to various online bookstores. Each time I do this, I am reminded of what a pain it is, and am more understanding of the various small publishers who don’t want to be bothered with my own store because it is yet another company to deal with. I try to make it easy for people by not demanding too much in the way of specific formats and procedures. Sadly all of the big boys have their own systems and procedures, and they are all different.

Anyway, Juliet is keeping an eye on things, and letting her readers know when the book appears in the various stores. I see that Nook and Kobo have been very swift. Robot Trading and Weightless Books should follow soon. And Amazon? Who knows. They are not easy to deal with. Fingers crossed everything will go smoothly this time, but there may be some angry blogging over the weekend.

New From Australia

~ Cheryl

We’ve been sent three new items for the bookstore from Australian writer, Simon Petrie.

First up is The Gordon Mamon Casebook, a short collection of humorous SF mysteries. When the book blurb says, “warning, may contain puns” I think you know pretty much what to expect.

Simon appears to be in a more serious mode with the novella, Flight 404. The blurb says:

To solve the mystery of the vanished passenger craft, Bougainvillaea, investigator/pilot Charmain Mertz must return to the conservative world of her boyhood.

Guess I’d better read that one.

Both of those titles come from Peggy Bright Books. In addition we have issue #54 of the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, which Simon edited.

Status Report

~ Cheryl

One of the things that happened over the weekend was that I got to see a bunch of people I haven’t seen in some time. Inevitably this lead to questions about how my life was going, and whether US Immigration had come to their senses. There’s not a lot of time at a party to go into detail, so I figured I should do a blog post.

The short version is that nothing has changed. I still can’t travel to the USA, or indeed anywhere in North America, without getting a special visa, and the likelihood of that being granted is not good. My best bets are a lottery win, or making a success of the publishing business.

So how is that latter going? Well, the bookstore still isn’t making a profit, but the monthly losses are not too terrible. I haven’t published any best sellers yet, but then I didn’t expect to. I’ve sent several payments to Juliet and Ben, and that makes me happy. I also have a busy schedule ahead with Colinthology due out in just over a week, four more novels to come from Juliet, and four from Lyda. The latter are crucial, because any argument regarding the business needs to rest on my ability to make money for US citizens.

Thanks to Jon Turney I have been able to do a little bit of SF-related work for someone who pays sensible fees. That means that Wizard’s Tower has a small amount of money in the bank for once, and I need to decide what to do with it.

I’m not planning to pay a fat advance for an undiscovered work of staggering genius. If I found such a book I’d do my best to place it with a bigger publisher.

I would like to get another issue or two of Salon Futura out. I still believe in the principle of paying people professional rates for top quality non-fiction, and maybe something like a quarterly schedule would be sustainable. The magazine was also a good advert for the store. But it can’t simply be a cost center. I need to be able to get some money in from it. And you can’t use something like Kickstarter easily for an ongoing project with no physical deliverables. So I need to think about this.

The other thing I want to do is put out some advertising for the bookstore. If more people knew about it, more people would buy books. The only reasons I haven’t done more already are a) lack of money, and b) I’m completely useless when it comes to graphics. I need ads created. If anyone is really good at that sort of thing, and would like to earn a bit of money, please get in touch.

The Thief Released

~ Cheryl

It is new book day at Wizard’s Tower. Well, not exactly new, of course, but a re-issue of a book that is now out of print, which is definitely fulfilling part of our mission statement.

The book in question is The Thief’s Gamble, the first of five volumes in Juliet E. McKenna’s tales of Einarinn series. The other four will follow in the coming months.

Juliet writes about the book, and the process of digitizing her backlist, here. I’d like to add my thanks to Elizabeth Campbell of Antimatter ePress for taking on the onerous task of converting paper books to quality digital books.

We’ve taken a decision to make the book available only through the Wizard’s Tower store for the first week. That’s because Juliet gets more money if you buy the book from us than if you go through those big commercial people. The book will be available on other stores, at the same price (give or take a few cents on exchange rates) as we are offering it next week for those folks who have no idea our store exists. It will be interesting to see how the experiment works.

A Filipino Book

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

One of the things I really love about ebooks is that the provide a cheap and effective way to distribute books all over the world. A case in point: I have just added a book from a Filipino publisher to the bookstore.

The book is How to Traverse Terra Incognita by Dean Francis Alfar. Alfar has had a couple of stories published in Western venues. In particular “The Kite of Stars” was in Strange Horizons and went on to be collected in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror #17 (2003), and in The Apex Book of World SF (2009). However, a quick look at his publication history shows that he’s very prolific, and most of his output has been published in the Philippines. So Flipside Publishing has made Alfar’s latest collection available as an ebook, and you can buy it here.

As you might expect, where the Philippines are involved, our friend Charles Tan has had a hand in the process. He has also got some fine blurbs for the book from people like John Grant, Ann VanderMeer, Lynne Thomas, Tansy Rayner Roberts and (in the book only) Rachel Swirsky. If Ann describes someone as a “wondrous storyteller” then we should sit up and take notice.

October Magazines

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

As we move inexorably into winter, the new issue of Clarkesworld comes to spread a little snow on our lives. Genevieve Valentine is on Europa. “A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones” tells of an attempt to build a colony on that icy moon of Jupiter. Kate Baker’s audio version appears to have got lost in the fog. Hopefully she’ll get back to us soon. Meanwhile Theodora Goss is much closer to home, finding out about life in “England Under the White Witch”. There at least, winter has indeed come. There are no obviously wintery references in Yoon Ha Lee’s “The Battle of Candle Arc”, but it does has space-faring moths.

In the non-fiction, Matthew Johnson talks abut Campbell’s Rule in “The Future, One Thing at a Time”. Jeremy interviews John Varley and talks about bacteria. In the Another Word column, Daniel Abraham talks about “Practicing Dissatisfaction”, by which he means the art of writing book reviews. He says some good stuff, though I might gently pick holes in it tomorrow if I’m not busy.

Neil’s editorial talks a bit more about sources of finance — in particular new books you’ll be able to buy. And the cover art is another fabulous piece of work by Julie Dillon. One of the ways you can help the magazine is, of course, to buy it, like you can do here.

The October issue of Lightspeed is also in the store. The original SF includes a story by Robert Reed, which has me interested immediately. And the ebook exclusive novella — the content you can’t get for free online — is “Dragonfly” by Ursula K. Le Guin. So you should buy it, of course.

Finally on the subject of magazines, the new Locus has an article in it by Kevin and myself. It is basically a report on the WSFS Business Meeting from Chicago, so you’ll know most of what it says, but it is always an honor to be asked to write these things.

Offers from Book View Cafe

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

This week in the bookstore I have added a bunch of special offers from Book View Cafe. These are all bundles of books sold together at a discount. Mostly they are series, though there are a few others as well. All of them allow you to save money compared to buying the books independently. Here’s what we have so far:

Happy (cheaper) reading.

Coming Soon – The Thief’s Gamble

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

There’s a fair amount of book production going on hereabouts right now. Over the next coupe of months you should see three new releases from Wizard’s Tower. The first one is actually pretty much done. The only reason I’m not releasing it is that Juliet is very busy right now finalizing her new novel from Solaris and I want her to be able to participate in the PR process. In the meantime, however, here’s a pretty picture to keep you happy.

Thief's Gamble cover