Wizard’s Tower

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.

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.

Champagne Time

~ Cheryl

In amongst the misery that always accompanies snowfall in Southern England, here is something that cheered me up. Yesterday I was doing the month end accounts for Wizard’s Tower and I noticed that The Thief’s Gamble by Juliet McKenna had become the first book of ours to sell over 1000 copies. I am, of course, very pleased. Go pour yourself a glass of something, Juliet, you’ve earned it.

Introducing Airship 2

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This year I am trying to devote a bit more time to Wizard’s Tower. We have the new Juliet McKenna novel due very soon now, and I have another project I am hoping very much will happen. Anthologies have been a bit complicated due to Jo & Roz being engaged in a protracted house moving process. That, however, is finally sorting itself out, and we have decided to do a second steampunk book.

Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion 2: Rail, Sea and Sky, as the subtitle suggests, will have a theme of transport. Brunel’s original vision for Bristol was to be a transit interchange where rail passengers from London could transfer onto luxury liners to cross the Atlantic. Since his time, Bristol has become famous for aircraft manufacture. And because this is steampunk there is no reason why Bristol could not become a major spaceport with aetherflyers leaving for the British colonies on the Moon, Mars and Venus.

Adventure can come in many ways. Trains can be robbed by masked automata; ships can be menaced by a giant kraken; airships can be hijacked by foreign agents; and aetherflyers can be raided by Venusian pirates. As with Airship 1, we are hoping that contributors will take the opportunity to interrogate Victorian society and question the conservative values for which it has become notorious.

We have got a lot of the old gang back together for book two. Jo and Roz will be editing it again, Andy Bigwood is hopefully doing the cover, and we have confirmed stories from Ken Shinn, Ian Millsted, Pete Sutton, Scott Lewis, John Hawkes-Reed, Andy Bigwood, Roz Clarke, Deborah Walker, Piotr Åšwietlik, Jonathan L Howard, Stephen Blake and, er, me. What can I say? I had a totally batshit idea; Jo & Roz liked it.

That leaves us at least 3 spaces for additional stories. We may take more if we get a lot of great submissions. We can only afford to pay £50 per story, so it is nowhere near professional rates, but this series is all about encouraging new writing so who knows what we’ll discover.

For full details of the submission guidelines, deadlines, etc., see the Wizard’s Tower website.

The Green Man is Coming

~ Cheryl

Well, technically his heir.

Juliet McKenna mentioned on her blog today that she has a brand new novel scheduled for this year. It will be called The Green Man’s Heir, and Juliet describes it as, “a modern fantasy, drawing on the folklore of the British Isles, and prompted by looking at urban fantasy from a few different angles.” I am delighted that Wizard’s Tower will be publishing it.

Obviously McKenna fans out there will be asking, “when will it be available?” Well I have done the ebook (subject to proofing by Juliet and a few little things that need adding). The paper version will take a bit longer because there’s a whole lot more involved in producing a paper book. Once Juliet and I have a timeline in place we’ll let you know.

Congratulations, Juliet!

~ Cheryl

No, this is not about the VATMOSS stuff, Juliet McKenna has had some other good news. She has been asked to join the jury for the World Fantasy Awards.

As she explains here, this is a lot of work. Yes, you get tons of free books, but you have to read them. Judging the Tiptree requires one heck of a lot of reading, though nothing too much more than I got through when I was running Emerald City. Judging World Fantasy is much worse because you have many different categories, all of which are judged by the same jury. So it is a huge honor, but also a huge responsibility.

This does not necessarily mean that there won’t be anything happening on the fiction front. After all, River Kingdom came out over a year ago. We might still be able to make something happen in 2018.

VATMOSS – Victory?

~ Cheryl

It has been a long time since I had to write about the nightmare of the EU’s VT changes on cross-border digital sales, but thanks to very hard work by a number of people, including Juliet McKenna, we now have a satisfactory resolution. As Juliet reports here, as of January 2019 there will be an exemption for companies that do less than €10,000 worth of digital trading per year.

Huge thanks are due to Juliet and all of those who helped here (and are listed in her blog post).

So what does this mean? Well, in theory as of January 2019 the Wizard’s Tower bookstore can re-open for direct sales. We have plans. We hope you will like them.

On the other hand, by that time the UK could be out of the EU with a no deal Brexit and Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg as Prime Minister, in which case I will have far more to worry about than VAT.

Cat Out Of Bag

~ Cheryl

Yesterday Juliet McKenna did a blog post talking about how Ibsen might have intended Hedda Gabler to be black. I haven’t had a chance to follow up on that, though it does sound fascinating. However, at the bottom of the post she mentions a few other things she has been up to, including this:

We’re heading into the final stages of preparing The Green Man’s Heir for publication. This is a modern fantasy novel that will be coming soon from Wizard’s Tower Press.

So, er, yes. This is something that Juliet and I have been talking about for some time. I’ve been leaving her to get on with it at her own pace. I have no timeline for it as yet. When she’s ready, I will progress it through the publication process as fast as I can. As and when I am able to give dates I will do so. I’m very much looking forward to it.

A Day at the Seaside

~ Cheryl


This afternoon Jo Hall had a signing at the delightful Books on the Hill store in Clevedon. Being a loyal publisher, I went along to support her. This also gave me a reason to visit Clevedon, a seaside town on the North Somerset coast just south of Bristol.

One reason for wanting to go is that the town is the birthplace of Jan Morris, a pioneering trans woman and brilliant writer. I don’t think there is a blue plaque or anything. Probably you can’t get one until you are dead. But Jan deserves one.

Clevedon is most famous, however, for its pier, which the poet, Sir John Betjeman, once described as the most beautiful in the world. As you’ll see from the picture above, it is a funny-looking old thing. It was built in Victorian times when steamships were still a common means of getting along and across the Severn Estuary. (If you look under all those clouds you can just make out Wales, and with better focus you’d be able to see Newport.)

Perhaps the oddest thing about the pier is its height. Why, you might think, is it perched so far above the water? Well, it isn’t. Clevedon has a maximum tidal range of 47 feet, second only to the Bay of Fundy in Canada. It ought to be a good place to build a tidal power installation, but George Osborne decided it would be better to borrow billions from the Chinese to pay the French to build a new nuclear station down the coast at Hinkley Point instead. Presumably Brexit will put an end to all that and the government will re-open some coal mines instead. Get all those Welsh people off benefits and back down the pits. That’ll teach them to vote Labour, eh?

Which reminds me, my colleague Yaz did a great show on Wednesday, and among here guests were some people from Coal Action talking about this campaign. Aberthaw power station directly affects the air quality in Bristol, so it is a matter of concern to us as well as to people in Glamorgan.

Introducing #Piracity Music Week

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

What ever else you might say about pirates, I think we can all agree that they love to sing. With that in mind, I’ll be spending this week tweeting links to songs for and about pirates. Hopefully you folks will join in too. Just tweet a link to your favorite pirate song, using the #Piracity hashtag, and I’ll include it in the final round-up.

To kick things off, here is one of my favorite bands, Dreadzone, with “Captain Dread”.

A Virtual Pirate Party

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Thanks to some conversations during Eurocon, the lovely people at The Future Fire have offered to run a virtual pirate party this coming weekend to help raise awareness for the Piracity crowdfunding campaign. Details are available here.

I’m going to be very busy towards the end of the week with Trans Day of Remembrance things. Thankfully, because the official day falls on a Sunday, everyone seems to be scheduling events for earlier in the week. Come the weekend I am going to be in need of something cheerful to think about.

Of course the Piracity campaign is ongoing. Tomorrow we’ll have an update from Eugene Byrne about some of Bristol’s pirate connections. Hopefully we will have made it to 20% funded before then. You can pledge here.

River Kingdom Availability

~ Cheryl

River Kingdom cover - Ben Baldwin
Copies of Shadow Histories of the River Kingdom are available through all of the usual channels now. Links are provided here.

Amazon will probably tell you that the book is out of stock and will take weeks to re-order. That’s because they do that to all small presses who don’t print through CreateSpace. They can get the book from our printers very quickly if they want to.

UK readers may prefer to buy the print edition from Tangent Books rather than Amazon. Turnaround will be a few days until I can get some stock to Richard, which I will do as soon as I get back from Barcelona.

The other thing I’d like you to do is go into your local bookstore and ask them to order the book. They should be able to do so very easily. I know that Mr. B’s has ordered some in, and if they found it in wholesale catalogues any other store can too. This goes for people in North America as well. The book is available for printing in the USA, so it should be no more expensive to get it than it is here. Sorting out printing in Australia is on my list of things to do.

If you are going to be at Eurocon, I will have some copies with me. If you want one, tell me, because I can’t carry that many and I don’t want to run out.

Some #Piracity FAQs

~ Cheryl

I have posted a bunch of FAQs on the Piracity campaign page (go here, scroll to the bottom).

The most important stuff is about the size of the final book, and how the money will be used. As I say in the FAQ, the plan is for 18 stories of not more than 7,000 words. If everyone maxes out that’s 126,000 words, which is a pretty substantial book. I haven’t made that a specific campaign promise because a whole variety of factors may prevent us from doing exactly that. As for the money, most of it will go to pay the authors, printers and Kickstarter. We’ll need a cover, and I want to pay Roz and Jo as well. I’m not going to get any money until the project makes a profit, which I doubt will happen until well after publication.

#Piracity on the BBC

~ Cheryl

This is a bit of a shaggy dog story. Bear with me, please.

One of the big local news items in Bristol this month has been the story of Ray Webber who is publishing his first collection of poetry at the ripe old age of 93. (The book, High On Rust, is being published by my friend Richard Jones through his company, Tangent Books.) John Darvall, who presents the mid-morning show on Radio Bristol, decided to see if he could find any other local literary geniuses in the city, and asked people to call in if they wanted to get published.

I knew nothing about this, because I was busy preparing to give some lectures to a gender studies class at Bath Spa University yesterday morning. However, I got email from Becky Walsh. I know Becky through the women’s network in local radio, and specifically because she was down to chair the Festival of Literature event I was speaking at today. Being a kind and supportive sister, Becky emailed all of us on the panel about John’s plans for the show.

This was too good an opportunity to miss. I phoned up Radio Bristol straight away and gave them the Piracity pitch. They sounded interested, so I got back to doing lecture prep, put the show on to listen to, and waited for a call.

It was a great show. John played some fabulous music (James Brown, y’all) and his other topic of the day, home care for the elderly, was really well done. It did, of course, bring to mind the panel on care for ageing LGBT people I chaired on Monday. As John clearly showed, straight people have quite enough trouble.

John got into talking to people about getting published around 11:30, and spoke to a couple of people. Then he had one of those things where a caller is so good you can’t ignore them, and went back to the home care story. In his final hour he spoke to a woman who got married to the man of her dreams but soon after found herself nursing him through a terminal illness. It is a great piece of radio, and I can quite see why John abandoned the publication issue. I would have done too.

By this time I had left home, because I had things I needed to do in Bath before the lectures. No phone call came, so I assumed that was that. Hey, it was a long shot. But this morning as we were chatting before the panel Becky asked me if I had heard John mention my project on the show.

Wait, what???

And he did. You can listen to it here. The bit about me comes in around the 2:50 mark, just after Feargal Sharkey’s “A Good Heart”. It is a bit garbled, but at the end John asks his producer she can get me in to talk more about the project.

I have no idea if this will happen. I know what live radio is like. Other news stories may pop up that are more interesting. But I have pinged John on Twitter and if I do hear from him and we can agree on a date I’ll be delighted.

Watch this space, as they say.

How To Help #Piracity Without Spending Money

~ Cheryl

cherylkevin
One day in: so far so good. We’ve had a bunch of backers for Piracity. If we get that much in pledges every day then we should fund.

However, a month is a very long time in Internetland, and interest in projects goes up and down very rapidly. To keep the project going, we need attention.

Obviously some of won’t be interested in the book, or you are short of money, or whatever. That’s entirely understood. But you can still help by signal-boosting on social media. Every tweet, share or whatever helps.

In view of that, today I launched what I hope will be a fun thing: Dress Like A Pirate Week. With Halloween coming I figure that lots of people will be into costuming. What I want people to do is post pictures of their pirate costumes with the #Piracity hashtag. Fingers crossed, that will generate a bit of interest.

To kick things off I am contributing the picture above. It shows Captain Standlee and I at the notorious “Worst World Fantasy Convention Ever” (so called by the World Fantasy Board because we encouraged Halloween costumes) in San José in 2009.

For those too young to remember such things, Kevin is taking the part of the Captain of the cruise liner, WSFS Armadillo, which was the spaceship we created as part of our time running Events for the 2005 Worldcon. Technically I was first officer on the ship, but I never got a uniform and anyway I am much more comfortable as a space pirate.

And for those interested in such things the jacket is from Warehouse. I loved it so much I hunted all over the country for a shop with one in my size, finally finding it in Birmingham. The hat is from the Pirate Supply Store on Valencia Street in San Francisco which I miss terribly. Aloysious the Squid is not in the picture because I hadn’t met him yet.

Introducing Piracity

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Piracity
Well, here we go, wayyyyy out of the comfort zone. Wizard’s Tower has launched its first Kickstarter project.

What does that mean? I means I get to publish a book that pays professional rates, and that means that Jo and Roz get to work with some top class authors. But we very much hope we’ll have some new and up-coming writers too, because we are looking for a specific mix of contributors.

Piracity is, in some ways, a follow-up to Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion. That is, it is a book that uses Bristol’s history and will feature local writers. It is not steampunk. As you must have guessed, it is about pirates. Arrr!

But, as I explain in the mortifyingly embarrassing video that I made for the Kickstarter campaign, you can’t write about pirates and Bristol without writing about the Caribbean, and therefore we are not just looking for local writers, we are looking for Caribbean writers too. We have three very good ones signed up, and we are hoping to get more.

The upshot of all this is that I will be saying Arrrr! rather a lot in the coming months. You will get heartily sick of That Hat, and of Aloysious the Squid. I may get fed up of rum. The campaign will run through the whole of November and may end up with something rather fun for locals. Can’t tell you about that one yet.

Along the way, to keep people interested, there will be updates. Karen Lord has promised me something about rum. Eugene Byrne will be writing about Bristol’s piratical history. And because we cannot ignore these things Dr. Olivette Otele will be writing about Bristol and the slave trade. If anyone else has a good idea for an update, do get in touch. If we raise enough money I may be able to pay to include them in the book.

Of course Halloween is right around the corner, which is one reason why we are launching now. You can guess what that means, can’t you. More about that later in the week.

In the meantime, please tell all of your friends. We do need to get this thing funded.

River Kingdom Availability Update

~ Cheryl

Having made the paper edition of Shadow Histories of the River Kingdom available for pre-order, Amazon appears to have withdrawn it again. I’m assuming it will come back in a few days when it hits the publication date.

In the meantime they have put the Kindle edition up for pre-order. You can also pre-order it from Google who are running a pre-order offer. Kobo apparently has a large backlog in getting books on sale, and Nook doesn’t seem to want to do pre-orders. I’ll update this page with links as and when things change.

As a reminder, there will be copies available at BristolCon, Eurocon and Novacon. If you want to be sure of getting one, please tell me and I’ll reserve one for you. (That’s especially true of Eurocon as I won’t be able to carry many copies.)

River Kingdom on Amazon

~ Cheryl

Shadow Histories of the River Kingdom
Those of you keen to get hold of a copy of the new Juliet McKenna book, Shadow Histories of the River Kingdom, can now find it available to pre-order on Amazon. The US page is here, the Canadian page is here, and the UK page is here. Doing something about Australian availability is on my list.

I was hoping to have a non-Amazon option, but sadly life appears to have got in the way of that.

Of course if you are going to be at BristolCon, Eurocon or Novacon you can get a copy direct from me, which is a win-win-win because you get the book cheaper and both Juliet and I get more of the money. BASFA members, I’ll be getting a box of them shipped to Kevin so you’ll be able to get it from him.

Ben Baldwin tells me that he’s happy to do signed A4 prints of his work at £10 a pop, presumably plus postage. That includes the four Aldabreshin Compass covers as well as River Kingdom. More details can be found at his website. We are talking to Sophie about prints of the map as well.

And because any excuse to re-post this is a good excuse, this is the art I’m talking about.

River Kingdom full cover

River Kingdom Map