2018 SBP x Locus

Mon 25 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Abbey Mei Otis, Andy Duncan, Claire G. Coleman, John Schoffstall, LCRW, Vandana Singh| Posted by: Gavin

Following up on my earlier 2018 wrap-up, I’d meant to post something near the start of February about the 2018 Locus Recommended Reading List but so it goes. The whole issue is worth digging into if you like weird or sff&h or genre fiction at all as between these reviewers they’ve tried to see everything that came out last year. Not everything is included in their write up but many are and I’m proud to say that 4 of our books and 3 stories we published in collections and one in LCRW were included.

I’m going to start with a lovely quote from Gary K. Wolfe and then put some reviews for each title:

2018 Locus Recommended Reading List

Andy Duncan · An Agent of Utopia
“An Agent of Utopia”, Andy Duncan (An Agent of Utopia)
“Joe Diabo’s Farewell”, Andy Duncan (An Agent of Utopia)

“Dying Light”, Maria Romasco Moore (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #37, 7/18)

Abbey Mei Otis · Alien Virus Love Disaster

John Schoffstall · Half-Witch

Vandana Singh · Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories
“Requiem”, Vandana Singh (Ambiguity Machines)

Readers can go and vote for their own favorites in the Locus Poll and Survey (deadline 4/15).

Reviews

Vandana Singh · Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories

“A major short story collection.” — Jonathan Strahan

“An essential short fiction collection in a year that saw many good ones. Singh’s superb work has appeared in a wide range of venues, and it is good to have a representative selection in one place.” — Graham Sleight (Ten books of the year)

John Schoffstall · Half-Witch

“Other highly recommended titles are Half-Witch from John Schoffstall, a traditional fantasy except that the sun orbits the world and God takes part as a not-very-helpful character . . .” – Laurel Amberdine

“Though billed as YA, had plenty for all to chew on in its vision of a magic-inflected Europe and a protagonist with a direct (if interference-riddled) line to God.” — Graham Sleight (Ten books of the year)

P.S. We just sold audio rights to Tantor on this title so listen out for that later this year.

Claire G. Coleman · Terra Nullius

“Searing.” — Gary K. Wolfe

Abbey Mei Otis · Alien Virus Love Disaster

“Abbey Mei Otis publishes in literary journals as well as SF magazines, so many of the weird SF and fantasy-infused stories in Alien Virus Love Disaster will be new and delightful for our readers.” — Tim Pratt

Andy Duncan · An Agent of Utopia

“Andy Duncan – in what might well be the collection of the year – invoked everyone from Sir Thomas More to Zora Neal Hurston in An Agent of Utopia, which also brought together some of his most evocative tales about the hidden corners of Americana, from an afterlife for Delta blues singers to the travails of an aging UFO abductee.” — Gary K. Wolfe

“. . . a book that showcased why he is a treasure.” — Jonathan Strahan

“An essential introduction to one of the great tellers of fantastic tall tales.” — Graham Sleight (Ten books of the year)

“Andy Duncan’s charming and affable stories abound with hidden depths, and An Agent of Utopia is no different, with a dozen stories, including a pair of originals that are generating a lot of buzz.” — Tim Pratt

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

“My very favorite story this year may have been another story from a veteran of both SF and Mystery: ‘Dayenu’, by James Sallis, from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. It’s an exceedingly odd and unsettling story, beautifully written, about a veteran of a war and his rehab – from injuries? Or something else done to him? And then about a journey, and his former partners. . . . The story itself a journey somewhere never unexpected.” — Rich Horton

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Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 39

Mon 25 Feb 2019 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

June 2019. 60 pages. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731579

Fiction, poetry, a little nonfiction (including a lovely recipe for pickled kumquats), and an absurd amount of hope and despair.

This is the issue in which we promised your neighbor’s secrets would be exposed. Your secrets too. The secrets, they have been exposed. Check CNN or your news purveyor of choice right now. Or look under that thing at the back of your fridge. The list of neighborhood secrets should be there on a very small piece of paper we are proud to have folded 12 times. Some people find the 9th through 12th folds difficult, but these wristlets, they really make the difference.

Reviews

“. . . there is some fine work here. ‘The Dynastic Arrangements of the Habsburgs, Washakie Branch’ by Felix Kent is a really odd story set in hotel in which a number of (apparently) cloned samples of European royalty stay, for the entertainment of the paying guests. That doesn’t seem to be a smashing success financially, and it’s a pain for the narrator, who has to keep the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns from causing too much trouble, and then deal with some guests who turn out to be plotting something awful . . . and who has her own personal past driving her. . . . but it’s quite original, and generally entertaining. There’s also a very short, quite effective, charming story by Eric Darby, ‘The Parking Witch’, about, well, a witch who can fix your parking problems.”
— Rich Horton, Locus

Table of Contents

fiction

Rosamund Lannin, The Lake House
Eliza Langhans, A Giant’s Heart
D. A. Xiaolin Spires, Fresh and Imminent Taste of Cucumbers
Anthony Ha, Late Train
Chloe N. Clark, Jumpers
Felix Kent, Dynastic Arrangements of the Habsburgs, Washakie Branch 38
Eric Darby, The Parking Witch
Jordan Taylor, Strange Engines
Audrey R. Hollis, How to be Afraid

nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, Sugar-Salt Time: A Love Story
Gavin J. Grant Possum, Not Playing

poetry

A. B. Robinson, The Will and Testament of François Villon
Robert Cooperman As They Row to the Killing Ground, Plaxis Considers His Partner, Meres

cover

Cynthia Yuen Cheng, “Gentrification”

Reviews

“The execution is deceptively simple, and leaves echoes of myth and mystery and questions about the nature of man. It is an excellent story.”
— Vernacular Books on Eliza Langhans’s story “A Giant’s Heart”

About

This is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet issue number 39, June 2019. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731579. Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is (usually) published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress @ gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw · Printed at Paradise Copies (paradisecopies.com · 413-585-0414). Subscriptions: $20/4 issues. Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO. LCRW is available as a DRM-free ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c.

About these Authors

Cynthia Yuan Cheng is a freelance cartoonist based in Los Angeles, CA. She strives to share hope and warmth through her illustrations and comics as she explores relationships, identity, and personal experience.

Chloe N. Clark’s work has appeared in Apex, Booth, Little Fiction, Uncanny, and more. She teaches multimodal communication, writes for Nerds of a Feather, and co-edits Cotton Xenomorph. Her chapbook The Science of Unvanishing Objects is available from Finishing Line Press and she can be found on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes.

Robert Cooperman’s latest collection is Draft Board Blues and his next, That Summer, is forthcoming. Cooperman won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry with In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains. His work has appeared in The Sewanee Review, North American Review, and California Quarterly.

Eric Darby earned engineering degrees from the University of Detroit-Mercy and an MFA from Syracuse University. His writing has appeared in Sentence, Mid-American Review, and several spoken word anthologies. He is currently parked in San Francisco.

Anthony Ha writes about media and technology for the news site TechCrunch. Love Songs for Monsters, a chapbook of his short stories, was published by Youth in Decline in 2014. He lives in Brooklyn.

Audrey R. Hollis, 2018 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, is an MFA candidate at Purdue University. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, the Los Angeles Review, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @audreyrhollis.

Felix Kent lives in Northern California.

Nicole Kimberling lives in Washington state and is the publisher of Blind Eye Books. Her books include Lambda Literary Award winner Turnskin. Her column has been running in LCRW since issue no. 27.

Eliza Langhans is a librarian and writer who lives in Western Massachusetts with her family.

The product of nine years in San Francisco and eight years in St. Paul, Rosamund Lannin has been reading and writing in Chicago for over a decade. These days, you can find her @rosamund most places on the Internet, co-hosting lady live lit show Miss Spoken, or in spirit anywhere magic and reality hold hands.

A. B. Robinson’s enthusiasms are for revolution and poetry, in that order. Their screaming Freudian id is François Villon, who also happens to be a French poet, thief, murderer, exile, grad student and miscreant, born on the day Jeanne d’Arc burned at the cross. A. B. Robinson’s life has not been nearly so exciting as Villon’s. Yet. They live in Holyoke with their dog.

D. A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Strange Horizons, Nature, Terraform, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Shoreline of Infinity, LONTAR, Mithila Review, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Eye to the Telescope, and numerous anthologies. Her stories are available or forthcoming in German, Vietnamese or Estonian translation. She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter and on her website: daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com.

Jordan Taylor has driven across the US three times, and lived in four different cities in as many years. She currently resides in Seattle, WA with her husband, their corgi, and too many books for one small apartment. Her short fiction has recently appeared in On Spec and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You can follow her online at jordanrtaylor.com, or on Twitter @JordanRTaylor13.

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Life Was So Wonderful

Tue 19 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Laurie J. Marks, Publication day| Posted by: Gavin

In 2004 I was still the science fiction and fantasy reviewer for BookPage and was very happy to see that Laurie J. Marks was about to publish her second Elemental Logic novel Earth Logic. I jumped on the opportunity to review it:

Laurie Marks’s rich and affecting new novel Earth Logic is the second book in her Elemental Logic series which began with Fire Logic (warmly reviewed here in May 2002). . . . Earth Logic is a thought-provoking and sometimes heartbreaking political novel which absorbingly examines the dynamics between two groups of people. Good bread, wine and friendships alone may not save the world, but they make the doing of it much more palatable.

At the end of 2010 Laurie’s agent contacted us with the news that rights to Fire Logic and Earth Logic were available and were we interested in them since we had published the third novel in the series, Water Logic?

Yes!

We started talking with the ever excellent Kathleen Jennings about covers for the whole series and we slowly moved to re-release them, first as ebooks, and now, with the publication of Air Logic in sight(!), in new print editions.

Every time I work on any of these four novels I am drawn once again into the stories within stories. Sometimes readers who don’t read fantasy novels ask why I love to read them and page after page these books provide such a strong answer. Here is a story of power held, relinquished, and shared. A story of families found, lost, made, and remade. A meeting of enemies who must learn to live with one another, or die trying. A story of those at the top, those at the bottom, and those that feed them. These are stories that were relevant when published and even more so now.

So on this cold day here in Western Massachusetts, where the temperature is definitely still below freezing — with all the pre-orders shipped, new review copies all sent out, and the book itself wending its way to your favorite indie bookstore — we raise a cup of tea to the (re)publication of Laurie J. Marks’s second Elemental Logic novel, Earth Logic.

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Earth Logic

Tue 19 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

February 19, 2019 · trade paper  · $16 · 9781618730930 | ebook ·  9781618730947 · Edelweiss

New edition with interlocking cover art by Kathleen Jennings now available.
Elemental Logic: Book 2
Spectrum Award winner

Fire Logic · Earth Logic · Water Logic · Air Logic

A thought-provoking sometimes heartbreaking novel which absorbingly examines the dynamics and power shifts between oppressed and oppressor.

The second book of Shaftal. The country has a ruler again, Karis, a woman who can heal the war-torn land and expel the invaders. But she lives in obscurity with her fractious found family. With war and disease spreading, Karis must act. And when Karis acts, the very stones of the earth sit up and take notice.

Read an excerpt. Listen to the author read Chapter 2 or “Raven’s Joke”

See the Map of Shaftal by Jeanne Gomoll.

Reviews

“With this follow-up to Fire Logic, Marks produces another stunner of a book. The powerful but subtle writing glows with intelligence, and the passionate, fierce, articulate, strong, and vital characters are among the most memorable in contemporary fantasy, though not for the faint of heart. Definitely for the thinking reader.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“The sequel to Fire Logic continues the tale of a woman born to magic and destined to rule. Vivid descriptions and a well-thought-out system of magic.”
— Library Journal

“Twenty years after the invading Sainnites won the Battle of Lilterwess, the struggle for the world of Shaftal is far from finished in Marks’s stirring, intricately detailed sequel to Fire Logic. . . . Full of love and humor as well as war and intrigue, this well-crafted epic fantasy will delight existing fans as surely as it will win new ones.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Rich and affecting. . . . A thought-provoking and sometimes heartbreaking political novel.”
— BookPage

“Intelligent, splendidly visualized, and beautifully written. Laurie Marks’s use of language is really tremendous.”
— Paula Volsky

“A dense and layered book filled with complex people facing impossible choices. Crammed with unconventional families, conflicted soldiers, amnesiac storytellers, and practical gods, the story also finds time for magical myths of origin and moments of warm, quiet humor. Against a bitter backdrop of war and winter, Marks offers hope in the form of various triumphs: of fellowship over chaos, the future over the past, and love over death.”
— Sharon Shinn

“A powerful and hopeful story where the peacemakers are as heroic as the warriors; where there is magic in good food and flower bulbs; and where the most powerful weapon of all is a printing press.”
— Naomi Kritzer

“Earth Logic is not a book of large battles and heart-stopping chases; rather, it’s more gradual and contemplative and inexorable, like the earth bloods who people it. It’s a novel of the everyday folk who are often ignored in fantasy novels, the farmers and cooks and healers. In this novel, the everyday lives side by side with the extraordinary, and sometimes within it; Karis herself embodies the power of ordinary, mundane methods to change the world.”
— SF Revu

“It is an ambitious thing to do, in this time of enemies and hatreds, to suggest that a conflict can be resolved by peaceable means. Laurie Marks believes that it can be done, and she relies relatively little on magic to make it work.”
— Cheryl Morgan, Emerald City

Praise for Fire Logic, Elemental Logic: Book 1

* “Marks has created a work that is filled with an intelligence that zings off the page. . . . This beautifully written novel includes enough blood and adventure to satisfy the most quest-driven readers.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A deftly painted story of both cultures and magics in conflict.” — Robin Hobb

Fire Logic and Earth Logic both received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award.

Cover art by Kathleen Jennings.

Laurie J. Marks (website) has published nine fantasy novels, including Dancing Jack, The Watcher’s Mask and the Elemental Logic series (Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air Logic). She has been writing since her childhood in California, inspired by the works of C.S. Lewis and Lloyd Alexander. Her books have been shortlisted for the James D. Tiptree/Otherwise Award, and have twice been awarded the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. Laurie J. Marks lives in Massachusetts with her wife, Deb Mensinger, and their Welsh corgi, Serendipity.

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Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Stars

Mon 18 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Sarah Pinsker, starred review| Posted by: Gavin

Such good news for next month’s release of Sarah Pinsker’s collection: a third starred review! This lovely review is courtesy of the fine folks at Booklist:

“Pinsker’s stories have murder houses that speak, dream children that emerge from the sea, and a car shaped like a narwal, but the heart of this debut collection lies in its people. The women protagonists, many of whom love women, are adapting to or resisting new ways of life: a punk musician insists on playing live and driving manually while her world depends on recorded immersive experiences and self-driving cars; a girl adjusts to a robotic grandmother as she and her father leave their home country; in ‘Wind Will Rove,’ a community that left Earth long ago asks why it still holds on so tightly to Earth’s history and art and whether it should let go of it entirely in order to embrace the new. A particular highlight is ‘In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,’ a story primarily about Millie’s impeding loss of her husband, where the sf gem at its core takes a backseat to the tree house George built with his children and to the question of whether he did his best to make the world a better place. This collection from an exciting new voice in speculative fiction is both haunting and hopeful.” — Leah von Essen

 

 

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Feb. 20: Abbey Mei Otis, Kelly Link, & Jordy Rosenberg

Wed 13 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Abbey Mei Otis, Kelly Link, Northampton & environs, readings| Posted by: Gavin

(from Forbes Library’s press release)

The third reading in the Forbes Library Writer in Reading Series “Our Work And Why We Do It” is Wednesday, February 20th, from 7-9pm in the Coolidge Museum at Forbes, featuring three brilliant fiction writers:

Kelly Link
author of “Get in Trouble”, “Magic for Beginners”,
“Stranger Things Happen” and more!

Abbey Mei Otis
visiting from Ohio and author of “Alien Virus Love Disaster”;
first reading from this collection in the area!

Jordy Rosenberg
author of “Confessions of the Fox”
(a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection)

~this event is FREE and Wheelchair Accessible~

Books by the authors will be available for purchase at the event!

(You can read more about the writers here on the library’s website and here on Facebook!)

This series features writers of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and memoir, and beneath these broad categories, constellations of subgenres and forms. The series is interested in exploring how writing relates to work, to a sense of a collective project that seeks to respond to the political and social forms that produce it. The series hopes to affirm the role of creative written work as a measure of response to the exigencies that shape our world.

I’ve been calling this reading In The Offing, an attempt to name a theme I feel captures the character these writers share. While diverse in formally adventurous ways, each carves a unique path toward futures portended in the murk and bright of the present or dredge different possibilities for histories buried in the past. They contain, in the richness of their visions and the lyricism of their articulations, a spirit that echoes Ernst Bloch in his demand for utopia: “that is why we go, why we cut new metaphysically constitutive paths, summon what is not, build into the blue, build ourselves into the blue, and there seek the true, the real, where the merely factual disappears…”

To learn more about the writers and their worlds, you can find a brief interview with Kelly Link from the MacArthur Foundation here, the title story from Abbey Mei Otis’ collection here (with an introduction by Dan Chaon), an interview with Jordy Rosenberg here, and an excerpt from his novel here.

Also, on February 7th, Jordy will be reading at UMASS Amherst as part of their Visiting Writers series! More info here.

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Arrival, OtherLife, Wounds

Mon 11 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., film, Kelley Eskridge, Nathan Ballingrud, Ted Chiang| Posted by: Gavin

Speaking of film and TV adaptations (as I sort of was a few days ago), I’m looking forward to seeing Babak Anvari’s new film Wounds which is based on Nathan Ballingrud’s story “The Visible Filth.” (Nathan is in the audience in the video from the Sundance film festival linked there.) Ok, so part of me can very much wait to see it. There’s a lot I don’t really like about horror movies; there are all these monsters and the insides of people keep getting moved to the outside, ugh.

For a hot second, before Saga/Simon & Schuster swooped in and scooped it up, it looked like we’d be publishing Nathan’s forthcoming second collection, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border or Hell (previously titled The Atlas of Hell) which includes “The Visible Filth.” I do like that new subtitle. Nathan is a tremendous craftsman building horrifying palaces of terror. May the book and the film terrify millions of people!

If we had published that book, it would have been the third film or TV adaptation from a book we’ve been associated with that actually made it to film. Curiously enough, the two previous films were both books that came out in 2002 and which we reprinted within three months of one another:

— Kelley Eskridge’s Solitaire, (the basis for the film OtherLife). This was Kelley’s first novel which came out in 2002. Our paperback & ebook edition came out in January 2011.

— Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others (the title story being the basis for Arrival). This was Ted’s first collection. It was first published in 2002. We picked up the rights and had it in print for about five years from October 2010 before Vintage took it off our hands so that they could very quickly sell a couple of hundred thousand copies when the film came out. Nice. After a seventeen-year wait, Ted’s second collection, Exhalation, comes out later this year.

There are two more books we’ve published (that we know of) which are being worked up into adaptations. Fingers crossed! As ever, I believe a film or TV show will happen when I’m sitting in front of the screen watching it. Up until then there are too many random factors which may make it all fall apart.

There are so many ones-that-got-away stories of stories of books we’ve published almost being adapted. I don’t know how many times I picked up the phone to someone asking me about Ayize Jama-Everett’s Liminal books. Maybe once the fourth book comes out. But still, two films and almost a third, it’s a hell (cf Wounds) of a lot more than I ever expected when we started out. Here’s to more in future years.

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Challenging SF

Thu 7 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Claire G. Coleman| Posted by: Gavin

Rachel Hill’s review of Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius on Strange Horizons cheered me up immensely. Here’s a reviewer who has dug into the book, enjoyed it, and pulled up many fascinating threads. Here’s a line, but if you have a minute, read the whole thing:

“Coleman’s work challenges SF to be better, revitalising and compelling the genre to realise its political importance as an incubator for counterfutures, alternative imaginaries and as a home for the people yet to come.”

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Boskone 2019

Tue 5 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., conventions, Elizabeth Hand, Karen Joy Fowler, Laurie J. Marks, Vandana Singh| Posted by: Gavin

If all goes as planned, from Feb. 15-17 you’ll be able to find me behind a table in the Dealers Room at Boskone in Boston. I haven’t been for a while — I think since our kid was oh-so-tiny and where a very kind Genevieve Valentine let Kelly go take the kid for a nap in her room, so kind!

This year Elizabeth Hand is the guest of honor so we’ll be bringing along copies of her first Cass Neary novel (where’s the TV show for that?) Generation Lost as well as her collection, Errantry. The latter just came back from the printer so if you like your books fresh off the ye olde bigge printing machine get your copy now.

Besides Liz, this year’s Hal Clement Science Speaker will be Vandana Singh, and, again if all goes as planned (weather &c. willing) we will have copies of the second printing of Vandana’s Philip K. Dick Award finalist(!) Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories. Nothing like an in-person appearance to get a book back to the printer. That’s also what’s happened with Karen Joy Fowler’s What I Didn’t See and Other Stories. I was looking at the AWP schedule (in Portland, OR, in March) and realized we were running very, very low of Karen’s book and since she’ll be doing a signing at our AWP booth that Saturday morning off that book went to the printer, too.

Three reprints, three fab writers, three good books.

Of course we’ll also have our 2 new reprints in Laurie J. Mark’s Elemental Logic series as well as lots of other good books, some old boots (seeing if anyone is still reading), LCRW, and some shiny things. Stop by and say hi if you’re there!

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2018 By the Numbers

Mon 4 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bestsellers, Books, ebooks, Publishing| Posted by: Gavin

While collecting info and working on 2018 taxes and royalties, I thought it would be fun (for me at least) to look at some 2018 sales numbers — or at least some relative numbers. This is still true:

Congratulations to my friend @cassieclare whose new book QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS just sold more copies in one week than we’ve sold all year! (SO FAR! You never know, right?) What fun—can’t wait to read: https://t.co/olnLAe9NCa pic.twitter.com/vQy2Ac2Oxo

— Small Beer Press (@smallbeerpress) December 17, 2018

In terms of sales, 2018 seems to have been our best year yet — thank you authors, booksellers, and writers! And since 2017 when we raised LCRW pay rates to $0.03/word for fiction subscriptions have started going up again. Subscription choices R us.

What had been a resurgence of print sales in the last few years dropped off a little as ebooks rose to just less than a third of total sales. Here’s a chart comparing our print to ebook sales from 2010 to 2018. We’ve been selling ebooks since at least 2005 and you can see that in 2010 print still held about 90% of sales. That dropped to 50% by 2014 — which is why lots of people were very worried about the future. I’m glad to see the rebalancing that’s happened in the last couple of years. However, I don’t think too much can be made from this chart as Small Beer sales aren’t a good snapshot of publishing in general: our sales volumes are too low, publishing schedules too irregular, and too easily impacted by variations in the sales of one or two books.

Of those books sold, here are our 2018 Top 10 Bestsellers

1. Sarah Rees Brennan · In Other Lands (2017)
2. Kij Johnson · At the Mouth of the River of Bees (2012)
3. Ursula K. Le Guin · Words Are My Matter (2016)
4. * Vandana Singh · Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories
5. * John Schoffstall · Half-Witch
6. * Claire G. Coleman · Terra Nullius
7. * Andy Duncan · An Agent of Utopia
8. * Abbey Mei Otis · Alien Virus Love Disaster
9. Nathan Ballingrud · North American Lake Monsters (2013)
10. Kelly Link · Stranger Things Happen (2001)

Notes:

1. This bestseller list is made up of net sales (gross sales minus returns) of our print and ebook editions.
2. These are not NPD/Bookscan figures or sales from Consortium our distributor.
3. This list does not include any ebooks that were included in Humble Bundle or StoryBundles.
4. This list does not include copies sold to book clubs.
5. I’ve put a * by the five 2018 titles that made this list: new books keepin’ the lights on!
6. Hey, doubters: short story collections sell.

Our 2018 bestseller came out in 2017: Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands is a powerhouse. We have a paperback coming in September which I expect will be our 2019 bestseller.

Kij Johnson’s collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees came roaring back in at #2 due to thousands of copies being picked up to go with a textbook which contains her unforgettable story “Ponies.”

#3, ach.

Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters continues to do well — I imagine partly because of the upcoming film based on one of his stories (not included in this book) and partly because NALM has scared the heck out of a reader they then pass it on to scare the heck out of a friend.

And coming in at #10 is the first book we published and one of the main reasons we get to keep publishing books, Kelly’s perennially solid selling debut Stranger Things Happen.

I saw that in a previous post like this [2011 · 2012 · 2013 — I know I was too depressed in the last couple of years to do these] I’d also noted which books were included in the annual Locus Recommended Reading list, so here are our 2018 titles on the just-released list, alphabetically by title:

1. Abbey Mei Otis · Alien Virus Love Disaster
2. Vandana Singh · Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories
3. Andy Duncan · An Agent of Utopia
4. Maria Romasco Moore, “Dying Light,” (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #37)
5. John Schoffstall · Half-Witch

Did we really just publish 3 collections all beginning with A? Weird. And look at all that black and orange below.

Not everything we published made the list, but it was a good showing none the less. Congratulations to all the writers on the list, it is a great thing to be read. Feel free to vote for these books and any other faves in the Locus survey. And to those authors not on the list, next time.

Here’s our plan for 2019 and 2020, should we all survive, is looking good. Thanks for reading this and any (or all!) of the books and zines we published in 2018.

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