LCRW: Book of the Week

Wed 8 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on LCRW: Book of the Week | Posted by: Gavin

Hey! Guess which zine is the library bingo winner this week? LCRW! Zebulon Wimsatt of Concord Public Library wrote up LCRW for the Concord Insider’s “Book of the Week” feature:

“But perhaps the greatest joy of LCRW’s is the rather left-field work on display, even and especially from these established authors. Le Guin contributes poems to LCRW no. 16; to no. 26, Ted Chiang gives an essay on folk biology, memory, and whither science fiction should aspire; to issue no. 6, Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club, contributes the story ‘Heartland,’ about a fast-food worker in The Land of Oz. . . . Bonus local flavor: Lady Churchill’s was first sold out of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop (then of Newberry Street in Boston, now of 1 Lee Hill Road in Lee). One of the shop’s proprietors is the novelist Vincent McCaffrey, and his A Slepyng Hounde to Wake (from, you guessed it, Small Beer Press) is available on our shelves. It’s about a bookseller who solves murders.

Read the whole column here and borrow LCRW from you local library through Hoopla here — and visit AVH online or in Lee.

   

 


Spring Zines & Postcards

Thu 2 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Comments Off on Spring Zines & Postcards | Posted by: Gavin

I just added the zines Kelly and Ursula made in March to the site: Horoscope Stories, I Hear You’re Working on a Novel, Writing Rules, & Monster Land, as well as the Horoscope Postcards made from Ursula’s illustrations of Kelly’s stories. All the info is on this page:

Spring zines


And Go Like This on Edelweiss

Wed 1 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Comments Off on And Go Like This on Edelweiss | Posted by: Gavin

Taboo cover - click to view full sizeReviewers, booksellers, librarians, bloggers, et al, I just added an uncorrected advance reading copy of John Crowley’s November 2019 collection And Go Like This: Stories to Edelweiss for downloading and reading.

Also available there (at least until the publication date for Air Logic): Laurie J. Marks’s four Elemental Logic novels — Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air — as well as our award-winning September drop-in title Taboo by Kim Scott.


Just Added: Taboo

Thu 11 Apr 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on Just Added: Taboo | Posted by: Gavin

Taboo cover - click to view full sizeEagle-eyed readers of this website might note we added a new forthcoming title today — woohoo!

And also, hey, wait, it’s a September title being added in April, that’s a bit soon, isn’t it? Yes, it absolutely is! But when Kim Scott’s novel Taboo was submitted to us we started a countdown to get this book out asap because 1) it’s an incredible read, and while 2) Kim Scott is the keynote speaker at this month’s American Association of Australian Literary Studies conference in Fairbanks, Alaska, there are also plans to bring him back to the USA in time for the publication of Taboo.

Taboo is the latest novel from Scott, the first Australian writer of Indigenous Australian ancestry to win the Miles Franklin Award. He received it in the year 2000 for his first novel Benang (a joint winner with Thea Astley’s Dryland) and then again in 2011 for his novel That Deadman Dance. Taboo itself received four major Australian literary awards worth AU$80,000.

Taboo is a tremendous novel, with a full range of voices from contemporary Australia. From rural and small town to inner city life, from prisoners and those recently released to young women and men exploring the world for the first time, Scott gives them all voice and his enthusiasm for this life and this planet we are all living on carries the novel from the first titanic images of a runaway truck barreling through a small town all the way through. It’s a novel that threads hard paths of history and violence between the settlers and indigenous peoples of Australia and their descendants in a way that will bring hope in these days when governments are propounding violence as the answer in itself. It made me laugh out loud and hold my breath in wonder and there are moments when the world in the page is as weird as the world I see around me.

We’re sending out the first review copies this week and will have it out and grabbable by you before you can say, wait, summer’s barely begun!


OP

Wed 10 Apr 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on OP | Posted by: Gavin

The rights are being reverted on a couple of novels (i.e. going OP or out of print) by Sean Stewart so pick them up here this week if you’re tempted:

Perfect Circle

Perfect Circle cover - click to view full size

and

Mockingbird

Mockingbird cover - click to view full size

One note about the two covers: that’s my hand on Perfect Circle and those are Carol Emshwiller’s hands on Mockingbird!


Deactivated

Mon 8 Apr 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

The Small Beer Press Facebook page has been deactivated. Here’s my twitter and the opt-in only occasional email newsletter.

In other updates: we’ve acquired a new book, we’re about to acquire another, and we are flooded with submissions — still always open especially for novels and collections by women and writers of color.


Strangers in Strange Lands Bundle

Fri 5 Apr 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Strangers in Strange Lands Bundle | Posted by: Gavin

Vandana Singh’s Philip K. Dick finalist Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories is one of a dozen books in the latest Storybundle, this one titled Strangers in Strange Lands and dedicated to the memory of the fierce, kind, excellent human being known as Vonda McIntyre. We sold out of Vandana’s book at AWP, and someone just hit me up to have her on their podcast, which is testimony to how far-reaching her writing is. If you’re not sure about picking up the paperback — now in its second printing — here’s an easy way to try the ebook:


AWP 2019, #8046

Mon 25 Mar 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | 2 Comments | Posted by: Gavin

Later this week we’ll be one of a million publishers and journals and writing programs taking part in the bookfair at the annual AWP Conference.

I’ll be at Booth 8046 most of the time; Kelly will be there sometimes (see panels below and the next item), and our kid will be with us, swimming, living in Powell’s if she can, reading under the table, or selling zines . . . !

Zines?

Due to shipping snafus on my part — ugh, everything delayed by short term sickness, all gone now, phew — some of our books won’t be on the table until Friday, darn it, so Kelly and Ursula went into overdrive and made some zines:

And here are a few things to potentially add to your sched. We will have copies of books by Kelly, Karen, Juan, and Abbey at their table signings.

Say hi if you’re there!

Thursday March 28
1:30 – 2:45 pm
B117-119, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1

R224A. Light is the Left Hand of Darkness: A Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. (,  ,  ,  ,  Kelly Link) “Truth,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, “is a matter of the imagination.” In 2018, one of America’s greatest science fiction writers passed on, leaving behind a library of literary and social achievements. Through her imaginative narratives, she scrutinized politics, gender, and the environment, creating alternate worlds and new societies as a means to convey deeper truths about our own. This panel celebrates her influential work and pays tribute to her legacy.

Friday March 29

11:00 – 11:30am
Kelly Link
Table signing, #8046

4:30 – 5:45 pm
F149, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1

F310. Speculative Fiction, Genre, and World-building in the Creative Writing Classroom. (,  ,  ,  ,  ) With more and more writers interested in speculative fiction, magical realism, and genre, how can workshops, teachers, and programs embrace all these forms? Panelists who teach in the Clarion Writers Workshop, UCLA Extension Programs, MFAs, and undergraduate programs discuss specific approaches to teaching, including speculative fiction in literary fiction workshops, classes and programs tailored for genre forms, and guiding students to build sound, imaginative, and diverse worlds.

Saturday March 30

10:30 – 11:00am
Karen Joy Fowler
Table signing, #8046

11:00 – 11:30am
Juan Martinez
Table signing, #8046

1:30 – 2:45 pm
B117-119, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1

S219. Getting Home: Writing & Publishing Debut POC Story Collections. (,  ,  ,  ) Finding a home for a story collection is hard. It’s harder still for people of color writing about worlds bypassed by the larger reading public. This panel features debut authors whose collections explore what it means to speculate on racialized experience in the US, Malaysia, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. They discuss how perceptions of identity wind through issues of craft and cultural expectations: What do readers seek in their work? To what degree do authors fulfill or frustrate assumptions?

3:00pm to 3:30pm
Abbey Mei Otis
Table signing, #8046


Everything Falls into the Sea

Tue 19 Mar 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Everything Falls into the Sea | Posted by: Gavin

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea cover - click to view full sizeHey hey, it’s new book day! You have to wait 6 short months for her first novel but today it’s Happy Publication Day to Sarah Pinsker whose debut collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea we have been looking forward to seeing out in the world.

Sarah’s been busy in the run up to publication and you’ll find her all over ye internets today (i.e. interview by A. C. Wise · Octavia Butler, Woody Guthrie, and other classics that inspired my debut” · Five Books That Gave Me Unreasonable Expectations for Post-High School Life · 6 Books) and there’ll be more of that in the next few days.

What’s Sarah up to tonight? She is launching her book tonight at the Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore!

Ok, so I’m not in Baltimore and you may not be either so what can you do?

You can listen to Liberty Hardy and María Cristina talk about the “jawdropping” Sooner or Later on Bookriot’s All the Books (now with T-shirt…!) and catch up with Sarah’s chat with Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan on the Coode Street Podcast.

If you can get to Baltimore in the next few hours you can get to that launch (yay!). If not, how about you catch her on tour:

March 19, 7 p.m. The Ivy Bookshop, Baltimore, MD
March 29, 6 p.m. Malaprop’s Bookstore, Asheville, NC
— in conversation with Alexandra Duncan
March 30, 6 p.m. Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC
March 31, 5 p.m., The Cave c/o Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC
April 24, 7 p.m. Charm City Spec series, Bird in Hand, Baltimore, MD
May 19, 5 p.m. Skylight Books, Los Angeles, CA
— with Rebecca Roanhorse
May 24-27, Balticon, Baltimore, MD
June 6, Barnes & Noble, NYC (Best of Asimov’s celebration)
July 12-14, Readercon, Quincy, MA
Sept. 18, 7 p.m. KGB Fantastic Fiction Reading, New York, NY

There will probably be some additional readings in there, too. Or if you’re not going to an event, you can read or share a couple of stories:

And We Were Left Darkling
In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind
No Lonely Seafarer
And Then There Were (N-One)

What did other people think? They like it!

— “Pinsker’s stories nestle in the cracks of our world.” — Sara Ramey, The Arkansas International
— “haunting and hopeful.” — Booklist (starred review)
— “delightful and surprising.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
— “in the speculative tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin or Kelly Link.” — Kirkus Reviews
— “none should try to resist.” — Foreword Reviews (starred review)

That’s maybe enough links for publication day. Check it out!


2018 SBP x Locus

Mon 25 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , | Comments Off on 2018 SBP x Locus | Posted by: Gavin

Locus February 2019 (#697) cover - click to view full sizeFollowing 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:

It’s worth noting that three of these collections (Singh, Otis, and Duncan) came from Small Beer Press, which has become a reliable source for innovative short fiction collections.
— Gary K. Wolfe

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


Life Was So Wonderful

Tue 19 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on Life Was So Wonderful | Posted by: Gavin

Earth Logic cover - 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.


Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Stars

Mon 18 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Stars | 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:

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea cover - “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

 

 


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

Wed 13 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Comments Off on Feb. 20: Abbey Mei Otis, Kelly Link, & Jordy Rosenberg | Posted by: Gavin

(from Forbes Library’s press release)

Alien Virus Love Disaster cover - click to view full sizeThe 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.


Arrival, OtherLife, Wounds

Mon 11 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Comments Off on Arrival, OtherLife, Wounds | 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.


Challenging SF

Thu 7 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Challenging SF | 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.”


Boskone 2019

Tue 5 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , | Comments Off on Boskone 2019 | 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!


2018 By the Numbers

Mon 4 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Comments Off on 2018 By the Numbers | 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:

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.


Annual Brutally Cold Discount Email

Wed 30 Jan 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Annual Brutally Cold Discount Email | Posted by: Gavin

Cold? Yep. Our distributor just sent along the new Am*zon discounts for the next two years which I would post here except I can’t because of the NDA Am*zon insists everyone sign. Why an NDA for a discount? Because it is brutal.

You may remember me whining about it in the past — just imagine a tiny bit added onto that previous whine. That’s another tiny bit less income for us & our authors (who are paid on net received on ebooks, unlike for print where they are paid a royalty on the retail price), a tiny bit more for Bezos et al. Ugh.

I don’t think we can stop selling books through Am*zon as many people find it is a handy database. But we don’t have Am*zon buttons on our site, we don’t buy ad space on those overcrowded pages, we don’t advertise on Goodreads, I don’t retweet links there, I don’t shop at Black Hole(sic) Foods, etc. Feh to them and their soul crushing tax-cut supported warehouse-enslaving main street closing goals, feh! (Sure, Jeff Billions, buy us out. The press is for sale for say $10 million and I’ll be nice and quiet. At least until that NDA runs out and I can start a new press.)

Every year Michael DeLuca and I have chat about the future of Weightless Books and every year I think about how the authors make more money from each sale, we get to sell DRM-free ebooks, and it gives us a venue to sell our own (and thousands of others) ebooks without $$$ going to Am*zon, etc. So, yes, we’ll keep it going.

Going to repost this even though it’s not Christmas but hey the Lunar New Year is coming up along with many more holidays so it still applies:

I know not everyone has a good local bookstore, a local branch of a chain, or a decent library, but if you have, *please* consider buying/borrowing books there. Am*zon still want to crush all competition (Bezos’s first name for the business was Relentless dot com [<— still leads you know where]) in all markets that they enter. They are fantastic at customer service, especially compared to some local businesses, but they are terrible for everyone else, suppliers, intermediaries, etc.

The discount creeps up a little more every year — something has to give. I suppose it won’t be Am*zon. Guess it will be us Small Gazelle Presses who want to publish interesting books, work with a wide range of people and artists, and see if we can send these weird things out into the world and find readers.

We are all together building the world we want. I want small and big bookstores all over the place. Loads of publishers following their own visions. This Christmas/holiday of your choice, please consider Powell’s, Indiebound, Kobo, B&N, anyone, anyone but Am*zon.

Thank you.


Fire Logic: Back in the World

Tue 22 Jan 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on Fire Logic: Back in the World | Posted by: Gavin

Fire Logic cover - click to view full sizeIn 2002 I was the sf&f reviewer for BookPage. I reviewed one book a month and every three months I’d do a column review of three books. It was an interesting gig trying to find books I could write about, books with big enough reach to interest readers of a general interest publication distributed in libraries and bookshops. It helped that I was working at BookSense.com — the ABA‘s website which later became Indiebound — and had access to a larger pool of incoming books.

Early in the spring of 2002 I came across Laurie J. Marks’s Fire Logic, published by Tor. The cover didn’t grab me but it didn’t put me off — I know people who found it offputting but the cover was just a signal that the novel was epic fantasy with a woman at the center so I gave it a shot. I loved it.

“Marks has a wide-angle view and has written an immensely political and unflinchingly optimistic novel. Differences are celebrated as often as scorned, and love can be found even with an enemy without the costs that might be expected in our world. Fire Logic questions both the real magic behind faith and the self-selective blindness involved in following a leader: religious, military or political. Characters and story come together effortlessly even as Marks refuses to shy away from complex issues of self-determination, ownership and multicultural coexistence.”

Here was a book that attempted to capture some of the complexity of personal and political relations and didn’t flinch from the difficulties and opportunities these offered.

The second book, Earth Logic, came out in 2004 (also from Tor). In 2007 we published the 3rd novel, Water Logic (Water Logic is still shipping the first edition cover. The new edition will ship in June), and in June we’ll publish the final volume, Air Logic. It’s been a long wait for Air Logic but it has been worth it.

While we work on getting Air Logic out in the world we’re enjoying seeing the reaction to new and returning readers to the earlier books. Don’t miss the 15-copy giveaway of Water Logic — along with 15 copies of Air Logic also up for grabs — on LibraryThing this month.

The new editions have interlocking artwork by the eternally patient and eagle-eyed Kathleen Jennings.

The new edition of Fire Logic is out today. Happy RePublication Day, Laurie! Anything you can do to spread the word about these magnificent books will be much appreciated over the next few months. Enjoy!


Pinsker, Samatar, Marks (x3), Brennan, Schoffstall, Crowley

Wed 16 Jan 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , | Comments Off on Pinsker, Samatar, Marks (x3), Brennan, Schoffstall, Crowley | Posted by: Gavin

And Go Like This cover - click to view full sizeNot to bury the lede, but in November we are going to publish John Crowley’s new collection — his first for a long time — And Go Like This: Stories. The book will be published in hardcover and ebook and in a limited edition. We will contact Kickstarter backers from The Chemical Wedding first about the limited edition then make it generally available.

Ok, so 2019: yeah! One aside: it is amazing to see the news reporting on events they reported on before yet now with added shock and horror: the Russian asset AKA the US President had 5 meetings with his boss Vlad P. and no one knows what was said? Yup. That’s why we’ve been, are, and will continue to be upset with the GOP, Mitch McConnell (good argument for him being a fan of Vlad, too; see 2016-present), and those who keep going along to go along with the Idiot Baby-in-Chief. Hoping 2019 will see the Idiot, McConnell, et al, chucked out and maybe imprisoned. Goals!

Another aside: Hope to see you at the Women’s March this coming Saturday either in my hometown of Northampton (12 p.m., Sheldon Field) or wherever you can march.

In the meantime, in the interests of sanity, good reading, and getting tremendous art out into the world, we are going to publish more fab books!

Besides LCRW (subscribe?) and perhaps an omnibus ebook edition of Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic novels and innumerable reprints and possibly one other reprint, here’s what we know we are publishing this year:

  • Jan. 22 — Laurie J. Marks, Fire Logic, Elemental Logic Book 1
    — available now, whoopee!
  • Feb. 19 — Laurie J. Marks, Earth Logic, Elemental Logic Book 2
    — about to ship from the printer!
  • Mar. 19 — Sarah Pinsker, Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea: Stories
    — at the printer!
  • Apr. 9 — Sofia Samatar, Tender: Stories, trade paperback
    — about to go to the printer!
  • Jun. 4 — Laurie J. Marks, Air Logic, Elemental Logic Book 4 . . . !
  • Sep. 3 —  Sarah Rees Brennan, In Other Lands, trade paperback
    — Sarah’s new novel Season of the Witch (The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Book 1) comes out from Scholastic on July 9th. That will be fun!
  • Oct. 22 — John Schoffstall, Half-Witch, trade paperback — the sleeper book of the year!
  • Nov. — John Crowley, And Go Like This: Stories

Cheers!


Meet a PKD Finalist

Mon 14 Jan 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Comments Off on Meet a PKD Finalist | Posted by: Gavin

Ambiguity Machines cover - click to view full sizeI’m paperback-sf-delighted to see that both Abbey Mei Otis’s Alien Virus Love Disaster and Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines are finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award, yay! — and congratulations to all the finalists!

Where’s your chance to meet a finalist?

Vandana Singh will be the Hal Clement Science Speaker at the Boskone convention which runs from Feb. 15-17 at the Westin Boston Waterfront, in Boston, MA. We’ll be there with her book in the dealers room.

And in the meantime, here’s the whole PKD Award nominee announcement, Cheers!

2019 Philip K. Dick Award Nominees Announced

The judges of the 2018 Philip K. Dick Award and the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, along with the Philip K. Dick Trust, are pleased to announce the six nominated works that comprise the final ballot for the award:

TIME WAS by Ian McDonald (Tor.com)
THE BODY LIBRARY by Jeff Noon (Angry Robot)
84K by Claire North (Orbit)
ALIEN VIRUS LOVE DISASTER: STORIES by Abbey Mei Otis (Small Beer Press)
THEORY OF BASTARDS by Audrey Schulman (Europa Editions)
AMBIGUITY MACHINES AND OTHER STORIES by Vandana Singh (Small Beer Press)

First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, April 19, 2019 at Norwescon 42 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport, SeaTac, Washington.

Alien Virus Love Disaster cover - click to view full sizeThe Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States during the previous calendar year. The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust and the award ceremony is sponsored by the Northwest Science Fiction Society. Last year’s winner was BANNERLESS by Carrie Vaughn (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) with a special citation to AFTER THE FLARE by Deji Bryce Olukotun (The Unnamed Press). The 2018 judges are Madeline Ashby, Brian Attebery, Christopher Brown, Rosemary Edghill, and Jason Hough (chair).


I love this book completely — Karen Joy Fowler

Mon 7 Jan 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on I love this book completely — Karen Joy Fowler | Posted by: Gavin

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea coverWe’re about to send Sarah Pinsker’s debut to the printer and just in time we received this fabulous note:

“This collection of stories is simply wonderful. Each story is generous and original; as a collection, the tales are varied, but with recurring themes of memory and music through-out. Pinsker has emerged as one of our most exciting voices and I’m glad to note that I’m not the only one who thinks so. I love this book completely.”
— Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves


Carmen Maria Machado Recommends . . .

Fri 4 Jan 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on Carmen Maria Machado Recommends . . . | Posted by: Gavin

Over on Electric Lit Carmen Maria Machado, or, rather Carmen Maria Machado — yeah! — got 2019 off to a shiny bright start with some lovely lovely things she said about books by Shirley Jackson, Joanna Russ, Gloria Naylor — as well as Sofia Samatar and Kelly:

Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link

When I was a baby writer, a friend recommended I check out Kelly Link’s stories, and it changed my life. I don’t mean that hyperbolically: if you are a reader who loves my work, you have Kelly Link’s mind-bending, genre-smashing, so-good-you-want-to-die fiction to thank. An entire generation of female fabulists have been profoundly influenced by her, and she was also my gateway drug into some of my other favorite authors: Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber), Kathryn Davis (Duplex), Shirley Jackson (Haunted of Hill House), and so many others.

Tender Sofia Samatar

2017 might seem like a pretty recent year for a book to have influenced me, but Sofia Samatar has been publishing these stories in magazines for ages, and they haven’t lost an ounce of their magic or eeriness. Samatar is best known for her secondary-world fantasy duology A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, but this collection of short stories occupies a different, more liminal space. Samatar’s keen and nimble mind, gorgeous sentences, and incredible imagination are on full display here; she balances beauty and horror in a way that thrills and inspires me. If you love Helen Oyeyemi (What is Not Yours is Not Yours), Karen Russell (St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves), or Kij Johnson (At the Mouth of the River of Bees), you need this book. (Bonus: It was published by Small Beer Press, owned by Kelly Link and her husband, Gavin Grant. They publish tons of amazing fiction, much of it by women. Check them out!)

Stranger Things Happen Tender cover


Start the Logic Series for Free

Tue 11 Dec 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Comments Off on Start the Logic Series for Free | Posted by: Gavin

Next month we’re bringing Laurie J. Marks’s first Elemental Logic novel, Fire Logic, back into print — it’s been available as an ebook for years but now you’ll be able to hold the new edition with Kathleen Jennings’s lovely lively art in your hands . . . and by summertime you’ll be able to have a matching set of all four novels.

To celebrate, this month we’re giving away 15 copies of Fire Logic on LibraryThing (US only due to mailing costs) as well as 15 copies of the second novel Earth Logic.

And: month we’ll give away 15 copies the third novel in the series Water Logic and . . .

yes,

at last,

15 copies of the final novel

Air Logic.

I can’t wait to getting Air Logic out into the world. It’s a huge series, heartbreaking, deeply immersive, thought-provoking, and satisfying. We’re also sending the last book out for blurbs and beginning to send it to reviewers —it’s up on Edelweiss, too, of course. I’ll leave it to Delia Sherman to have the last word here:

“If you’ve been looking for an exciting, thoughtful, queer, diverse, politically aware, complex, timely, beautifully written saga of a fascinating world and set of characters, here it is.”
— Delia Sherman



Celebrating the NPR Best of 2018

Tue 27 Nov 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Comments Off on Celebrating the NPR Best of 2018 | Posted by: Gavin

Half-WitchToday NPR posted their endlessly fascinating year-end book concierge and I am elated to find that two of our titles are included.

But first, have you tried it? There are 32 filters and I am going to try every one of them, but not right now, as I have to ship ship ship books from our recent sale — so yay and thanks to everyone who ordered and I hope you enjoy the books!

But, look: who doesn’t need a Rather Short book sometimes? And then winter is great for Rather Long books. There are 3 or 4 books in the Comics I want to read and I love that Shobha Roa’s excellent Girls Burn Brighter is the first title that pops up in the Eye-Opening Reads. I could go on (and point out faves such as Sofia and Del Samatar’s Monster Portraits) but, really, NPR have set you up here. Hope you enjoy playing with it as much as I do.

The two Small Beer novels that are included are:

John Schoffstall, Half-Witch

Terra Nullius: A NovelClaire G. Coleman, Terra Nullius

I posted two tweets after finding out these two books were on the list. They are quite understated because if I tried to encapsulate my joy in discovery I would have exploded the 280-character limit and perhaps my laptop, too.

While I tend to think the books we publish are some of the best I read each year, I never know how the world will take them. Some books land well, some don’t. Some find their readership over years, not months. It is at once a joy, a vindication, a relief, and an inspiration to see these books read and put forward — among hundreds of other great books — as some of the best of the year.

We will raise a glass tonight to these authors and to all the authors who send us or let us publish their books. Thanks again, Claire and John, hope you celebrate, too!


Viral Swedes

Tue 27 Nov 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Viral Swedes | Posted by: Gavin

I think this sentence smashing together two recent news stories is the most-read sentence I’ve written, at least so far. I wrote 2-3 versions in, say a minute, read it out loud, left the full stop/period off on purpose, and fired it off. Closed the twitter tab on Firefox, did some task at work. Checked on it five minutes later and maybe 3 people had liked it and I figured, ok, as per usual I thought that might have been more popular, but I guess not.

I finished up whatever work I was doing on October 25th (besides despairing about the USA and the world, which is an everyday rather than a specific day thing), drove home, and walked over to pick up our kid from school.

After dinner I looked at twitter and that tweet had 1.6k likes, which is something like 10 times more than 99.9% of everything posted and right then and there (after marveling over it and telling Kelly about it) I began to really understand how twitter makes money. Millions of people write on it for . . . free. I don’t support websites that ask writers to write for free and I think Facebook is a sucking deathhole that wants to kill the web and extract money from as many people as possible, but I so enjoy Twitter: I follow people I know, and many more that I don’t, an unwieldy slowly built-up group of writers, musicians, artists, booksellers, journalists, and many random people that I don’t know and can’t really remember why I follow them. I drop and add people (sometimes the same ones) all the time. I like the account that posts antique fruit paintings but I can’t take most of the satirical ones. Sometimes I use the phone app — although it really is the mindkiller — and sometimes I use the chronological bookmark someone made (thank you!). I usually open it at least once a day — although I spend a lot less time on my laptop during the weekend so sometimes I’ll happily skip a day or two — and see what’s going on. And all those smart, funny people are right there, writing things that will spread out from wherever they are and maybe — as the tweet below did for apparently 800,000+ people — pop up on twitter for me to enjoy. Lucky me.


4-Day Sale

Fri 23 Nov 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Comments Off on 4-Day Sale | Posted by: Gavin

What it says on the tin: 4-Day Sale: 25-80% off regular prices. Prices include shipping — so please order 2-100 titles!


2018 by the Numbers

Mon 19 Nov 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 2018 by the Numbers | Posted by: Gavin


Before this week disappears I wanted to post about the year in Small Beer. The year out in the world is very dark although I refuse to be pessimistic about the present and the future. I believe everyone rises together and that working with that in mind is the way to live. One of the ways I can deal with all the crap right wing antihumanists are throwing at us around the world — besides going to protests, calling politicians, tweeting in desperation, lying on the floor, donating to nonprofits, and listening to audiobooks instead of the news — is to keep making things. Some of those things go out into the world, some of them are breakfast, some of them are ephemeral toys me and my kid make. The biggest things I make, with Kelly and the work of many other people, come out from Small Beer Press.

Every year I want to look back and see that we’ve published stories I haven’t read before — seems like a good place to throw in a reminder that we’re always looking for work by women and writers of color; our submissions are always open and we still ask for paper subs because there are two of us and we want to read everything.

So, in 2018 we published 2 issues of our million-year-old zine — still the best zine named after Winston Churchill’s Cobble-Hill Brooklynite mother, Jennie Jerome — LCRW and 6 diverse and fascinating books. To break down the books a little:

7 starred reviews — feel free to grab the illo above and put it into the hands of Netflix, review editors, &c.
5 US debuts
3 novels, 3 short story collections
3 women, 3 men
1 translation
2 NPR Best Books of 2018
1 Washington Post Best of the Year
plus 4 reprints:
— Sarah Rees Brennan, In Other Lands, 3rd printing, June 2018
— Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, 5th printing, June 2018
— Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen, 9th printing, November 2018
— Naomi Mitchison, Travel Light, short run reprint, November 2018
Somewhat related: 1 MacArthur Fellowship (so we had a sale — sort of still going)

The books:

Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories by Vandana Singh
“Magnificent.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review), Top 10 SF, Fantasy & Horror Spring 2018
“hopeful, enriching” — Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

The Invisible Valley: a novel by Su Wei, translated by Austin Woerner
“pleasantly picaresque” — Publishers Weekly
“complex, colorful characters” — Kirkus Reviews
“shocking and gritty” — Library Journal
“lushly atmospheric and haunting novel” — Booklist

Half-Witch: a novel by John Schoffstall
NPR Best Books of 2018
“Genuinely thrilling.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“a marvel of storytelling” — Amal El-Mohtar, New York Times Book Review

Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories by Abbey Mei Otis
“A breathtaking reading experience.” — Booklist (starred review)
“An exciting voice. . . . dreamy but with an intense physicality.” — Washington Post “5 best science fiction and fantasy novels of 2018”

Terra Nullius: a novel by Claire G. Coleman
NPR Best Books of 2018
Stella Prize finalist
“Imaginative, astounding.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Highly recommended.” — Library Journal (starred review)

An Agent of Utopia: New & Selected Stories by Andy Duncan
“Zany and kaleidoscopic.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Evocative, playful, and deeply accomplished.” — Booklist (starred review)

The zine

fiction: 9 women, 3 men
nonfiction: 1 woman
poetry: 3 women, 2 men
2 first publications

So far next year, besides helping with the ongoing progressive revolution, we’re planning on making many Small Beer things including 2 (or maybe 3) issues of LCRW and at least 3 books:

1 debut
1 novel, 2 short story collections
2 women, 1 man
4 Reprints
— Laurie J. Marks, Fire Logic, January 2019
— Laurie J. Marks, Earth Logic, February 2019
— Sofia Samatar, Tender: Stories, trade paperback, April 2019
— Sarah Rees Brennan, an, In Other Lands, trade paperback, September 2019

And one or both of us are planning to be at Boskone (Boston, February), AWP (Portland, OR, March), WisCon (Madison, WI, May), Readercon (Boston, July), Brooklyn Book Festival (September), & maybe more, who can say?

We published a lot of things to read this year and we know at least 2 people (us!) loved them. Hope you get a chance to read and enjoy them, too.


« Later Entries — Earlier Entries »