April: A Stranger in Olondria

Thu 26 Jul 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Sofia Samatar | Comments Off on April: A Stranger in Olondria | Posted by: Gavin

I know we announced A Stranger in Olondria for 2012 but we decided to add a simultaneous hardcover edition to the trade paperback and ebook editions as the behind-the-scenes excitement is building tremendously as more readers discover A Stranger in Olondria is a book to be treasured.

So now it is an April 2013 book. Ta da! We’ll be making a new round of galleys to reflect the changes which should be going out by the end of the month. Electronic review copies are going out, too. Leave a comment or ping us (ok, so we’re traveling this week, but still) if you’d like a copy.

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Things Mean a Lot

Thu 12 Jul 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Things Mean a Lot | Posted by: Gavin

Gosh, this is nice.

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Here we go to Readercon & Clarion West

Tue 10 Jul 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., conventions, Jedediah Berry, Kelly Link, Readercon, Vincent McCaffrey | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

This coming weekend we (me, Kelly, and our daughter, Ursula) will be at Readercon. I am on a panel on Oblique Strategies. Help! Kelly is on some panels, too, see below. Since we are leaving on Saturday morning for Clarion West (Writer Boot Camp ahoy! We do a reading on Tuesday night in Seattle!) even though the program sched says Kelly will be at the Shirley Jackson Awards, she won’t. And, Jedediah Berry has stepped up to man the Small Beer table. Phew! And Vincent McCaffrey (author of the Hound series) is on a panel about political fiction, Delia Sherman can be found on “When Non-Fantastic Genres Interrogate Themselves,” Greer Gilman is on “Mapping the Parallels,” and so on and on!

The bad news is that the con dropped us from two tables down to one, which means we can’t take as many titles from other publishers to sell: boo! That’s how we got our start with LCRW—people such as Mike Walsh (Old Earth Books) and Greg Ketter (DreamHaven, a real bookstore, how exciting that was!) sold the zine and then our chapbooks off their table, encouraging us to keep going back to the conventions and eventually it all snowballed into BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS! (It is a slippery slide!)

See you in Boston or Seattle!

Thursday

8:00 PM   G   Genrecare. Elizabeth Bear (leader), Kathleen Ann Goonan, Kelly Link, Shira Lipkin. In a 2011 review of Harmony by Project Itoh, Adam Roberts suggests that “the concept of ‘healthcare’ in its broadest sense is one of the keys to the modern psyche.” Yet Roberts notes “how poorly genre has tuned in to that particular aspect of contemporary life.” Similarly, in the essay “No Cure for the Future,” Kirk Hampton and Carol MacKay write that “SF is a world almost never concerned with the issues of physical frailty and malfunction.” As writers such as Nalo Hopkinson, Tricia Sullivan, and Kim Stanley Robinson explore the future of the body, how is SF dealing with the concepts of health, medicine, and what it means to be well?

Friday

4:00 PM   ME   Oblique Strategies for Authors. Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen, Gavin J. Grant, Glenn Grant (leader), Katherine MacLean, Eric M. Van, Jo Walton. In 1975 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published a deck of cards called “Oblique Strategies.” Each card provides a cryptic directive—such as “Use an old idea” or “Honour thy error as a hidden intention”—intended to help an artist deal with a creative block or dilemma. While many of the original strategies are useful for writers of fiction, others (such as “The tape is now the music”) are perhaps only appropriate for musicians and visual artists. Let’s brainstorm a deck of Oblique Strategies specifically designed to provide unexpected creative kicks for authors who are in a jam.
Proposed by Glenn Grant.

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Reselling the spider

Fri 6 Jul 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

I must be too old. Hmm, deafening silence in response. Anyway, there’s yet another Spiderman movie coming and I swear there was a new one just last week, or was it last year? What? It was more than 3 or 4 years ago? Oh well then, it must be time to remake it . . .

You know what they should remake? The Avengers. That was fun and it came out ages ago now, so why not remake it and then we can enjoy it all over again.

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Couple of nice reviews

Tue 3 Jul 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Couple of nice reviews | Posted by: Gavin

Just love to see our books finding readers. There was a very thoughtful (and fully linked) review of After the Apocalypse by L.S. Bassen on SF Signal. This intro paragraph signals (sorry) that it won’t read like the average review:

“Maureen F. McHugh’s collection of stories is an outstanding solo in the zeitgeist fiction chorus including Gods Without Men (Hari Kunzru) and The Truth and All Its Ugly (Kyle Minor) that at long last begins building the bridge between The Two Cultures invoked by C.P. Snow decades ago. In these stories, despite the title, destruction and despair are not the key motif: survival, even transcendence, is.”
—SF Signal

And then on Strange Horizons, T.S. Miller looks at Geoff Ryman’s collection Paradise Tales through the lens of the title:

“The stories gathered here from across Ryman’s career narrate paradise and its stories in ways that are far from conventionally utopian. Rather, Ryman’s paradises are not only largely intangible but often built on and out of loss. Reading his quasi-fairytales and other flights of passionate fantasy, we will always be reminded that these paradises, like all paradises, are places that can never be—except in fiction. For Ryman, however, this is an essential exception, as the power of story to heal and repair across time and across cultures becomes a recurrent theme in the collection…. By the end of Paradise Tales, however, the reader will understand that Ryman has already invented such a device: whether it is fantasy, science fiction, or some fiction in-between, the utopian, revelatory tool for Ryman is simply fiction itself.”
—Strange Horizons

 

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Complicate my accounting, please

Fri 29 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., accounting joy, shipper's delight, spreadsheets of wonder, Yog's Law | Comments Off on Complicate my accounting, please | Posted by: Gavin

If you have long wished to make a publisher’s life more complicated here’s your chance. June 30th—manana!—is the last day of this royalty period (here in spreadsheet land that’s a.k.a.Jan-Jun2011).

So go on, complicate our accounting and royalties by making all kinds of weird orders. Why, yes, now that you ask, subscription options were updated and new ones—Big Mouth, YBF&H, Col(Link)ection, Signed— added today.

It’s also the last day of the 3-month royalty period for Weightless, but royalties are so much easier there that we can usually pay within 10 days. Hmm!

We will thank you from the icy chambers of our hearts!

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Apocalyptic summer

Tue 26 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Apocalyptic summer | Posted by: Gavin

Very nice to see Maureen F. McHugh’s After the Apocalypse on this NPR list:

Summer’s Best Sci-Fi: Planets, Politics, Apocalypse

along with Kim Stanley Robinson, Saladin Ahmed, Tobias Buckell, and Mira Grant. There’s some good reading!

As you may know, Bob, After the Apocalypse is “. . . definitely one of the best works of science fiction you’ll read this year, or any thereafter.”

Yup!

A long time ago when the world was young and Maureen had only written a handful of novels (ha!) and stories we published her first collection, Mothers & Other Monsters. The most excellent Nancy Pearl*featured Mothers on Morning Edition (“Gorgeously crafted stories,” she said, I remember as if it were yesterday**). That was a little while ago now so it was refreshing to read a 5-star review of the collection this week:

“Fans of McHugh will adore Mothers & Other Monsters – and, if you’re not already one, Mothers & Other Monsters will make a fan out of you!”

It is lovely to find that the books we’ve published over the years keep finding readers. Thanks, y’all, for spreading the word, it’s appreciated.

In other news, I should start posting some of the other news about Things That Are Happening including being tempted to do a Kickstarter called the Kick-in-the-Behind LCRW Kickstarter to get the new ish out. Hmm. But paying work calls, gots to go do that first.

* Yeah, yeah, we know, she has an Amazon imprint. Who doesn’t these days? She’s doing what we’d love to do: get someone else to bring lots of books back into print. Wish she were doing it elsewhere, but no one else bit, c’est la vie.

** Except yesterday I didn’t almost fall off my chair at breakfast when someone on the radio started talking about one of our books.

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A book, a book!

Mon 18 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

Where? There!

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Win free copies of Lydia Millet’s Dissenters books

Mon 11 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Free books, Lydia Millet | Comments Off on Win free copies of Lydia Millet’s Dissenters books | Posted by: Gavin

We just posted giveaways for both of Lydia Millet’s Dissenters novels on Goodreads. The first book, The Fires Beneath the Sea just came out in paperback and the second The Shimmers in the Night is now at the proofreader and will be out later this summer. Get ahead of the game and win an advance copy today!

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Clarion West reading series

Fri 8 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Clarion West, events | Comments Off on Clarion West reading series | Posted by: Gavin

Hey, we’re going to teach week 5 at Clarion West in Seattle this year. We haven’t been to CW—or out west—for ages. Can’t wait!

While there we’ll do a reading at the fabby University Book Store—although you might also want to pick up tix for some of these other readings, too.

The readers for the 2012 Clarion West Summer Reading Series are:

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Mary Rosenblum

June 19, 7 p.m., University Book Store

Mary Rosenblum explores climate change, biotechnology, and class inequity in stories based on her profound knowledge of science and technology and her passion for sustainable living. Her first novel, The Drylands, won the 1994 Compton Crook Award, and in 2009 she received the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for her story “Sacrifice.”

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Stephen Graham Jones

June 26, 7 p.m., University Book Store

Stephen Graham Jones has published eleven novels and over 140 finely-honed stories about innocents, unfairness, and scary truths. A Blackfoot Indian from Texas, a Professor of English at the University of Colorado, an NEA Fellow, and a Bram Stoker Award finalist, Jones can warm an audience to laughter or chill it with icily observed inevitabilities.

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George R.R. Martin

July 3, 7 p.m., Town Hall Seattle

George R. R. Martin is the author of the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, basis for HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones.’ He has received four Hugos, two Nebulas, and many other major awards over his four-decade career. Martin was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people of 2011. Note: Tickets for this reading are $10; they’re available at Brown Paper Tickets.

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Connie Willis

July 10, 7 p.m., University Book Store

Connie Willis peppers her live appearances with humorous insights on everything from the Oscars to current elections. Willis has won more major awards than any other author, including most recently her eleventh Hugo for Blackout/All Clear, a time-travel novel about World War II London. She explores comic and tragic aspects of the human condition through characters that run the gamut from desperately likable to sweetly infuriating.

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Kelly Link & Gavin Grant

July 17, 7 p.m., University Book Store

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant founded Small Beer Press, arguably today’s most important independent publisher of avant-garde fantasy. Link’s award-winning fiction was described as “an alchemical mix of Borges, Raymond Chandler and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’” by Salon.com. Grant’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons and The Christian Science Monitor. The pair’s editorial projects include the literary zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, several volumes of The Years’ Best Fantasy and Horror (with Ellen Datlow), and 2011’s Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories.

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Chuck Palahniuk

July 24, 7 p.m., Town Hall Seattle

Chuck Palahniuk is known for his reclusive nature and his skillful hand with disturbing modern fables. His most recent book, Damned, references the young adult novels of Judy Blume as it follows a thirteen-year-old girl through Hell. Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club won critical acclaim and cult status before being turned into a major motion picture. Note: Tickets for this reading are $10; they’re available at Brown Paper Tickets.

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More University Book Store Readings

In addition to the Clarion West Summer Reading Series, every year the University Book Store hosts dozens of other readings of interest to fans of SF. Check out their events calendar for further information.

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A Day in the Life of a Publisher (not) at BEA 2012

Wed 6 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., BEA 2012, nap time | Comments Off on A Day in the Life of a Publisher (not) at BEA 2012 | Posted by: Gavin

Woke at 7 for 7:30 breakfast meeting. Worried I might be late but I hear that the person I’m meeting doesn’t want to get out of bed. Phew.

Next meeting is one I am not looking forward to. It’s all about returns/remainders/what happens to stuff when it’s been through the, you know, consumer channel. The meeting is longer than hoped for but it all goes well in the end.

Breakfast meeting goes surprisingly smoothly and there may be some forward motion on some recent disagreements (whether consumers must consume what is put in front of them or whether they can walk away at any point).

I have to escort client to a 9:00 meet and greet followed by two hours of panels and focus groups on contemporary education publishing. I get to slip out instead—win! Get some design done in by avoiding twitter. For the most part. Local music shop calls to tell me that my copy of the new Kelly Hogan album is in. I didn’t order it. Marriage = total win!

11:30 AM Client exhausted and weepy from educational seminar. We have another post-consumption meeting. Goes much as expected. Lunch is quick, client needs tears wiped away and to sit on my knee. I pull out the exclusive tchotkes (binky, blanket) and client is much happier. Post lunch meeting is a total nap.

I grab a sandwich (but it’s not a Javits Center sandwich, so it’s pretty good and only costs $6) and do some mailing. Hey, the post office only charges $17 to mail a book internationally! Hope they are investing in some other business as they’re killing their own. No wonder we sell so many ebooks abroad.

3:00 meeting with publishing consultant about new formats and consumption patterns. Client now well rested and very cheery, takes over any room she walks into. I go in thinking she is going to totally rule and she does. Expect that she will be all over twitter and in the PW Show Daily tomorrow. Awesome.

4:00 Client has an outdoor meeting on social media, meeting places, and discoverability vis-a-vis diversity vis-a-vis diverticulosis or something. She is off my hands for 2 hours because she is busy buying some YouTube subscribers for her various accounts. Time for tea and biscuits—excuse me, cookies—and reading twitter rather than pretending to do something else and checking it.

6 PM pre-dinner drinks with client. Drinks unimpressive, seem very watered down. (May have actually been water.)

7 PM Dinner with client. Both of us a little punch drunk—not actually drunk, see 6 PM above—but for the most part food follows the trajectory of plate to cutlery to mouth. Occasionally cutlery is put aside and occasionally food is put aside, too.

8 PM A very successful last meeting. Client falls asleep after reading only three books.

9 PM Write-up day and listen to Fitz and the Tantrums.

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Small Beer Podcast 11: Jennifer Stevenson’s Trash Sex Magic

Mon 4 Jun 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Jennifer Stevenson, Julie Day, Podcastery, small beer podcast, trash sex magic | Comments Off on Small Beer Podcast 11: Jennifer Stevenson’s Trash Sex Magic | Posted by: Julie

I think the world should be filled with double features: double-dip ice cream cones, double copies of the books you’re likely to drop in the tub, bonus skirts given at the time of purchase. Sometimes more is better.

Now that we’ve successfully pulled off our first double feature (the John Kesselmania that was Episode Nine and Episode Ten), we’re raring to do it again. This week we bring you an excerpt of Jennifer Stevenson’s Trash Sex Magic. The novel is now available as an audio book through Iambic Books. It’s wild, weird and sexy: a perfect spring read. But that’s not the end of our Stevenson tear. In the next Small Beer podcast, we return to the scene of the crime and roll out a full-on interview with the amazing Jennifer Stevenson: author, speed skater and former roller derby queen.

Episode 11: An excerpt from Jennifer Stevenson’s novel Trash Sex Magic. [audio]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe to the Small Beer podcast using  iTunes or the service of your choice:

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Stranger Things Happen limited edition news

Fri 25 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link, limited editions, Stranger Things Happen | Comments Off on Stranger Things Happen limited edition news | Posted by: Gavin

Stranger Things Happen is Kelly Link’s debut collection of stories. It contains eleven stories It was one of the first two books—the other was Ray Vukcevich’s Meet Me in the Moon Room—we launched with back in July 2001 and is our bestselling title. We just recently got in copies of the seventh printing of the paperback. It has also been downloaded more than 110,000 times from our site and others as well as selling very well as an ebook. It is taught at many schools and has been published in Japan, Italy, Hungary, Russia, the Czech Republic, France, Israel, and Korea. Yay!

This October, eleven years after first publication, Stranger Things Happen will be published in a hardcover edition by the good people at Subterranean Press. We could have published this edition ourselves but Kelly has long wanted to work with Bill Schafer and everyone at Sub Press and they are pros at this kind of project. As with many readers in this genre, we’ve long been admirers of the press and Bill has often given us great advice over the years. We own many of their books—and we have all these great books we’re working on so it made sense to go to them with it.

It is also gave Kelly a chance to work with one of her favorite artists, Kathleen Jennings, who has provided the cover illustration as well as story headers for each of the eleven stories.

This special signed limited edition of Stranger Things Happen is accompanied by a exclusive hardcover chapbook, Origin Stories, which contains two stories, “Origin Stories” and “Secret Identity.”

There are only going to be 500 copies, all of which will be signed, and we have arranged with Kelly to personalize copies ordered here.

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Norton, Nebulas!

Mon 21 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, Delia Sherman, Geoff Ryman, Kij Johnson | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

What a weekend not to be in Washington, DC! Huge congratulations to Delia Sherman whose novel The Freedom Maze received the Norton Award. You can see a picture of a very happy Delia in this picture on Making Light with the rest of the nights awardees.

We’re very proud to have published this book and elated to see it recognized in this way. The Freedom Maze is also a Prometheus Award finalist and was on the Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 and Tiptree Award Honor lists. The audio book will come out this autumn from Listening Library; you can listen to an interview with Delia and a reading from The Freedom Maze on our podcast, and read Delia’s guest post on Diversity in YA about the book: “When I began writing The Freedom Maze, back in 1987, I didn’t intend to write a book about race.”

Geoff Ryman was very happy that he came over from the UK for the weekend: his story “What We Found,” from the Sept./Oct. 2011 issue of F&SF received the novelette Nebula. That story is not in his collection Paradise Tales but if you want a taste of his writing you can read the first story, “The Film-makers of Mars,” on Tor.com.

It’s been said that Kij Johnson‘s forthcoming At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories is one of the most anticipated debut (print—there was an ebook collection a few years ago) science fiction and fantasy collections in recent years. Her story “The Man Who Bridged the Mist“ (Asimov’s, Oct./Nov. 2011) is her third in three years to have received the Nebula, which is pretty amazing. You can read a few of her stories on her website and the collection—with a fantastic cover by Jackie Morris—will be out in August.

Also: Delia will be at Wiscon in Madiscon, WI, next weekend. We’re not going (ach!) but David J. Schwartz will be tabling for us, thanks again Dave. He will have a few signed copies of Delia’s book—all we have left are the copies Delia signed when she was up here recently. When the few we have and those sent to Wiscon sell, that’s it until the paperback comes out. Get your copy here. Of course, you can also get the ebook.

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Translation games

Thu 17 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Alberto Chimal, Chris N. Brown, Skynet, Three Messages and a Warning, translation | 3 Comments | Posted by: Gavin

When Three Messages and a Warning came out one of the things we meant to do was play with Google Translate. Hold that thought, let a few months pass, find a quiet Thursday afternoon and here we are.

So:

1. here’s the story in the English translation
2. then the same story run through Google from English to Spanish (enjoy, Hispanophones!),
3. and, lastly the machine Spanish translation retranslated by Google from Spanish to English—using a different browser so that it did not just return the original text.

I used one of the shorter stories in the book, “Variation on a Theme of Coleridge” by Alberto Chimal [video of author reading], translated by co-editor Chris N.Brown so that you can buzz through it and easily compare: Read more

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New Catalog, New Titles: Le Guin, Dickinson, Gorodischer, More

Tue 15 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., catalog | 5 Comments | Posted by: Gavin

We’ll be mailing copies of this soonish but you can read it right now due to the magic of . . . yes, your early childhood educators who taught you to read. A big hand, ladies and gentlemen, for all those educators. Yay! And now you can exercise your lovely reading ability on our new catalog covering rightnowthisinstant through to March 2013.

Bookstores and reviewers: if you would like a print copy, email us at info @ smallbeerpres dot com and we will add you to our opt-in very occasional actual physical mailing list.

In conjunction with posting our catalog, we’ve added our new titles to the site. More about these books TK in coming weeks, but for the moment we are delighted to add books we are very happily working on:

Peter Dickinson, Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures (Sept. tc/tp/ebook)

Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy (Sept. tp)

The Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume One: Where on Earth (Nov. tc/ebook)
The Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume Two: Outer Space Inner Lands (Nov. tc/ebook)

Angélica Gorodischer, Trafalgar: a novel (Feb. 2013, tp/ebook, translated by Amalia Gladhart)

All of which can be ordered right here right now.

Small Beer Press 2012+

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The Book Group

Mon 14 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | 1 Comment | Posted by: Gavin

At some point we realized one of our fave painfully funny TV shows, The Book Group is available on Hulu. Painful painful painful Funny funny funny.

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Yay Street Books!

Tue 8 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Yay Street Books! | Posted by: Gavin

Pasted wholesale from the National Book Foundation website’s winners of the Innovations in Reading Prize: yay Laura!

Street Books

Portland, OR
> www.streetbooks.org

Street Books is a bicycle-powered mobile library serving people who live outside in Portland, Oregon. Founded in June 2011, the street library offers a means to check out books for patrons who are unable to do so from regular libraries because they lack identification or proof of address. In nearly a year of operation, hundreds of patrons have been served, many of them becoming regulars who return weekly to the shift to return books and check out new ones. Patrons are invited to be photographed with their books of choice, and contribute their own reviews or stories from the road. These stories can be viewed at Streetbooks.org.

Street Books is committed to providing good literature, and conversations about literature, for those who are often pushed to the margins. Patrons have checked out hundreds of paperbacks in all genres, from sci-fi to romance to memoir, by authors ranging from James Patterson and Jeannette Walls to Flannery O’Connor and Stephen King. Street Books has created a greater engagement between its patrons and the larger housed community, and built a bridge with literature between the two. The Street Books project has been featured in national and international media, including Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Newstalk Radio in Ireland.

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Kij Johnson, At the . . . Goodreads Giveaway

Mon 7 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Free books, Kij Johnson | Comments Off on Kij Johnson, At the . . . Goodreads Giveaway | Posted by: Gavin

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Small Beer Podcast 10: Julie Day Interviews John Kessel

Fri 4 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., John Kessel, Julie Day, Podcastery, small beer podcast, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence | 1 Comment | Posted by: Julie

Here at the Small Beer Studios, it’s Kesselmania! Between the reading of “The Last American” in Episode Nine and this week’s interview of the man himself, right now it seems that we have Kessel and nothing but Kessel on our minds.

And why not? He’s an interesting guy, an astute anthologist and a terrific writer. Yes,it’s true: he’s won the Nebula, the James Tiptree Jr. and the Shirley Jackson awards. He’s also co-edited a fantastic series of anthologies with James Patrick Kelly. I tried to cover everything in a single interview. In other words, I set myself the impossible task.

What did make it into this podcast? John’s thoughts on the singularity, his current batch of anthologies with Jim Kelly, his latest novel in progress (yay!) his illuminating thoughts on Ender’s Game, a reading from his novelette, “Buddha Nostril Bird,” and how science fiction saved his life.

Small Beer is part of the DRM-free universe. More than that, John’s collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence is available as a free ebook on Weightless Books. So go ahead and read the collection for yourself. After all, how many interviews come with their own free book?

Episode 10: In which Julie Day interviews John Kessel

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe to the Small Beer podcast using  iTunes or the service of your choice:

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Why print on demand isn’t right for us right now

Tue 1 May 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., inside baseball, Publishing, Small Beer Press | 6 Comments | Posted by: Gavin

I keep reading about the death of legacy publishers (hey, that’s us!) due to their refusal to get into the ebook game (done that) or not being swift enough to change from old fashioned book printers to using print on demand. This is going to be a short post because here’s the simple problem with print on demand is it’s too expensive. (Unless we want to price our paperbacks at $20 . . . ! Which I don’t.) Another problem is that we would have to create a gallery that would allow each product to be ordered when wanted. So the printing would be more expensive and then we would essentially have to rework our online presence too.

Let’s use a 320-page book as an example. We’ve been pricing our trade paperbacks at $16 since we started publishing in 2001. From that $16, about 65% goes to the bookstore and the distro. So we receive about 35% = $5.60 to pay the author and for the art, copyediting, Indexer marketing, publicity, mailing, freight, returns, and whatever other costs there are, including, with luck, ourselves.

So why don’t we minimize our investment in printed books and only print one or two hundred at a time? Because we can’t afford to.

We always use recycled paper, which bumps up the printing price of all our books but we’ve always thought that if a publisher can’t afford that, they shouldn’t be printing books.

The book printer below quoted just under $2 a copy, not bad for only 2K books. The more books we can print, the lower the unit cost. That leaves us almost $4 for all those costs above.

If we go the print on demand route, we’d receive $0.83 per book, not enough to pay the author royalties, never mind anything else.

So until the print on demand unit price drops, we’ll stick to printing a couple of thousand copies, letting books sell through, and reprinting when the orders start building up.

Print on Demand (quotes provided May 1, 2012 from 2 printers):

100 copies
$517.00 · ($5.17 each)
$667.80 · ($6.67 each)

250 copies
$1,292.50 · ($5.17 each)
$1,458.89 · ($5.83 each)

Book Printer (quote provided Feb 16, 2012):

2000 copies (including freight to warehouse/office)
$3842.00 · ($1.92 each)

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Publication day for Fountain of Age

Tue 24 Apr 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Nancy Kress, Small Beer Press | Comments Off on Publication day for Fountain of Age | Posted by: Gavin

Yay!

If anyone can tell you what the near future holds, it’s Nancy Kress. She’s been on a tear in recent years writing up a storm about what it’s like to live now and what it will be like when the aliens come—how does she know? (Well, it ain’t called science fiction for nothing.)

You can get the book from us (both version, print and ebook, are as always DRM-free, ha!) and it will be stacked up at such excellent bookstores as Elliott Bay, A Room of One’s Own, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, and University Bookstore.

Two of the stories, “End Game” & “The Kindness of Strangers,” are available on Escape Pod and with luck we’ll have another one up on the Small Beer Podcast within the next couple of weeks. It will either be “Safeguard” or “Laws of Survival”—I love the first one slightly more than the second, even though the second one outweighs the first by a factor of 1.2 billion on the weirdness scale, but we will see. (I also love the caper-ish title  story (which you can read on Asimov’s) but I think it’s too long for the podcast.)

So: Fountain of Age goes out into the world today. Steven Finch of fonografiks.com, who did the cover for After the Apocalypse did us proud again, thanks Steven!

If you read the book and love it we’d love to hear about it—and please do help us spread the word.

Last minute contest: we will send a free copy of the book out to the first three readers (US & Canada only, sorry) who can tell us the name of the story we published recently that features the fountain of youth.

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Signed copies of The Freedom Maze

Tue 17 Apr 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Signed copies of The Freedom Maze | Posted by: Gavin

Thanks to a recent visit to Western Mass by Delia Sherman, we have signed first edition hardcover copies of Delia’s The Freedom Maze in stock now.

NB: we automatically ship signed copies of any books we have in stock.

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Small Beer Podcast 9: John Kessel’s “The Last American”

Thu 12 Apr 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., John Kessel, Julie Day, Michael J DeLuca, Podcastery, small beer podcast, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence, The Last American | Comments Off on Small Beer Podcast 9: John Kessel’s “The Last American” | Posted by: Julie

I don’t know how many different people mentioned John Kessel to me before I ever read his work. Well, actually, that’s a lie. I know exactly how many people mentioned John Kessel: four. One of them was Gavin Grant and another was James Patrick Kelly. Mariel Morales and Taylor Preston, school friends of mine from the Stonecoast M.F.A. program, round out the list. In a weirder than fiction moment, while I’m currently typing up this blog post in Massachusetts, tomorrow John, Taylor, Mariel and I are having lunch in North Carolina. It feels like Jim and Kelly should be there as well.

Both this podcast and the next one are all about John Kessel’s fiction. Once you’ve read or listened to one of John’s stories, you’ll find yourself needing more, at least I did. One of my personal Kessel favorites is “Every Angel is Terrifying” along with his series of science fiction stories “A Lunar Quartet.”

It’s nice when it’s easy to share what you love. John’s collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence is available as a free ebook on Weightless Books. So listen, enjoy and then download the rest of John’s stories and read them for yourself. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Episode 9: In which Michael J. DeLuca reads John Kessel’s “The Last American.”

Subscribe to the Small Beer podcast using  iTunes or the service of your choice:

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An A-Z of the Fantastic City is here . . .

Thu 12 Apr 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on An A-Z of the Fantastic City is here . . . | Posted by: Gavin

at laaaaaaaaast!

We received the signed and numbered (1-89!) limited hardcover edition of Hal Duncan’s An A-Z of the Fantastic City today and only burned down half the office in the process. Success! (They are only 2+ months late from the printer—still no explanation given . . .)

So, anyway, apologies everyone who is waiting for this. We are shipping it out to Hal, the fantastic illustrator Eric Schaller, and all those lovely people (and a couple of bookstores) who pre-ordered it.

Once they’re shipped we should have a few copies left over for sale then it will be gone, baby, gone. We’ll post some pictures of it when we get time, too.

It’s a book!

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Monday Monday

Mon 9 Apr 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Monday Monday | Posted by: Gavin

Phew, what a day.

Best phone call of the morning: someone asked us to reinforce two car seats. I put the call on hold and we discussed it: Perhaps this is the best use of our returns? There’s also that old lunch in the fridge that’s turned to stone . . .

Worst call of the morning: that bird, the one that sounds like a cell phone, very early this morning.

Lovely news of the day: Karen Lord is a Campbell Award nominee: yay! Congrats and best of luck to all the Hugo and Campbell nominees.

Best SBP news of the day: Nancy Kress’s Fountain of Age is on its way from C-M Books in Ann Arbor, MI, to Consortium’s warehouse in Jackson, TN, from where it will spring forth into the world.

Worst SBP news of the day: no info yet from the (different) printer on Hal Duncan’s limited edition. Bah humbug.

Best Weightless news of the day: royalties go out this week. They are so much easier to do than Small Beer’s headache inducing royalties which should go out next week. Also: tomorrow we are adding 100+ PM Press ebooks. Ha.

And PW profiles Newbury Comics, an old fave of ours. They’re a regional New England chain of record stores who started with comics and moved to music. They have a few magazines, a few books, and loads and loads of t-shirts, buttons, and various impulse-y things. Long may their pile it high and keep it cheery reign continue.

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Contracts, contracts

Mon 9 Apr 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bookshops, ebooks | Comments Off on Contracts, contracts | Posted by: Gavin

Interesting Salon article on Am*zon’s sponsorship of many literary non-profits. Are they buying love? They’re definitely trying. $25,000 is a helluva donation to anyone never mind a small organization trying to get by on sales or membership fees. (The Brooklyn Book Fest recently asked if we’d like Small Beer to be profiled on their new sponsored-by-Amazon OnePage and we said no. I love the Brooklyn Book Fest, but that’s not a great fit for us.)

Keep in mind that books are a halo product for Amazon. They would much rather be thought of as a bookstore than a Walmart wannabe.

This part of the Salon article was great to hear:

For the first time, the “Big Six” publishers — HarperCollins, Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Macmillan — have refused to sign Amazon’s latest annual contract. The main sticking point is exorbitant increases in “co-op promotional fees” for e-books that the publishers see as an illegal gouge by another name. One person familiar with the details of the proposed 2012 contracts that Amazon has submitted to major New York publishers described them as “stupifyingly draconian.” In some cases, he said, Amazon has raised promotional fees by 30 times their 2011 cost. In saying no, the big publishers are following in the footsteps of the Independent Publishing Group, a major indie distributor representing dozens of small presses that refused Amazon’s increases earlier this winter and soon saw the “Buy” buttons on more than 4,000 of their titles promptly delinked.

I am still hopeful that Amazon will overreach and disappear. Not going to happen, but it makes the horrible headlines about what they are doing to who easier to deal with.

What really makes me unhappy is that high street shops may be pushed out of business and all of our shopping choices will become the same: big box chain stores or Amazon. Which is a crap choice given that most of Amazon’s workers work in warehouses—with goals I could not meet if I were working there—and Fedex and UPS (and warehouse robot suppliers) will be the only winners.

And here’s the Boston Globe being much cheerier, so yay for them.

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Google glasses

Mon 9 Apr 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Comments Off on Google glasses | Posted by: Gavin

Google have suggested that at some point they may launch a product. This product may or may not look like the one in the photo.The product may or may not do certain things and have certain features. These features include being from the future! As ever with Google there is no actual human being who can give you information about this proposed project.

Given Google’s great success with Wave, Reader, Buzz, (and I am forgetting some here) and their recent announced closing of their ebook program with indie bookshops (thanks for messing that up), I am just jittering with excitement about this vaporware exciting new project.

Wow. The future will be great. (Wonder if they are working on jetpacks?)

This post is not at all informed by the fact that I’m using Bing (or even Yahoo(!)) half the time now because I can’t stand the “social search” crapola on the Google results page. Neither am I joining Google+ (i.e. “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”) because if I wanted some company to know absolutely everything about me . . . oh, wait, they already do. Crap. Sure, sign me up.

And I look forward to this post coming back to bite me in the bum when I am happily soldering my Google glasses permanently to my newly installed Google Headjak.

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