email snafus

Wed 31 Mar 2010 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

And now someone around here, ok, me, has put their foot in it and broken the work email. So please try smallbeerpress@gmail dot dot dot if you want to get through, thanks.


tarnation@smallbeerpress.com

Tue 16 Jun 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

We’re having an internet nofun time with all our @smallbeerpress.com emails not working. Boo. Old emails: info @ lcrw.net for instance still work. One of these years we will change over prop’ly, one of these years.

Update: snafu all untangled and everything is working again!


Tumblr

Fri 17 Apr 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Ok, we were told this was easy. Sounded like a challenge. Nope. No challenge. Really, really easy. What’s it for? Who knows? For the nonce, here’s http://smallbeerpress.tumblr.com/


How social are you?

Thu 9 Apr 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

We just got a query on how socially Web 2.0 (isn’t it 2.1 by now?) this press is. Not much, we said. We’re the retiring types. It’s fun to put the books out there, not us. But then the listing began. And did it go on:

  1. Obviously we have this bloggity-type thing with RSS feed and livejournal syndication for which we sometimes get people to write but usually it is robot-produced text (such as this: 1001011010101000110).
  2. We dropped myspace: hated it. (It would be great if we were a band. We’re not.)
  3. We’re on Scribd.
  4. We’re on LibraryThing.
  5. We’re sort of on Flickr.
  6. And on YouTube.
  7. We’re on Facebook. (Fixed, thanks Jed!)
  8. Gavin’s on IndieBound—we should add the press as an indie business—and Goodreads.
  9. Some of our authors are on Twitter (although god knows we’re not, so maybe we can add to this later): Benjamin Parzybok, Holly Black, Jedediah Berry, Alan DeNiro, & ?

Not sure which of these is our favorite. Or if there’s something else that would be fun to join?


Tue 23 Dec 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Something new for the website: join us on Goodreads:

Widget_logo

Tue 23 Dec 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Something new for the website: join us on Goodreads:

Widget_logo

shipping dates

Tue 9 Dec 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Looks like we have to ship books out by the following dates for Xmas (or other December 25th celebrations) arrival (although finding this information on the USPS website is almost impossible):

  • Dec 4 Priority Mail to Africa, Central & South America
  • Dec. 11 Priority Mail: Asia, Pacific Rim, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Caribbean, Mexico, Europe, Middle East
  • Dec. 15 Domestic Parcel Post
  • Dec. 20 Domestic First-Class Mail
  • Dec. 20 Domestic Priority Mail
  • Dec. 22 Domestic Express Mail
    NOTE:  Express Mail deliveries 365 days per year (in many areas), including Christmas Day

Also: post office package prices are rising in January 18th (our prices include Media Mail shipping so this won’t affect most of our shipping):

Flat Rate Envelopes and Boxes Retail Commercial Base Commercial Plus
Priority Mail —
Envelope $4.95 $4.80 $4.75
Small box $4.95 $4.80 $4.75
Regular box $10.35 $9.85 $9.67
Large box $13.95 $13.50 $13.27
Large box (APO/FPO) $11.95 $11.50 $11.30
Express Mail —
Envelope $17.50 $16.63 $14.96

cats, tags

Wed 3 Dec 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

are these post things meant to have categories and tags or is that just wordpress messing with us?


pics and comments

Thu 26 Jun 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Kessel, Baum Plan

Thanks to Ben P. we now have a new thing (functionality!) on this page. (But nowhere else on the site. Ha!) During our gremlins’ tea break we installed a “Subscribe to Comments” plugin so that you, the commenter can choose to receive an email when someone else comments on your comment. It’s not just a Facebook wall for graffiti, people are reading! Cough.

Another thing: a little while ago Michael* took some pics of some of our books and now they are online. At some later point there may be more. In the meantime:

Crowley, Endless Things

Hand, Generation Loss

Ellen Kushner, The Privilege of the Sword

Magic for Beginners

* Michael’s got a solstice gardening story here — with a picture linked in the comments that is just right for you, Mr. Rowe.


Ad word suggestions please

Tue 24 Jun 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Google and Vistaprint (cheap postcards!) sent us $100 credit for Google Adwords so we’re looking for suggesting for which words* we should use. The words should apparently be enticing, or, er, seductive (perhaps filthy-as-all-get-out would be the way to go?), and something which will encourage people not at all like you (ie they have no idea who either you or us are) buy books.**

Suggestions in the comments, please. Best suggestion(s) within the next couple of days will receive an uncorrected proof of Ben Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories.

*or: keywords!, so much more important and sexy than regular words.
** The Small Beer HQ was rocked by laughter at this point as thousands of editors, designers, typesetters, etc., chuckled heartily at the thought of people buying books. Who does that anymore? Ha ha ha.


not this week

Wed 30 Apr 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

No free books this week! Making more books, LCRW (hey, we still put out a zine!), a catalog, und, yes, so weiter, is getting in the way. Also: we are planning a fun thing for BookExpo, hee hee. Cough. (Sounds look weird in WordPress. May need to add sound.)

ARCs of Ben Rosenbaum’s collection are on their way to the secret masters of the universe who will declare it a bestseller. Yes, they are in touch with the public’s unending appetite for short story collections.

Kelly is reading next week at the South Street Seaport in NYC as part of the NYRSF reading series with Jennifer Stevenson whose sexy new novel The Brass Bed is about to about to about to arrive.

Hey, in February we sold a couple of books on the Kindle. Who knew! Asked Amazon if they would send us a Kindle to see what the reading experience was like. They demurred. People should always feel free to send us expensive gifts. We are not public servants. (Neither are we savants.) We do not fear the gifting. We are just very bad at the return part.


Sale over dude, sale over

Sat 29 Dec 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Or perhaps the quote was Game Over? Anyway. We have been too lazy to take down our sale page and so it has dragged on a bit past its sell-by date. Oops and all that. So. It will disappear soon. No, really.

In the new year there will be activity, linking to wonderful things about writers, news, all that stuff. In the meantime—


Kelly’s daemon

Sat 15 Dec 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Slightly different from the one she did last April(!), here’s Kelly’s new daemon:


Useful Web 2.0 Stuff

Tue 23 Oct 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Just signed up for Tour Filter (should be one word, all lower case, of course) which does seem rather groovy and very much like something we’ve been waiting for the web to deliver (we don’t program: we wait).

Yay! Cut and pasted tons of bands from our this-empty-space-is-a-social-experiment-really myspace page and Voila! Tracking tons of bands. Could be good, as it grows, to check out cities where we have to go for conventions: LA in June, anyone?

Also signed up for Book Tour. You can subscribe to authors (they’re still adding people so not everyone is there), check by zip code or city, and look for books. That last one seemed the weakest link and it doesn’t have the fastest search engine, but it could become a good site. Anything that makes keeping up easier. May add our authors to this—or see if someone else will!

Read Around New England took a shot at this previously, but maybe didn’t have rss feeds (Or Chris Anderson or “Chief Evangelist” [religion, it’s everywhere] Kevin Smokler).

It’s the personalizationableness (ha!) of both of these things that will determine their survival.They’re both nice, simple sites at the moment—although the above-mentioned mycrap site shows that simplicity and good design aren’t actually necessary to pull people in—and if they can keep that and resist the Amazonian urge to mess with their recommendation engines, they’ll be huge.

Now, can someone write a site like these for TV? How about short fiction? Vegetarian restaurants? Nonleather shoes? Every petty little need and want?

At the other end of the spectrum on Monday we got a call from a large literary organization (whom we like a lot so no names) asking if we would like to pay $395 a year to have a profile on their site.

Could be the wrong answer (hope we’re not in the bad books for this) but, um, thanks for the opportunity, but no thanks. $395 is a lot of beer. And what’s the point of paying for a profile? Either the website is edited/curated and the profiles mean something, or they’re paid for and it’s just a link farm moneymaker.


redesign

Mon 15 Oct 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Thanks to Michael this page you are looking at is cleaner and prettier, thanks Michael!

  • Now you can actually tell where the links are, there’s a groovy link to some of our author’s posts (may re-org that later). That was inspired by something seen on the Mumpsimus—thanks Matt!—but we didn’t want to have to go to the trouble of “sharing” other people’s posts, rather this is an automatic scrape of what they’ve written. The WordPress plug-in for it seems a bit buggy and doesn’t seem to love all the blogs we put in, but maybe it will sort itself out.
  • Our links are still laughable, but there’s a good page of them elsewhere.
  • The other useful Google ap here is the calendar which should have been on this page ages ago.
  • Indented text isn’t as ugly.
  • What people are looking for: still not here.

Maybe this page should be the front page of the site? Don’t know. Doesn’t have any book covers on it!

Michael is also the guy putting together the really neat Interfictions teaser podcast series, where every month they’re posting the first 10 minutes of an author reading their story. This month: Vandana Singh.


ebookery

Tue 7 Aug 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Last week Jed was busy tearing lots of our books apart, taking very careful pictures of each of the pages (just as he did with that Harry Potter book*), and mailing the photos to Fictionwise. Over there they have carefully assembled the photos into facsimiles of the books (complicated!) which can be ordered in up to eight formats (none of which are technically edible). Hereaways are the books you can now get:

Endless Things by John Crowley

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand

Water Logic by Laurie J. Marks

Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead by Alan DeNiro

Also these (more to come soon):

Trash Sex Magic by Jennifer Stevenson

Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller

Mothers & Other Monsters by Maureen F. McHugh

Storyteller by Kate Wilhelm—this ebook is only available from our web site.

* No. He didn’t.


Bookslut R US

Mon 30 Jul 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

From Monday August 6 to Friday August 10 we will be guestblogging over at Bookslut.

We will be opinionating, pimping, scatterbrained, and at some point during the week travelling to San Fransisco. Suggestions?

&: Booklust Is Also Us.


Cafe Press

Tue 10 Jul 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Skinny Dipping: Dark T-ShirtWe have a bunch of “stores” on Cafe Press. If we actually sold much of this stuff we’d quit selling books in the drop of a pink Men’s Raglan Hoodie. But they’re more for fun than anything else.

This came up because Anne Sebba, author of a new biography of Jennie Jerome (aka Lady Randolph Churchill), reminded us we have an LCRW store. The other stores are:

Skinny Dipping: Dog T-ShirtWe haven’t added shops for the ’07 books yet—maybe we will, maybe we won’t. Any requests will be read and (after a quick trip to Maine), perhaps acted upon.

In the meantime the last one of these we added was for Alan DeNiro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. We really hope these doggy shirts are popular this winter.


Google book bar

Thu 21 Jun 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Random wigglings on Google having control of our site. Or, at least, we’ve added Google Book Bar to the front page (down a bit on the left hand side). And if you wait a minute it will change.

We also use Google Calendar and Kelly has experimented with Google Docs (although not, as Alan DeNiro, is doing, by writing a novel in it).

Whether we should keep this on the site is a question. Whether in fact we should drop the whole site and leave this up as a self-generating page for the books is also an interesting question.

We have a pretty basic site which retains much of its 5 year old charm. Cough. Updating it is something we think about but don’t jump at. Companies like Google making these auto-content generating widgets may mean that eventually we won’t have a site. Just a journalling capability to centralize a source of information.

That journalling capability, i.e. doing the site blog-style, is basically great — since the structure and archiving are built into it — but not one we’re moving to with any real haste. The front/splash page seems important as people go to websites for lots of different reasons and we like the simplicity of it.

At least for now.


Sat 28 Apr 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Ironside: A Modern Faery's Tale CoverHolly Black has brought us screaming into 2002 by creating a live journal feed for this thing. We tried to name it lcrw but it declared autonomy, packed up all its old cassettes and vinyl, moved out, and hung its own shingle under the name

smallbeer_rss

At some point (soonish?) that may be added to the feed syndicate (because we are all always hungry and we believe in the syndicate and that they are good. Good). Livejournal seems to require posts to have titles in a way that other blog syndicates don’t. A tithe we pay to the syndicate in good grace.

Thanks Holly!

Holly is about to take a landyacht (or maybe she will valiantly brave the Friendly Skies and take the Aeriobehometh) for the west coast where she (and Cassandra Clare) will visit (and share vast quantities of Arabian Wine with) purveyors of bookth.


Sat 28 Apr 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Ironside: A Modern Faery's Tale CoverHolly Black has brought us screaming into 2002 by creating a live journal feed for this thing. We tried to name it lcrw but it declared autonomy, packed up all its old cassettes and vinyl, moved out, and hung its own shingle under the name

smallbeer_rss

At some point (soonish?) that may be added to the feed syndicate (because we are all always hungry and we believe in the syndicate and that they are good. Good). Livejournal seems to require posts to have titles in a way that other blog syndicates don’t. A tithe we pay to the syndicate in good grace.

Thanks Holly!

Holly is about to take a landyacht (or maybe she will valiantly brave the Friendly Skies and take the Aeriobehometh) for the west coast where she (and Cassandra Clare) will visit (and share vast quantities of Arabian Wine with) purveyors of bookth.


Mon 26 Mar 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Last Wednesday some of us here trundled down the glorious winter roads to New York to the KGB Bar to see Carol Emshwiller and David Louis Edelman read. Both readers were worth getting the matched pair out and the (somewhat long) curricle ride. And is there anything more beautiful than the rural fields of Stamford and the rolling hills of New Haven on the approach to the glittering metropolis of New York?

However, despite the lovely readings and the feast following the reading, we left with something unexpected: a “Devil Bug of Doom” (copyright Gwenda Bond) which had us shaking like Elvis for a couple of days. Or maybe just Shakin’ Stevens.

Things You the Reader Could Do*:

Send us the new Adobe Creative Suite…? MacRumors says the pricing will be released tomorrow — which is far enough ahead of the software packages’ ship dates (which run April to June) for us to get over the sticker shock. We are using new (for us, maybe 6 months old now) MacBooks (tiny, cute computers!) and PhotoShop and InDesign run a bit slow so these upgrades are much anticipated. The Design package is what we’re looking at:

CS3 Design Premium (up) $1799.95
CS3 Design Standard $1199.95

…although we might be able to get an upgrade from PhotoShop 7 for only $900. So, Johnny, you know how we promised to take you to DissMeLand for your birthday this year? Small Beer says, Sorry Kid, maybe next year, maybe never. Don’t cry kid. Aw.

* If you were perhaps either stuck in traffic for 36 hours and bored out your head. Or just a little more than tipsy. Or a crazy stalker**. Or just wealthy. Or just plain crazy.

** We don’t have any of these, yay!

In other news:

  • John Crowley’s Endless Things received one of its first big reviews in Book Forum: “With Endless Things and the completion of the Ægypt cycle, Crowley has constructed one of the finest, most welcoming tales contemporary fiction has to offer us.”
  • Liz Hand (whose novel is will shipped from the printer next week) is part of a new group blog, the inferior 4 +1.
  • Matt Cheney posted the contents for the first Best American Fantasy anthology which includes Kelly’s “Origin Story” from A Public Space, Liz Hand’s “The Saffron Gatherer”, as well as a ton of other great stories.
  • Happy to see that Michael Dirda’s Washington Post piece was run by the Austin American Stateman this weekend.
  • Did Scotland actually win at football? Reports say the final score in some kind of European tourney was Scotland 2, Georgia 1. But we were in Georgia recently, in Atlanta, and while the accents were strong, they did not seem to be Europeans (and I could have sworn we drove, so how did we cross the water?). Scotland play Italy on Wednesday. You never know. Unless you’re a Scotland fan.

Mon 26 Mar 2007 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

Last Wednesday some of us here trundled down the glorious winter roads to New York to the KGB Bar to see Carol Emshwiller and David Louis Edelman read. Both readers were worth getting the matched pair out and the (somewhat long) curricle ride. And is there anything more beautiful than the rural fields of Stamford and the rolling hills of New Haven on the approach to the glittering metropolis of New York?

However, despite the lovely readings and the feast following the reading, we left with something unexpected: a “Devil Bug of Doom” (copyright Gwenda Bond) which had us shaking like Elvis for a couple of days. Or maybe just Shakin’ Stevens.

Things You the Reader Could Do*:

Send us the new Adobe Creative Suite…? MacRumors says the pricing will be released tomorrow — which is far enough ahead of the software packages’ ship dates (which run April to June) for us to get over the sticker shock. We are using new (for us, maybe 6 months old now) MacBooks (tiny, cute computers!) and PhotoShop and InDesign run a bit slow so these upgrades are much anticipated. The Design package is what we’re looking at:

CS3 Design Premium (up) $1799.95
CS3 Design Standard $1199.95

…although we might be able to get an upgrade from PhotoShop 7 for only $900. So, Johnny, you know how we promised to take you to DissMeLand for your birthday this year? Small Beer says, Sorry Kid, maybe next year, maybe never. Don’t cry kid. Aw.

* If you were perhaps either stuck in traffic for 36 hours and bored out your head. Or just a little more than tipsy. Or a crazy stalker**. Or just wealthy. Or just plain crazy.

** We don’t have any of these, yay!

In other news:

  • John Crowley’s Endless Things received one of its first big reviews in Book Forum: “With Endless Things and the completion of the Ægypt cycle, Crowley has constructed one of the finest, most welcoming tales contemporary fiction has to offer us.”
  • Liz Hand (whose novel is will shipped from the printer next week) is part of a new group blog, the inferior 4 +1.
  • Matt Cheney posted the contents for the first Best American Fantasy anthology which includes Kelly’s “Origin Story” from A Public Space, Liz Hand’s “The Saffron Gatherer”, as well as a ton of other great stories.
  • Happy to see that Michael Dirda’s Washington Post piece was run by the Austin American Stateman this weekend.
  • Did Scotland actually win at football? Reports say the final score in some kind of European tourney was Scotland 2, Georgia 1. But we were in Georgia recently, in Atlanta, and while the accents were strong, they did not seem to be Europeans (and I could have sworn we drove, so how did we cross the water?). Scotland play Italy on Wednesday. You never know. Unless you’re a Scotland fan.

Small Beer Readings Calendar

Wed 6 Sep 2006 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Just embedded a new Google Calendar on our events page. Here’s a direct link. You can subscribe to the calendar—which means it adds our calendar to yours. We’ve set up a bunch of these calendars so that we can look at a glance at what fruit we’re supposed to be picking, wo the Scottish football team is playing, where the moon is (says “in the sky” every day), and so on. Very handy.

We’ll probably just flip all the Readings links on the site to the calendar page and maybe someday make different calendars for each author (or, maybe they will make their own!). Although that sounds like work, especially since the G.Calendar page has a search function.

So far we’ve only added a Federal holidays calendar, since they keep creeping up on us unexpectedly: banks and bakeries close and we have no idea why…. Will go looking at what is else is public—or feel free to point us toward interesting ones.