Wizard’s Tower

Regarding Eastercon

~ Cheryl ~ Leave a comment

Eastercon is happening in a few weeks time, and I had a dealer table booked there. However, my car is currently sick and definitely not up to a lot of motorway driving. The fix isn’t huge, but it is time-consuming and I have no guarantee that I’ll have a fully working car come Easter.

I’ve looked into car rental, but I’d need it for at least 6 days and there’s no way I can justify the cost.

Also Eastercon has a long waiting list for dealer tables. Farah needed to know asap whether I would be using my booked place.

So I decided to hand back the booking and plan to travel to Birmingham by train.

That doesn’t mean I can’t sell books. It just limits the quantity I can take with me. A couple of people have kindly offered to help with book transport should I need it. And of course if I do get the car back in time I can take more.

So, if you want a book from Wizard’s Tower, and want to take advantage of convention pricing, I need to know in advance so I am mostly packing books that are actually going to sell.

To make things easy, I’m keeping the convention pricing very simple. Paperbacks are £10, hardcovers are £15; except for the bigger fantasy novels (the Tales of Einarinn series, the Aldabreshin Compass series, and The Tangled Lands), which are £12 and £18. I do expect to have copies of A Dark Way to Glory available, but they haven’t been delivered yet.

If you want books, please let me know, either here, by email or by social media. Contact email addresses for Wizard’s Tower are here. Pay me at the con. I will probably be spending some time at the Science Fiction Foundation table in the Dealers’ Room, and may be on panel.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Introducing The Green Man’s Gift

~ Cheryl


It is that time of year again. A new Green Man book is nearing publication. Today we debuted the fablulous cover that Ben Baldwin has produced for The Green Man’s Gift. If all goes according to plan, ebook pre-orders will be open on Monday. The book is scheduled for publication on October 6th. If you want an eARC, let me know.

Weightless Once More

~ Cheryl

No, I haven’t been on a diet. I am pleased to announce that Wizard’s Tower Press books are once more available via Weightless Books, a very fine independent purveyor of ebooks.

Those of you with long memories may recall that we had to stop using Weightless back in the days of the Great EU VAT Debacle. Much has happened since then. To start with, the UK is no longer part of the EU. Also Weightless are now preventing sales into the UK and EU. So all of the legal issues seem to have gone away. Obviously folks in the UK and EU can’t take advantage of this, but for folks elsewhere I would encourage you to buy from Weightless rather than from the Evil Empire.

I’ll be adding purchase links to the various book pages on the Wizard’s Tower website as soon as I can get it all done.

Green Men Going Cheap

~ Cheryl


As I mentioned briefy yesterday, Amazon UK has decided to put The Green Man’s Heir on sale at £0.99 for the whole of March. Juliet and I are, of course, delighted to be able to bring the series to the attention of yet more readers. But equally we don’t see why people outside of the UK should miss out.

Ideally I’d simply match prices all over the world, but it isn’t quite that easy. Your best bet, wherever you live, is Kobo. The book is £0.99 in their UK store, and should be roughly the same price all over the world, subject to the whims of exchange rates.

Update: I’ve been informed by a friend in Europe that Kobo has not put the book on sale there. I’m guessing that’s because I’ve incorrectly understood the vague instructions on their store’s backend. I will try to fix it, but I may not be able to do that without cancelling the sale. Bah!

If you are in the USA you can get a copy from Barnes & Noble at $1.30.

Amazon is a bit weird. They wouldn’t let me reduce the price below $2.99 in the USA, but when I check the page it says the book is $1.33, so it looks like they have it on sale there too. In Europe the lowest I could set was €2.69, and that’s what I’m seeing in France. Amazon stores outside of Europe are probably basing their price on the $2.99 US price.

Sorry it is all so weird, but that’s the trouble with having to work through big, multi-national corporations. If it hadn’t been for Brexit, I would still be able to sell ebooks direct. Which is one of many reasons why I want to see Mr. Putin’s arse kicked.

The BSFA Awards

~ Cheryl

The finalists for this year’s BSFA Awards have been announced, and I am pleased to see that The Green Man’s Challenge is on the list for Best Novel. That’s the second time one of the Green Man books has had this honour. The Green Man’s Foe was also a finalist. And of course The Green Man’s Heir was a finalist for the Rob Holdstock Award from the British Fantasy Society. That’s award nominations for three out of the four books in the series, which is pretty spectacular. Go Juliet!

I’m also pleased to see Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction on the short list for Non-Fiction. That’s the latest Academia Lunare book, and it contains my essay on worldbuilding with sex and gender, a.k.a. the queer animals essay.

It seems unlikley that either book will win, given the nature of the competition, but it always an honour to be on these short lists and it gives one an excuse to wear a pretty frock to an award ceremony, which I haven’t done in a while.

The full lists, which also include a fiction for younger readers category, and an artwork category, can be found here.

And talking of The Green Man’s Heir, Amazon UK has decided to put the Kindle edition on sale for the whole of March. That will hopefully net Juliet a nice chunk of cash. The book has already sold over 17,000 copies, which is absurdly successful for a small company like Wziard’s Tower. I have dreams of getting past 20,000. To help with that I will be reducing the ebook prices to match (as best I can) on other platforms and other Amazon sites. It takes a while for all of this to go live, and I can’t queue it up in advance because you never quite know whether Amazon will do what they say they will when it comes to special offers. But we have the whole month so hopefully tomorrow all will be in place. If you know of anyone who doesn’t yet have a copy of the book, do let them know.

Introducing Outremer

~ Cheryl

It is late in 2003 and I am in Stafford in Middle England for FantasyCon. It is an up and down event. On the downside, it takes place on the same weekend as the final of the Rugby World Cup. The English win. That chap Wilkinson. I am unhappy. But I am at the convention, at least in part, for the awards. China Miéville is busy finishing writing The Iron Council and has asked me if I will stand in for him at the award ceremony where The Scar is up for Best Novel. So I get to make a speech on China’s behalf, and I get given an ugly little Cthuloid statue to take back to him. Ah well, at least it wasn’t a bust of Lovecraft.

At the banquet I am sat next to a lad from Newcastle called Chaz. We bond over a number of things, including a shared devotion to the San Francisco 49ers. “What have you written?” I ask. “Well,” says Chaz, “I have this fantasy series set in an alternate version of the Crusades, and it has just started to come out in America…”

It is 2003, two years since 9/11 and two years into George W Bush’s quest for vengeance. Crusader rhetoric is the order of the day. The West is cast as Christian, Iran and Iraq are obviously Muslim. Tony Blair has recently deployed the Dodgy Dossier; David Kelly is dead; and the invasion of Iraq is well underway. This man wants me to read a fantasy series based on the Crusades? It had better be bloody good.

Of course it was.

Outremer is the collective name given to the four Crusader kingdoms founded after the First Crusade. Their actual history is deeply fascinating, and some great historical novels could doubtless be set in them. Brenchley, however, is doing that fantasy thing where a thinly disguised version of real history, with added magical seasoning, allows him to talk about the real world without the associated baggage that readers are likely to bring to it. He can’t have known, when he started writing the books, how appropriate they would become. The first one was published in the UK in 1998. But sometimes we luck into things.

What Chaz didn’t luck into was recognition for what he had created. I did my best with reviews in Emerald City, but the books didn’t capture the imagination in the way I’d hoped. Maybe they were too timely. Maybe there was too much queer stuff for the audience of 20 years ago. Regardless, I am absolutely delighted to have been given the opportunity to bring them to a new audience.

I’m particularly pleased to have the first book nearing completion during LGBT+ History Month. The mediaeval world has been presented to us as relentlessly heterosexual for decades, but we now know that was far from the truth. Human beings have always been queer, and a lot of what actually happened in those days has been carefully excised from history. Slowly modern historians are undoing that erasure. There have even been questions asked of that most macho of men, Richard Couer de Lion. Brenchley is not writing about real people, so there can be no one to say that there is no proof they were queer. Having them in the book is simply portraying the period as it existed, which is a good thing to be doing.

There will be more publicity for Outremer in the coming weeks. I very much hope that the books manage to find a new audience.

Happy Solstice!

~ Cheryl


As usual, my holiday card this year is by my talented friend, Dru Marland. This picture is titled, “Fox on Pickle Hill”, and Juliet McKenna fans will note that I picked it specifically because it features some of the chalk figures from the Wiltshire landscape. These also play a key role in The Green Man’s Challenge.

This particular image is currently unavailable as a card from Dru’s shop. I’m guessing that she has run out of stock. But it does feature in her 2022 Wildlife Calendar which looks an excellent thing to have.

May you all have a very happy holiday season, and in the Northern Hemisphere enjoy the return of shorter and warmer days. (Sorry Aussie pals, but you are thumping us at cricket so we need something to cheer us up.)

Those of you who celebrate the Solstice will be able to follow the sunset alignment at Maeshowe in Orkney via the broadcast below. It starts at 15:00 today.

New Compass eBooks

~ Cheryl


Those of you who have ebook editions of Juliet McKenna’s Adabreshin Compass books should be getting notifications of new editions that are available. The main reason for this is to incorporate the fabulous new map of the Aldabreshin Archipelago that Oisín McGann did for us for the paper editions. Enjoy.

New Crater School Book on Pre-Order

~ Cheryl


The new Chaz Brenchey novel, Dust Up at the Crater School, is ready to go at last. The fabulous Ben Baldwin cover is above, and links to pre-order are available here. It is just Amazon and Kobo right now because the B&N website has been having a bit of a moment, but I have finally got the book uploaded so they should have it available soon.

Print copies will be a little longer coming because of the time of year, and the supply chain crisis. But the ebooks will be available on December 24th. That’s a significant date. Does it mean something? Why yes! Here’s the blurb:

Christmas is coming to the Crater School, so the girls must celebrate. So says the Earth calendar. But Mars does not respect school rules. Nor does the Red Planet have much respect for Earth weather. Why bother with a white Christmas when Martian weather can be far more dangerous?

Then again, perhaps this is for the best. The people most likely to arrive at the Crater School with snow on their boots are Russian spies.

Yes, we have a Christmas story for you. But before that we have the whole of the autumn term, so there’s plenty of time for our girls to get themselves into trouble. And they do, of course.

As you may have noticed, we have a front page quote from the inimitable Francis Spufford. He’s also provided a blurb for the book. Here it is:

Only in the laboratory of Chaz Brenchley could the British school story be lovingly sutured together with the Old Mars of the pulps, animated with the crackling static of a planetary dust storm, and sent lumbering down to the village. No – *skipping* down to the village, with a beret, and a paper bag full of bulls’-eyes, and a wholesome desire to excel at lacrosse.

Do keep an eye on the Wizard’s Tower Press Twitter feed (@WTPress) as I’ll be teasing a few things about the book over the next few weeks. Also Chaz has promised a few Christmas recipes from Mrs. Bailey, the school’s legendary cook.

Finally, if you read and enjoyed Three Twins, do please consider posting a review on Amazon. I’ve seen from Juliet and Tate what a massive difference getting to 50 reviews makes to sales. We currently have 36, so we don’t need many more.

Compass in Paper

~ Cheryl


This took rather longer than expected due to the pandemic and the need to get the map re-done, but finally we have Juliet McKenna’s Aldabreshin Compass series back in print. The image above is of the paperbacks, and showcases Ben Baldwin’s brilliant new covers. I don’t have all of the hardcovers yet, but UPS has promised they’ll be delivered tomorrow and that should be before I have to leave for BristolCon.

I’m particularly pleased to have this series back in print because it shows that fantasy writers have been aware of diversty issues for some time. The majority of the people we meet in these books are black, and the US edition of Southern Fire had a good picture of Daish Kheda on the cover. It was published in 2003. The culture of the Aldabreshin Archipelago is also fascinating. Men have multiple wives, but their role in society is limited to law and war. Economic power is firmly vested in the women who do all of the trading. Eunuchs are commonplace. And magic is viewed with deep suspicion, if not horror.

Thanks to the worldwide paper shortage, and my being off to Canada next week, I won’t be able to fulfill orders from the Wizard’s Tower store swiftly, but the books should all be orderable from bookstores as of today. I will be looking for links and updating the Wizard’s Tower main site accordingly.

Mega McKenna Offers

~ Cheryl


Every so often an author finds herself storing rather a lot of author copies of some of her books. What are you going to do with them? Well, sell them, obviously. But you probably don’t have enough stock for a dealer table at a convention. Which is where your friendly, neighbourhood small press comes in. As I’m now selling paper, I can help.

I have just added a coupe of massive bargains to the Wizard’s Tower bookstore. You can get the complete series of The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution, and The Hadrumal Crisis, for just £5 + postage each. The postage is as much as the cost of the books. And if you will be at BristolCon you can reserve copies to pick up there and not pay postage. Honestly, bargain. See here.

UK only, of course. Curse you, Brexit.

Green Men at BristolCon

~ Cheryl


Yes folks, BristolCon is fast approaching, and I will be in the Dealers’ Room with lots of lovely books for you to buy.

The book that will probably be most in demand is The Green Man’s Challenge. I should have enough paperbacks, but if you want a hardcover it would be best to reserve one. Equally if you want a copy of something else that is low on stock.

Anyway, the bookstore now sells paper books to UK customers. Mostly that means postage, but if you expect the pick up the book at a con then just select that delivery option instead. Please check any books that you want, because the website does have stock levels so it is easy to see if anything is in short supply.

Did I mention that you get a free copy of the ebook if you buy a paper book direct from us?

See (some of) you at BristolCon.

Octocon This Weekend

~ Cheryl

Ireland’s national SF&F convention will be taking place virtually again this year. It is free to attend, and there is a lot going on. Details are available here.

I am on two panels. They are as follows.

Saturday, 21:00 How Not to Code Your Non-Humans
Writers often use traits of neurodiverse, non-binary, queer or disabled people as blueprints for their aliens, robots and monsters, but don’t allow their humans to share these characteristics. How can we build both human and non-human characters to exhibit a wide range of identities without resorting to mere ambiguous coding or else to using racist, sexist or other bigoted stereotypes?
With: Faranae, Kat Dodd, Angeline B. Adams & S.L. Dove Cooper

Sunday, 15:00 Uncovering the Hidden Treasures of the Past
Science fiction as a genre looks to the future, but authors of the past can still have a lot to say to us even though their work may have fallen out of print and become a distant memory. Why have some writers and works been consigned to the vaults of history while others have remained on the shelves, and what would our panel most like to see restored from the archives?
With: Ian Moore, Michael Carroll, Cora Buhlert & Deirdre Thornton

I will also be available in the Wizard’s Tower Press channel of the convention’s Discord.

Juliet McKenna is doing a couple of panels on Saturday, and a reading on Sunday.

As far as the rest of the programme goes, I’m looking forward to the great Shelly Bond talking about editing comics, Gillian Polack’s talk on Food in Fantasy, and S.L. Dove Cooper on Asexuality in SF&F. The full schedule is available here.

Hopefully I will see some of you there.

Publication Day

~ Cheryl


The Green Man’s Challenge is now out in the wild, and the several hundred people who pre-ordered the book should now have it on their reading devices.

If you haven’t ordered a copy yet and will be at BristolCon, I will be putting up links for you to reserve a copy for collection there. Or, if you are in the UK, you can order a copy to be mailed to you.

I note that if you buy paper books direct from Wizard’s Tower you can elect to have a copy of the ebook sent to you for free.

If you were at FantasyCon you might also have noticed a proof copy of the paperback of Southern Fire. The rest of the Aldabreshin Compass series will be following this month. It will be great to have that series back in print again, especially with those lovely Ben Baldwin covers.

Now that I’m doing actual physical sales from the website (again, apologies, UK only), a few other things will turn up there. Keep your eyes peeled.

Outremer Returns

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment


When I started Wizard’s Tower, my primary business plan was to help authors whose books had gone out of print to get them available to the public again. In particular I was looking at books for which an ebook edition never existed, because making an ebook was easy. Of course a lot of water has flowed under the bridge in the past 10 years. I certainly never expected to have a huge hit with original fiction published in paper. But equally I haven’t lost sight of the original goal. It is therefore with great pleasure that I can announce that Wizard’s Tower will be producing new editions of Chaz Brenchey’s Books of Outremer.

I read these books back in 2004 and was struck by how they provided a nuanced and understanding view of the Crusades at a time when simplistic and Islamophobic Crusader imagery was being widely deployed in support of the Iraq War, and that they featured a gay relationship between two major characters. In 2004 that was massive. But Chaz was a UK writer largely cut off from the UK scene, and positive coverage in Emerald City wasn’t enough to break him in America. These days he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, so hopefully the new editions will find their way to US conventions, at least on the West Coast.

An interesting piece of synchronicity is that John Jarrold, who was the commissioning editor at Random House back in the 1990s who originally bought the books, is now Chaz’s agent and was responsible for negotiating the deal with me.

Those who know the books will have questions. Here are some answers. We will publish the series in six volumes as per the US edition. There will be new cover art. (I’ve given Ben Baldwin some ideas.) And there will be hardcovers. The first book will be out early in 2022, hopefully for LGBT History Month here in the UK. The rest of the books will follow over time, but we have the Crater School books to do as well and there’s a limit to how quickly Chaz and I, not to mention Ben, can get through all of this.

If you are unfamiliar with the books (and don’t mind spoilers) there is a website devoted to the series. Also I reviewed all 6 books for Emerald City.

John’s official press release is here.

And I am a very happy publisher.

The Green Man’s Challenge

~ Cheryl


Yes folks, the latest book in Juliet McKenna’s hugely successful Green Man series is coming very soon. Publication is planned for September 28th, and pre-orders are opening up around the internet. More on that later, but first some blurb.

A while back, Daniel Mackmain’s life took an unexpected turn. Now the Green Man expects him to resolve clashes between those dwelling unseen in wild places and the ordinary people who have no idea what’s out there. Dan’s father is human and his mother’s a dryad, so he sees what’s happening in both these worlds.

Once upon a time, giants walked this land. So says everyone from Geoffrey of Monmouth to William Blake. This ancient threat is stirring in the Wiltshire twilight, up on the chalk downs. Can Dan meet this new challenge when he can only find half-forgotten fairy tales to guide him? Will the other local supernatural inhabitants see him – or the giant – as friend or foe?

A modern fantasy rooted in the ancient myths and folklore of the British Isles.

The book also features a bonus short story starring Dan’s boss, Eleanor Beauchene.

There you have it. But who is that person on the cover? Obviously you will need the book to find out.

Links to various stores that have the book available can be found here. It is a bit sparse at the moment, but it should fill out over the next few days. I’ve just approved the paperback for printing, so that should be appearing in stores soon.

If you are going to be at FantasyCon then you will be able to get paper copies a few days early. Juliet and I will be there, and to help me judge how many copies I need to take with me I have opened up a special pre-order page that is for at-con pickup only. Juliet will sign the book for you at the con, and the price is a lot lower than you’ll pay in a shop.

We’ll also be at BristolCon, of course, but that means waiting another month.

The other way to get the book quickly would be to ask me for an eARC so you can write a review.

With all of the nonsense resulting from Brexit and the pandemic, getting paper books to customers has become much harder, so I am taking the plunge and looking into selling direct to the public. This will be UK only, thanks to Brexit, but hopefully it will shift some stock. More on this later. Right now I’m looking into environmentally responsible packaging.

There are other things I’m working on to make our books more easily available. Also there will be some exciting Chaz Brenchley news real soon now. Watch this space.

Top of the Charts Again

~ Cheryl


Yesterday The Green Man’s Heir was on sale at Amazon UK again. I wasn’t expecting a lot, because it has been on sale a few times before. I figured everyone I knew would have a copy by now. Nevertheless, little ebooks flew off the virtual shelves, and soon things got exciting. By early evening the book was once again #1 in paid SF&F on Kindle.

To get there once in a book’s lifetime is pretty incredible. To do it twice… I’m flabbergasted.

Of course there is also the special thrill that comes from seeing a book that I published ahead of works by She Who Must Not Be Named in the charts.

I should add also that GMH was by no means the only quality book on sale yesterday. We spent the whole day locked in a contest with two of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut books, the most recent of which ended up #2 in the charts. There were also books on sale from the likes of Joe Abercrombie and Neil Gaiman. Possibly those were on longer-term sales, which would mean less concentrated action on one day, but even so it is very pleasing.

A lot of it is down to Ben Baldwin’s brilliant cover, of course. Juliet and I have been lucky enough to see some drafts of the cover for The Green Man’s Challenge, and y’all will get to see it later this week.

Also of note yesterday was a tweet from Fonda Lee noting that only three things can make a book a huge hit: a big marketing campaign; the author being a celebrity; or word of mouth. There’s no way Wizard’s Tower can afford a big marketing campaign. Juliet is nowhere near that famous. And so, as she said in response to Fonda’s tweet, we owe all this to you. Without all of the positive reviews, the encouraging your friends to buy the book, and so on, we would not have this massive hit on our hands. Thank you!

By the way, if anyone ever tells you that books with green covers don’t sell…

A Daily Deal

~ Cheryl


In case you haven’t noticed, The Green Man’s Silence is a Daily Deal on Amazon UK today. That means you can pick it up for just 99p, but today only. It being the third book in the series, it isn’t going to do quite as well as when The Green Man’s Heir got to be #1 in Science Fiction and Fantasy, but it is doing very nicely. If you don’t have a copy yet, do pick one up while you can. It will help encourage Amazon to promote the new book when it comes out. And these sales figures do wonders for Juliet’s ability to sell to mainstream publishers.

By the way, I haven’t forgotten this. Take that, Rowling!

Clevedon Tomorrow

~ Cheryl

This is a reminder that Juliet McKenna and I will be in Clevedon tomorrow for their literary festival. Juliet is appearing on the Fantasy Fringe panel at 3:30pm, but the lovely people from Books on the Hill, who are organising that event, have a stall there all day, so I’ll be going over early to give them some books to sell.

Mind you, given that Clevedon is a seaside town, and the weather is forecast to be excellent, I might not be at the venue all day. A little bit of breathing in of sea air might be necessary.

UK, What Are You Thinking?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments


No, this is not a post about the Cummings and Goings in Westminster. This is about book. That lovely cover is for Tate Hallaway’s fabulous Unjust Cause. It is selling like the proverbial hot cakes in the USA — well over 100 copies a month at full price. And it has the magic 50 reviews so it should be nice and visible. In the UK it has been priced at around £2 all month. Nothing to do with me, it is an Amazon thing that they didn’t tell me about. And yet, in 26 days of it being on sale, not one UK customer has bought a copy!

People, what are you thinking? This is a great fun book about a girl coroner and her dragon boyfriend, with a very serious punch to the ending. I know it is book #2, but you don’t need to have read Precinct 13 to enjoy this one. Get out there and snap it up while it is cheap.