Fablecroft have let us know that they are dropping the price of One Small Step, a fine themed anthology featuring many of the best Australian women writers. You can now get it for just £4.99 rather than £6.49.

I added two new books to the store over the weekend. They are as follows:

Trading Rosemary is a novella by Octavia Cade from Masque. It has a very interesting premise — a word in which memories are currency.

12:19 by Michael Infinito is a horror mystery from Must It Up. Breathless stuff.

By the way, talking of the website, some of you may have noticed that digital delivery is now not always available immediately on placing an order. This is a result of changes in the way that Shopify does things. The current delivery service that I’m using isn’t able to cope with this change, so I’m investigating alternatives.

Our good friends at Fablecroft have completed the ebook re-issue of Glenda Larke’s Isles of Glory trilogy. with the final volume, The Tainted. This a a very fine fantasy series. You can get all three books as follows:

• The Aware
• Gilfeather
• The Tainted

I note also that Glenda’s latest series will be launched in March with The Lascar’s Dagger, which is getting fine reviews already (even if there is a cloak on the cover — sorry Gav…).

This morning I uploaded three more books from Muse It Up. They are:

• Faizah’s Destiny by Marva Dasef — a YA fantasy using Arabian mythology;
• Fortunatus by James Hartley — short fiction about a magical bag of gold that never empties; and
• Nightmares by Donna Jean McDunn — a dark fantasy ghost story

Our Canadian friends have sent us three new books:

• Broken Bonds is a science fantasy romance by Margaret Fieland;
• Charmed Memories is the second book in Mary Waibel’s YA fantasy series, A Princess of Valendria; and
• The Girl and the Dragon is a children’s fantasy with Christian themes and gender bending (the heroine disguises herself as a boy)

The busy little British small press, Fox Spirit, has a new anthology available. Shapeshifters is the second book in their Fox Pockets series. Both books feature a lot of talented young writers. In order to encourage you to follow the series, we are offering the first volume, Piracy, in a cut-price bundle with Shapeshifters. What does the fox say? She says, “buy my books, please”.

I’ve been busy doing the Wizard’s Tower accounts for December and I thought it might be interesting to take a look at business in the bookstore over the year. Which books were you actually buying? Well, six books in particular stood out. (I’ve left out our own books because they are obviously going to sell well.)

In sixth place is Lori Selke & Djibril al-Ayad’s anthology of stories about the future of identity, Outlaw Bodies.

Equal fourth were Aliette de Bodard’s Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novella, On A Red Station Drifting, and a brand new book, Desirina Boskovich’s anthology of Finnish fiction, It Came from The North.

In third place is the only other book from The Future Fire, Fabio Fernandes & Djibril al-Ayad’s anthology of post-colonial SF, We See A Different Frontier. Gardner Dozois was waxing lyrical about this one in the January Locus.

Second, on the back of a successful promotional campaign, is Tansy Rayner Roberts’ award-winning debut novel, Splashdance Silver. I hope everyone who bought it comes back for the other two books in the series.

And at number one is the magnificent collection by Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath.

It will probably come as no surprise that the publisher who did most business for us in 2013 was Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Cheeky Frawg. Thanks for putting out such great books, folks.

Second and third places in the publisher stakes go to Prime Books and Aqueduct Press respectively. While they didn’t have any stand-out titles, they have an awful lot of very good books. Do check them out.

The latter part of last year turned into a total disaster, schedule-wise. If I make any resolutions for 2014 they will all involve not over-committing myself as much in future. That is, of course, easier said than done.

I try not to make promises about when books will be ready until I am pretty certain that they will be ready then. Having said that, I have been doing some work over the Holidays to try to catch up while things are quiet.

Most importantly, the copy for Airship-Shaped & Bristol Fashion has been formatted and is ready to go off to Joe, our book designer, as soon as he’s back from his vacation. It will be a relief to get that one out of the door.

In addition I have Apocalypse Array, the final volume of Lyda Morehouse’s AngeLINK series, assembled and ready for corrections. That takes a while as there will be a huge number of scanning errors to fix, but progress has been made.

I’ve spent time yesterday and working on another book project that I’m very excited about, but can’t tell you about yet.

There will, of course, be more books from Juliet McKenna, but she’s still in the midst of family Christmas so I need to wait for her to surface before I can promise anything.

And then there’s the more speculative stuff, that I really should do something about, especially as I was talking to people about both books at World Fantasy. Less blogging, more work.

This is the time of year when most online stores are pestering you endlessly about the sales they have running. You maybe wondering why I am not doing this. Well partly it is because I suspect you are as fed up of sales-mania as I am. The main reason, however, is that I let the publishers set prices in the store. That’s because of Amazon and their price-matching policies. They like to be the cheapest store around. If they were to notice me running a sale, they would probably drop their prices to match, and they might not bother to put them back up again. As they have no control over what price Amazon sells their books at, publishers worry about this sort of thing, so I only drop prices when they ask me to.

That reminds me, however, that we do have Tansy Rayner Roberts’ award-winning debut novel, Splashdance Siver, available very cheaply until the end of the year. If you’d like to take this opportunity to sample the first volume of the Mocklore Chronicles, you have only a few days left.

One of the main goals of any small press is to get the fiction you publish recognized alongside work published by the bigger companies. As small presses often do anthologies, one of the ways that they can do this is to have stories from those books chosen for Best of the Year collections. Gardner Dozois has recently released details of his Best of the Year collection for 2013. The cover features one of my favorite pieces of Jim Burns artwork, but what really caught my eye was the fact that two of the stories in it came from We See A Different Frontier, an anthology of post-colonial SF from The Future Fire, edited by Fabio Fernandes & Djibril al-Ayad. Well done chaps!


Those stories are:

• “A Heap of Broken Images” by Sunny Moraine
• “Fleet” by Sandra McDonald

Oh yeah, that’s one author who uses non-binary pronouns, and one who is famous for stories about a trans woman. *Fist pump!*

Sharon Kae Raemer has sent us the second and third books in her Schattenreich series. This far we have:

• Primary Fault
• Shaky Ground
• Double Couple

Yes folks, other people might have to wait until the 25th for their messiah to be born, but we have one right now. I am talking, of course, about Messiah Node, the third novel in Lyda Morehouse’s legendary AngeLINK series, which I am honored to be reprinting. I don’t want to say too much about the book, because you should all be reading Archangel Protocol and Fallen Host first. However, there is a blurb for the book, so you’ll know that Mouse, Page and the Archangel Michael are all involved. Also Satan and his newly discovered Antichrist, Emmaline McNaughton, are busy bringing about the Apocalypse. There is an actual messiah too. Elijah turns up to make it official. She is Michael and Deirdre’s daughter, Amariah. That’s not going to go down well with the churches.

The book will be available through the usual outlets in due course, though as they are now all terrified about accidentally selling porn as well as accidentally selling pirated material they are getting more serious about checking new titles and at this time of year they may be quite slow doing it. In the meantime, the book is of course available from your friendly, neighborhood ebook store.