Causing Pandemonium: January Update
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Updates, updates, updates, updates!
Pandatown and 1853!
The Café de Paris edition of A Town Called Pandemonium is at the printer. They're exceedingly posh (both the book and the printer) and we have high hopes for the result.
The hardcover is over twenty pages longer than the paperback, and jammed with content that's exclusive to this edition. That includes a new introduction, an interview with illustrator Adam Hill, (fewer typos - gulp!), some extracts from the world's background material, an entirely new story and, best of all, a recipe for some kick-ass chili.
The Café de Paris edition is limited to 75 copies. 39 of these have already been claimed by the kind people who pre-ordered it four months ago. The remaining 36 will go on sale shortly.
Our next chapbook, 1853, is ready to go, with the final edits in from contributors Marc Aplin, Lor Graham and Jonathan Green. Illustrator Adam Hill has created a new cover which you can see here - foxy, right? We'll release both 1853 and the Café de Paris edition at the same time. It depends on the printer, but it looks like mid to late February.
Speculative Fiction 2012!
Justin Landon unveiled the cover for our collection of the year's best online reviews and commentary over on Staffer's Book Review. The fabulous design is by Sarah Anne Langton, who did such an amazing job on our Stocking Stuffers.
As he says, we're currently narrowing down over 300 submitted/flagged/archived posts to 50 or so, and then we need to organise the rights. The update is: we're getting there!
Chapbooks!
After much discussion, we're going to make all our chapbooks free. On Kobo at least. (Amazon doesn't do "free"... go figure.) Sadly, Kobo doesn't actually give reports free downloads, so if you do snaffle one, please let us know by rating the book or leaving a review!
We'll continue to pay the chapbook contributors, because that's part of what makes the whole thing work.
The next chapbook will be Planetoids (possibly Planetismals) in the summer. There will be another, to go with The Book of the Dead, in the fall. Both will have open submissions.
Novelettes!
Poor Uncle Smoke keeps fluttering further and further away, but Archie Black's wonderful aerial tour of London is now seriously-definitely-finally scheduled for February. The story is done - plus the additional material - we're just futzing. Gary Northfield, who did the gorgeous illustrations for Stories of the Smoke, is back on board to do something rather spectacular.
The next two novelettes for 2013 are:
Will Hill's The Sad Tale of the Deakins Boys. Will's tale is a brilliant encapsulation/introduction/distillation of the weird little town, and we're excited about this new edition (plus, more sneaky additional material will be included).
Janine Ashbless and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Reading Between the Lines. This will be our first original fiction in the novelette line, and it is a wonderful, haunting tale of worlds-beneath-worlds. We've sent it to Vincent Sammy (our go-to guy for "wonderful & haunting") for illustration.
All novelettes will be print only, limited to 26 signed and lettered copies. All tentatively priced at £8, but that may change. Like the chapbooks, they're an excuse to play around, so we'll continue experimenting with the format and the contents in every one.
Other stuff!
There will be a big update on this summer's The Lowest Heaven in February. Plus, we're scheming with the Egypt Exploration Society for October's The Book of the Dead...
Don't forget: all sales, pre-orders, submissions, etc. are announced to our mailing list first.