jack_yoniga

SFReader.com has a 4-star review up now for Daniel A. Rabuzzi's The Choir Boats:

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.asp?book=1404

Some lovely words, too, from James Grainger in the December issue of Quill & Quire, who, in part, says:

"In The Choir Boats, the first novel in a new fantasy trilogy by folklorist David A. Rabuzzi, young readers get a crash course in that rich global tradition, along with a seminar¹s worth of material on world religion and mythology. . . . The Choir Boats is a fine opening volume of a seagoing saga that measures up to its multiple reference points."


http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/choir-boats.php

Starting tomorrow, December 17th, CZP author Robert J. Wiersema will have an original Xmas ghost story running for eight days, till Xmas Eve, at TheTorontoist. Check out the press release below!

December 16, 2009

The editors of Books@Torontoist, the official books site of Torontoist.com, are proud to announce the publication of an original story by Robert J. Wiersema, bestselling author of the novel Before I Wake (now published in ten countries) and the novella The World More Full of Weeping. The story, “Just Like the Ones He Used to Know,” will be serialized on the site in eight daily posts, beginning on Thursday, December 17 and ending on Christmas Eve. The story of a man who makes a mysterious journey to his home town on a stormy Christmas Eve, “Just Like the Ones He Used to Know” revives the Victorian tradition of ringing in the holiday season with a story of the ghostly and the miraculous.

The serialized story will be accompanied by photos and original illustrations provided by Torontoist’s stable of talented artists and photographers.

Please go to http://torontoist.com or http://books.torontoist.com for more information and http://books.torontoist.com and http://torontoist.com for daily updates.

James Grainger
Editor in Chief, books.torontoist.com

Stephen Humphrey has written a piece about Claude Lalumière's Objects of Worship at Examiner.com called "Claude Lalumière turns religion on its head with his strange, sexy, objects of worship and desire":

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-30055-Toronto-Science-Fiction-Examiner~y2009m12d15-Claude-Lalumieres-stories-turn-religion-on-its-head-with-their-strange-sexy-objects-of-desire#

Still time to order for Xmas, folks!


http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/objects-of-worship.php

Fantastic review of Robert J. Wiersema's The World More Full of Weeping at Publisher's Weekly:

The World More Full of Weeping
Robert J. Wiersema. ChiZine Publications (www.chizine.com/chizinepub), $12.95 paper (104p) ISBN 9780980941098

Wiersema’s haunting novella–whose title aptly references a line in William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Stolen Child”—revolves around an 11-year old boy named Brian whose love of the woods behind his father’s house in rural southwestern British Columbia leads him to supernatural discoveries—namely Carly, an ethereal girl. Carly shows the boy a breathtakingly beautiful “hidden world” in the forest. When Brian disappears one day, his father is forced to revisit obscure memories from his own youth—memories that involve the mysterious forest and a girl named Carly. Powered by a sublime sense of wistfulness and a setting that is simultaneously natural and otherworldly, Wiersema’s novella seamlessly blends literary fiction with mythic fantasy to create a lyrical, surreal and deeply melancholic reading experience. The book also includes an essay entitled “Places and Names,” in which the author explores the signification of “personal geography” and explains how his fictional town of Henderson (the setting for his story) was created. (Sept.)


http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/world-more-full-weeping.php

As our Canadian sales force, The Literary Press Group, just reminded us here:

http://www.lpg.ca/public/news/039monstrous_affections039_nominated_black_quill_award

David Nickle's Monstrous Affections has been nominated for a Black Quill Award. Click the above link for all the details! And big congrats to Dave!


http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/monstrous-affections.php

Hello everyone, just another reminder about this award!

The Rannu Fund for Writers of Spec Fic is now in its second year and is open
to submissions!

Two prizes of $500 each, one in fiction and one in poetry. Deadline Dec.
31/09. Submit by e-mail. Entry fee $10.00 US/CDN.

Details here:
http://chizine.com/sandrakasturi/rannufund.htm

PLEASE NOTE: All entries in either fiction and poetry MUST be "speculative
literature" in content; in other words: science fiction, fantasy, horror,
magic realism, alternate history, steampunk, etc. Non-genre entries will be
automatically disqualified, and will not receive a refund.

Poetry Judges: Gemma Files, Helen Marshall, Sandra Kasturi
Fiction Judges: Nick Stokes, Don Bassingthwaite, Sandra Kasturi

ALL JUDGING IS BLIND.

Please feel free to forward this to any lists you are on, or any writers you
think might be interested!

Thanks!

Sandra Kasturi
Founder & Administrator
Rannu Fund for Writers
http://chizine.com/sandrakasturi/rannufund.htm

This one made the author a little weepy. But don't tell him I told you that.

http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=9621


http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/world-more-full-weeping.php

Fantastic review of Claude Lalumière's Objects of Worship in the December issue of Rue Morgue! Check it out below:

Ever been to Montreal? If so, you've probably soaked up the European ambiance of the Old Town, sampled the fine cuisine from the city's many legendary restaurants or cultured yourself at one of its famous museums or festivals. Or perhaps you've cruised local bars to meet members of a spider cult, watched werewolves hunt monsters outside the city walls or marvelled at the apocalyptic destruction left in the wake of an instant ice age.

For those last three, you would've been in Claude Lalumière's Montreal, the place that hosts many of the stories in his anthology Objects of Worship. As the title implies, the twelve stories in this 275-page collection are gathered together under the umbrella of gods, god-like beings and acts of god(s). While some tales are grounded in classical mythology ("The Darkness at the Heart of the World") and the author's love of superheroes drives a couple of 'em (notably "Hochelaga and Sons") there are plenty of monsters, zombies and gore for the horror faithful.

Cast your eyes towards "The Sea at Bari," which has an emotionally damaged man returning to Italy to confront the sea creature that robbed him of his innocence years earlier. "The Ethical Treatment of Meat" and its follow-up "A Visit to the Optometrist" humorously posit a world where the zombies won a long time ago and now treat humans like cattle. And "Roman Predator's Chimeric Odyssey" has a member of a bloodthirsty werewolf cult tearing apart the mythical beasts lurking outside the walls of an alternate Montreal. Yet none of the tales are that simple . . .

Lalumière's astounding imagination has birthed entire worlds for each story, and you never know just where his journeys will end. That aforementioned ice age wasteland is simply the stage for a young couple fleeing a cult; that werewolf also attacks an alien and morphs into a Lovecraftian creature(!); and when one of those zombies gets replacement human eyes, he/it discovers that they're possessed by a wizard trying to resurrect a dark god(!!). If you're hungry for original genre content, Objects of Worship is just the nectar you've been praying for.

-- Dave Alexander, Rue Morgue (December 2009)


http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/objects-of-worship.php

Great audio interview with national bestselling author Robert J. Wiersema up now at TheCommentary.ca:

http://thecommentary.ca/ontheline/449-robert-j-wiersema/


http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/world-more-full-weeping.php

Three more reviews to share with you folks. And still time to order these fantastic, critically lauded books for friends and family before Xmas!

Claude Lalumière's Objects of Worship reviewed at Tangent Online:

http://www.tangentonline.com/index.php/print--other-reviewsmenu-263/collections-reviewsmenu-337/1267-objects-of-worship-claude-lalumiere


Order here: http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/objects-of-worship.php

David Nickle's Monstrous Affections named one of SF Signals's best genre books of 2009!:

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/12/mind-meld-the-best-genre-related-booksfilmsshows-consumed-in-2009-part-1/


Order here: http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/monstrous-affections.php

Daniel A. Rabuzzi's The Choir Boats reviewed at Ideomancer:

http://www.ideomancer.com/main/ideoMain.htm


Order here: http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/choir-boats.php

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS SIGN WITH DIAMOND BOOK DISTRIBUTORS FOR U.S./U.K. DISTRIBUTION

TORONTO, Ontario (November 29, 2009) – Building on its deal with the Literary Press Group and LitDistCo, ChiZine Publications (CZP) has signed a deal with Diamond Book Distributors to have its books placed in U.S. and U.K. bookstores.

One of the U.S.'s leading distributors, Diamond distributes to booksellers like Barnes & Noble, Ingram, Baker & Taylor, WaldenBooks, and Borders. It represents a number of book and comic publishers, including Borderlands Press, Night Shade Books, Prime Books, Subterranean Press, and Random House UK.

"It's another step forward, but a bigger risk," says CZP Co-Publisher Brett Alexander Savory. "Getting books on the shelves means getting those books printed. If they don't sell, we eat that cost. But our experiment with the Literary Press Group worked. Some of our books sold out. So if we're going to grow, we need to be in major markets like the U.S. and U.K."

The announcement comes on the heels of a lengthy article about ChiZine Publications that appeared in The National Post's Afterword literary blog. In the article, Brett, fellow Co-Publisher Sandra Kasturi, and authors David Nickle (Monstrous Affections) and Robert J. Wiersema (The World More Full of Weeping) discuss the origins of CZP and the challenges of being a "genre" publisher at a time when "genre" fiction is assumed to not be "literary" fiction.

Brett says the plan is for CZP titles to be in U.S. and U.K. bookstores by early 2010.

Contact
Brett Alexander Savory, Co-Publisher
ChiZine Publications
http://chizinepub.com
brett@chizinepub.com

About ChiZine Publications
ChiZine Publications (CZP) is an independent publisher of weird, subtle, surreal and disturbing dark fiction. It is the book-length, print version outgrowth of ChiZine (http://www.chizine.com), an online professional market in operation since 1997 focused on the same type of story material. All of CZP’s publications are hand-picked by co-Publishers and Bram Stoker Award-winners Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi. Erik Mohr serves as cover artist and graphic designer, with publicity by Matthew Moore.

About Diamond Book Distributors
Diamond Book Distributors is a division of Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc., and is dedicated to making a wide selection of graphic novels and other pop culture collectibles available to the mainstream book market. For more information, visit Diamond Books on the web at http://www.diamondbookdistributors.com.

ChiZine Newsletter (December 2009 edition)

~~~~~
Table of Contents

1. 42nd issue of ChiZine is still live!
2. New Members
3. Member News
4. Film Reviews
5. Book Reviews
6. Music Reviews [NEW!]
7. New Leisure Books horror titles
~~~~~

The 42nd issue of ChiZine is still live!

With fiction by:

“Filaria” by Brent Hayward
“Horror Story and Other Horror Stories” by Robert Boyczuk
“The Tel Aviv Dossier” by Lavie Tidhar & Nir Yaniv
“The Choir Boats” by Daniel A. Rabuzzi
“Monstrous Affections” by David Nickle
“Objects of Worship” by Claude Lalumière
“The World More Full of Weeping” by Robert J. Wiersema


With poetry by:

Mike Allen: “The Black Watch”
M. Frost: “Samhain”
Samuel Minier: “Licking a Public Restroom Floor”
Scott Standridge: “Haunt”
Jacqueline West: “After the Trial”


Go here to access the new fiction and poetry: http://chizine.com/fiction.htm

Here for resident big-mouth David Niall Wilson's new column, "Seasons of the Storytellers": http://chizine.com/dnw2.htm

And click here for Editor-in-Chief Brett Alexander Savory's explanation for the lack of new fiction in this issue!: http://chizine.com/editorial.htm

+++

NEW MEMBERS:

Susan Wingate . . . Washington, US
Timothy Burlingame . . . Pennsylvania, US
Grant Stone . . . New Zealand
Stephen Graham Jones . . . Colorado, US
Mark Hall . . . Michigan, US
Ted Bergeron . . . Ontario, Canada
Dennis Danvers . . . Virginia, US
Jason Fischer . . . South Australia, Australia
Hezekiah Bennetts . . . Oklahoma, US
Jose Juan Rodriguez . . . California, US
Janine-Langley Wood . . . Yorkshire, UK
Oscar Windsor-Smith . . . Hertfordshire, UK
Bruce Memblatt . . . New York, US
David L. Frase . . . Georgia, US
Jeff Sims . . . Arizona, US
Jeremy Cort . . . Maryland, US
Stephen Dedman . . . Western Australia, Australia
Tiffany Kirby . . . UK
Melissa Mia Hall . . . Texas, US


The Chiaroscuro is 2,078 members strong in 47 countries.

+++

MEMBER NEWS

James S. Dorr has had a story, "Sombras," accepted for Dark Regions Press' upcoming anthology NOSTRADAMUS' FATE AND OTHER DARK PROPHECIES, joining the company of what seems, judging by Dark Regions' pre-publicity, to be an all-star cast of writers. Another anthology, ESCAPE CLAUSE, has just come out with his story "River Red," while a short short, "The Shackles," has been announced as winning 3rd place in this year's Ligonier Valley Writers flash competition (topic for 2009: shapeshifters). Coincidentally another flash piece, "The Third Prisoner," which won an honorable mention in last year's Ligonier Valley Writers contest (topic: zombies) has been accepted for translation into Portuguese for the upcoming Brazilian e-book ANTOLOGIA LUSIADAS while, in English, short story "Pre-Owned Jeans" has been accepted for the anthology DREAMSPELL NIGHTMARES.


From Brett Alexander Savory | ChiZine Publications (CZP)

Three of our spring 2010 hardcovers are up for pre-order at Horror Mall right now, but time is running out to get your order in!

Katja from the Punk Band by Simon Logan
Available until January 31st exclusively at Horror Mall
http://tinyurl.com/yfvyr6j

A Book of Tongues (Book One) by Gemma Files
Available until January 31st exclusively at Horror Mall
http://tinyurl.com/yc6tz3

Chimerascope by Douglas Smith
Available until December 31st exclusively at Horror Mall
http://tinyurl.com/nxjbmg
+++

FILM REVIEWS

Phil Brugalette reviews CIRQUE DU FREAK: THE VAMPIRE'S ASSISTANT and ORPHAN.

http://www.chizine.com/potshots.htm

+++

BOOK REVIEWS

William D. Gagliani reviews THE SOUND OF BUILDING COFFINS by Louis Maistros.

http://www.chizine.com/williamsreviews.htm

+++

MUSIC REVIEWS

Check out "SCREAMING MIMIS," the first article in Ian Grey's new music review column.

http://www.chizine.com/ian-grey.htm


And now a word from our sponsor . . .

Available this month from Leisure Books:


THE RESURRECTIONIST
by Wrath James White

Dale McCarthy has a unique and miraculous ability. He can bring the dead back to life, though the resurrected have no memory of their deaths. But not every miracle comes from God, and not every healer is a saint.

Ever since her new neighbor moved in, Sarah Lincoln has been having terrible nightmares. Last night she dreamed that she and her husband were brutally murdered in their beds. This morning she found bloody sheets in the laundry and bloodstains on her mattress. And the nightmare is the same, night after night after night. With no one prepared to take her wild fears seriously, Sarah will have to save herself from being murdered. Again.


GHOST MONSTER
by Simon Clark

The local children call it “the ghost monster,” a disturbing mosaic on a mausoleum wall in the old cemetery. For centuries the grim portrait has imprisoned the spirits of the notorious Justice Murrain and his vicious gang of misfits. But now someone has taken the portrait, and the spirits of the sadists are free to enjoy the darkest of pleasures. Mayhem rules the town. The streets run red with blood. People are not merely insane. They are possessed. And even death will not stop them.

Leisure Books
http://dorchesterpub.com/Dorch/Genre.cfm?L1=1&L2=0


Until next month, stay dark,

Brett Alexander Savory
Editor-in-Chief

ChiZine: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words
http://chizine.com


**Next ChiZine Newsletter will be January 1st, 2010

November 25, 2009 For Immediate Release

Small Press of Toronto celebrating 22 years of book fairs
December 12, 2009 at the fabulous Gladstone Hotel
10 am to 5 pm
FREE

http://www.torontosmallpressbookfair.org/

Toronto, Ontario – The Small Press of Toronto Book Fair is back! Books, chapbooks, graphic novels, zines, comics, audio-books, magazines

PLUS an amazing full day of readings by authors Nancy Jo Cullen, Karen Dales, Shinan Govani, rob mclennan, Al Moritz, Sheree-Lee Olson, Lisa Pasold, Timothy Quinn, & Lisa Ray

PLUS a special interview with Giller Prize-winning writer Austin Clark hosted by Sang Kim.

The Gladstone Hotel will play host to this year’s Small Press Book Fair and it is shaping up to be even bigger than the last. Along with the venue change, our new date makes the event perfect for holiday gift giving--stock up on local press for the holidays!

Talk, buy, peruse, and enjoy books, chapbooks, graphic novels, zines, comics and so much more.

The Fair features an up-close look at some of the city’s most exciting small presses. Small Press of Toronto grew out of the “Meet the Presses” events organized by Stuart Ross and Nick Power back in the '80s, which was then a once-a-month gathering featuring five or six small and micro presses displaying, selling, and reading from new work. A much larger gathering, the (first) Toronto Small Press Book Fair, became an annual event in 1987, and a biannual event in the fall of 1990.

Today, the Fair happens twice a year, a feast of all things printed, with readings, workshops, and prizes. What's more, the event is entirely free & open to the public. This year we are pleased to be celebrating our 22nd year with a fair at the fabulous Gladstone Hotel.

for more information, please contact torontosmallpressfairgroup@gmail.com

location: The Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West

Contact:
Small Press of Toronto: Sang Kim or Lisa Pasold, Book Fair co-organizers
http://www.torontosmallpressbookfair.org/

My and David Niall Wilson's long-out-of-print novella My Eyes Are Nailed, But Still I See (originally a 226-copy hardcover novella from Delirium Books, 2006) is now available in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB formats exclusively at Horror Mall:

https://www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital/product.php?productid=20089&cat=0&page=1&featured



Only $4.95!

~~~~~

Johnson Milhone’s mind is a world unto itself—maybe several worlds. Therapy doesn’t penetrate, but nails do. Leather doesn’t sew easily, and pigs don’t talk—but don’t tell Johnson. Enter a world where spiders stalk sentient stuffed animals that may or may not be carved from the flesh of family members who may or may not be psychotic killers, slaves, and sadistic torturers. Find new uses for lime green Jell-O and lose it as a viable dessert. Find new darkness in Poe’s Pit and the Pendulum and dine at the best table at the Fear Factory. Learn why you should only keep toothpicks in the drawer if you really trust your mother, or your brother, and never—ever—fish in Scotland at Midnight.

My Eyes Are Nailed, But Still I See is the culmination of an odyssey through a warped young mind that leads one way, and then another, through gruesome imagery and psychotic delusion to an ultimate truth you will never see coming.


https://www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital/product.php?productid=20089&cat=0&page=1&featured

Balanced (but poorly edited) review of Claude Lalumière's Objects of Worship at Strange Horizons:

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2009/11/objects_of_wors.shtml


http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/objects-of-worship.php

+++

Good review of Daniel A. Rabuzzi's The Choir Boats in the February issue of Realms of Fantasy (which hits shelves in early December). No link to it, but we've been given permission to post the full review here:

Daniel A. Rabuzzi makes an auspicious debut with The Choir Boats: Volume One of Longing for Yount (ChiZine Publications, Toronto, trade paperback, 408 pp., $18.95, ISBN: 978-0-9809410-7-4), a muscular, Napoleonic-era fantasy that, like Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials series, will appeal to both adult and young adult readers. There's a Dickensian vibrancy—and messiness—to Rabuzzi's book; it's filled with outsized characters, colorful slang, outrageous coincidences, buried secrets, stunning revelations, and star-crossed lovers. The novel is not an unqualified success; its first half is substantially better than the second, when Rabuzzi's control of his material slips appreciably, leading to a climax that feels forced. There is also an unfortunate conceptual problem, which I will get to below.

The Yount mentioned in the novel's subtitle is what might be thought of in science-fictional terms as a pocket universe, one that has been brought into contact with Rabuzzi's alternate Earth by some mysterious cataclysm. There are two points at which it is possible to sail from Earth to Yount, and vice versa, aboard boats that navigate by means of a process called fulgination, which can involve technology but is also an innate ability of some people and animals. There is a musical aspect to fulgination, and it's this quality that's alluded to in the novel's title.

The people of Yount look to Earth for salvation. It seems they have been imprisoned, cut off from their own world for crimes they don't entirely remember or agree upon. But prophecies indicate that their long exile can be ended by people from Earth, and Rabuzzi's central characters are an extended family who may possess the ability to do just that. Rabuzzi focuses on three members of the family: Barnabas McDoon, a middle-aged man nurturing a guilty secret and a lost love; Sarah MacLeish, known as Sally, his eighteen-year-old niece; and Thomas MacLeish, his twenty-one-year-old nephew. Sally and Tom are orphans raised by their childless, unmarried uncle. A fourth important protagonist is a London street urchin named Maggie, a mathematical genius who was born a slave in Maryland.

Slavery is a central theme of the novel, though this only gradually becomes clear. Not only is it ongoing in antebellum America, where its casual brutalities have tragically marked Maggie's life, but it's also an ugly reality in Yount, where a civil war was fought, and may yet be re-fought, over the issue.

The Yountians who seek the help of the McDoons are opposed by a frightening figure known as the Cretched Man, a once-human wizard of vast age and power who is the servant of an entity more potent still—a monster with the unlikely cognomen of Strix Tender Wurm. But after the Cretched Man kidnaps Tom, he begins to reveal depths of character that lift him above the common run of villainy—and such is his charismatic appeal that he comes close to walking away with the novel. His origin proves to be both surprising and thematically fitting, and underscores the extent to which the novel draws on Judeo-Christian myths and beliefs; at times it veers more toward allegory than fantasy, but Rabuzzi keeps pulling it back.

Sally is a kind of counter-balance to the Cretched Man. She is, on the whole, less interesting, but that may be because her personality is not yet formed. She is a young woman still growing into the adult she will become, and her heart has not yet been scarred and made cautious. Her brave willingness to love and trust others takes her into some emotionally and physically dangerous places, but it also makes her a heroine worth rooting for.

Rabuzzi's alternate England of 1812 is one that is familiar not only because of its correspondences to the historical England of that time, but also because many of the literary creations of our world have a historical reality in his imaginary one, both as facts and fancies. For example, secondary characters from Dickens novels are encountered as secondary characters in Rabuzzi's book, and, even more strikingly, the story related in Lord of the Rings is here a part of England's own legendarium, as if there had not been a need for Tolkien to invent it.

It's hard to know why Rabuzzi chose to make this metafictional move. It doesn't seem integral to the plot, yet it complicates the novel's central conceit, which is that there are multiple realities, of divergent concordance, intersecting and diverging from each other. Rabuzzi, whether he means to do so or not, is staking a claim to the effect that his fictional universe is the primary one, containing, in their pure and original forms, as realities, what in secondary universes, like ours, are mere echoes scribbled down by sub-creators like Dickens and Tolkien. It's a ballsy claim that colonizes or appropriates the work of better writers than Rabuzzi has yet shown himself to be. That's one strike against it. But even worse, it seems to have been done impulsively, as a kind of shout-out, without thinking the implications through. It's a small yet telling flaw that mars the book on a foundational level. Nevertheless, I was impressed by Rabuzzi's sprawling imagination and more than ready to follow his appealing cast of characters into the next volume of their adventures.


http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/choir-boats.php

Check it out, folks. David Nickle, Robert J. Wiersema, Sandra Kasturi, and me discuss the state of genre publishing in Canada, and why we're doing what we're doing:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/afterword/archive/2009/11/24/Horror-Stories_3A00_-a-roundtable-with-the-publishers-and-writers-of-ChiZine-Publications.aspx

Change Coming for ChiZine Publications in 2010

Following a year that saw nearly universal acclaim for its titles, growth into eBooks, and one of the most talked-about launch parties at the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal, ChiZine Publications has unveiled more changes for 2010.

One change will be simultaneously releasing signed, limited edition hardcovers, trade paperbacks, and eBooks. "We used to release the hardcovers months before trade paperbacks because, one, the profits from the hardcovers helped offset the costs of the trades; two, it helped gauge interest in a book; and three, that's how everyone else did it. And eBooks would be released whenever we could get the conversions done. Not anymore. We have the staff and finances to get them out and reach those three audiences at the same time. One book, one release date." Brett adds they're dedicated to keeping the prices of their eBooks as low as possible—most ChiZine Publication's eBooks are $5.95—and without DRM.

In addition, from now on all hardcovers will contain exclusive content not found in the trade paperbacks or eBooks. "We used to include special content in some of the hardcovers, but it will be the norm now. Besides the signatures, that kind of extra content is what makes them special."

Novellas—fiction too long to be a short story but not long enough to be a full-length novel—may become a staple for CZP moving forward. "Getting Robert J. Wiersema's novella The World More Full of Weeping was a coup for us, having an author that well known. What I didn't fully realize is that big publishers won't touch them, not even for someone like Rob. Since then, we've landed Tim Lebbon's The Thief of Broken Toys, and word is getting around to other well-known writers that we're in that market. We really hope be able to announce some big names in the coming months."

Another change is that the formerly invite-only press will begin accepting unsolicited manuscripts in mid-November, thanks to the addition to the CZP staff of Slushie/Editor Helen Marshall. "CZP's mission is to publish voices we felt needed to be heard. We've done that. There are others we want to talk to, but to fulfill CZP's mission to move the genre forward, we now need writers to find us."

When talking about CZP's success, Brett says: "There are a lot of reasons. One is that my wife and business partner—who is an absolutely voracious reader and fantastic editor—has equal weight in choosing what we do and do not publish. Her insight has been invaluable. Another big advantage is our publicist, Matthew Moore, being so plugged in and online, talking to people on Twitter and Facebook and blogs. But more than that, a lot of big publishers are in the book business. We are in the story business. I trust the writer's vision and purpose and stay out of their way as much as possible as editor. I know they're great, so my job is to get their greatness in front of as many people as I can. This also means moving into eBooks in a big way and knowing what readers want—a reasonable price without DRM gumming things up. But still, a book has to be great inside and out, which is why Erik Mohr's brilliant cover art is so valuable and a big reason we've been noticed. The cover for David Nickle's Monstrous Affections stopped people in their tracks at WorldCon. Plus, I've found a printer that can deliver a book you can tell is of very solid quality when you pick it up."

CZP plans to launch six new titles—Chasing the Dragon (Nicholas Kaufmann), Chimerascope (Douglas Smith), A Book of Tongues (Gemma Files), Katja from the Punk Band (Simon Logan), Cities of Night (Philip Nutman), and The Thief of Broken Toys (Tim Lebbon)—at the World Horror Convention in Brighton, Sussex, England in March 2010.

Love from both BoingBoing and io9 for CZP!

DRM-free top-flight horror novels
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/19/-brett-from-small-pr.html

Independent Publishers Who Are Reinventing The Future
http://io9.com/5409552/independent-publishers-who-are-reinventing-the-future

Damn fantastic!

You heard right, folks! Our previously invite-only doors have now swung wide open:

http://chizine.com/chizinepub/index.php

Read the guidelines carefully. Better yet, buy one (or a few!) of our books to get a real sense of what we're looking for. That really is the best way to get your book published with us.

More good press for ChiZine Publications, folks. Here's a round-up of review and such from Nov. 8th to Nov. 18th:

The Times Colonist ran a feature on Robert J. Wiersema, author of The World More Full of Weeping:

http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/Books+fears+inspire+author+stories/2199296/story.html

Reaction from a reader who attended Robert J. Wiersema's in-store signing at the Yorkdale Indigo on Nov. 12th:

http://monalisa1964.blogspot.com/2009/11/adventures-in-toronto-and-other.html

David Nickle (author of Monstrous Affections) has a blog post about the Bakka-Phoenix Books three-author launch we had in Toronto on Nov. 14th, including a video of him reading his super-short story "The Mayor Will Make a Brief Statement and Then Take Questions":

http://davidnickle.blogspot.com/2009/11/one-story-collection-launched.html

An incredibly in-depth and fascinating review of Brent Hayward's dystopian SF novel Filaria at Strange Horizons:

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2009/11/filaria_by_bren-comments.shtml

An exclusive interview with Nir Yaniv (co-author of The Tel Aviv Dossier) at SF Signal:

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/11/exclusive-interview-nir-yaniv/


As for news, Claude Lalumière's Objects of Worship has gone live at Horror Mall as a $5.95 digital download:

https://www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital/product.php?productid=19917&cat=0&page=1&featured

With that final title going live, it means all seven of our fall '09 titles are now available for digital download. We'll be putting out a press release soon announcing this, as well as the fact that we're very shortly opening up to unsolicited submissions. Keep an eye out, you writers!

For now, check out the above links, then head over to our site (http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/index.php) for more details about the books and how to order them. We also have another big announcement coming, but the ink needs to dry on the contract before we can do so.

Stay tuned!!