Author Heather Rose Jones is on the Hugo Award Ballot in the Best Other Work Category for “Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics,” co-written with Camestros Felapton! Please give it a read and consider voting!
Author: Queen of Swords
Award Eligibility Post
Michael Merriam’s novella Terror at Tierra de Cobre is currently a nominee for the 2024 Small Spec Book Awards and is eligible for any award with a novella category including the Locus Awards, the Nebulas, the Hugos, the Stokers and the Silver Spurs. It was published in March of 2024 and is around 38k words long.
Volumes 1-5 of the Astreiant Series, which we are re-releasing this year, are all reprints and are only eligible for novel or novella awards that allow for new editions of previously published works. Point of Hearts (Astreiant #6) by Melissa Scott, will be out in early 2025. POINT OF HOPES (Astreiant #1) by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett is currently a nominee for the Midwest Independent Publisher’s Awards.
News!
The next volume in the Astreiant Series, Fairs’ Point (Astreiant #4) by Melissa Scott, is here!
And Melissa Scott talks about how she and Lisa A. Barnett were inspired to come up with the idea of dog racing as a sport in Astreiant here.
Speaking of the Astreiant Series, we have a great deal running on Google Play this weekend . Bundle any 2 of the first 3 books and get 25% off!
11/29 (today) is also the last day to get 60% off the audiobook for Catherine Lundoff’s Silver Moon! Don’t sleep on this one!
Great news!
We are very excited to be finalists for the 2024 Independent Book Publishers Association Innovative Voices Program! We’re in really great company so this is a quite the honor! Do please keep your fingers crossed for us – we’ll need the well wishes on this one. 🙂
Happy Pride Month!
We have SO much going on this month!
Check out the Pride StoryBundle, curated by Melissa Scott and Catherine Lundoff, for 13 terrific queer specfic titles, including LITTLE NOTHING by Dee Holloway and A DEATH AT THE DIONYSUS CLUB by Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold! Get it at the $25 level and help support Rainbow Railroad’s essential work with LGBTQ refugees. Runs through 7/1/24.
Log on to The Story Hour on 6/5 at 7PM PST to hear Dee Holloway read from her latest!
Look for Catherine Lundoff on programming at 4th Street Fantasy 6/14-6/16.
join us at the Midwest Book Awards on 6/22 to see if DEATH BY SILVER wins in the SF & F category! Then join the Temporal Textual Virtual Book Club on 6/23 to talk about the book!
On 6/27, we’ll be releasing POINT OF HOPES (Astreiant #1) by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett!
Finally, look for us at Twin Cities Pride on 6/28-6/29! We’ll be in the Pink Zone in the Queer Writes section, next to the bridge to the Sculpture Garden from Loring Park in Minneapolis.
Happy Pride!
Preorder and award news!
Big shoutout to Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold! Death by Silver is a 2024 Midwest Book Award Finalist!
And, speaking of Melissa Scott, Point of Hopes: A Novel of Astreiant (Book 1) is up for preorder here and elsewhere! Look for Book 2, Point of Knives, in July and the other books every month after that, on through to a brand new novella in the series in December!
March Events and a new title!

It’s here! Check out Terror at Tierra de Cobre by Michael Merriam!
And if you’re in Minnesota this weekend, come see Michael and Catherine at MarsCon Minneapolis. If you’re closer to Ohio, go see Melissa Scott at Cleveland Concoction.
- MarsCon – March 8-10, Minneapolis, MN. Author Michael Merriam is a Guest of Honor as no we’ll both be on programming and we’ll be there with a book table and his latest books and more!
- Cleveland Concoction – March 8-10, Ohio. Author Melissa Scott is a Guest of Honor!
- Minicon – March 29-31, Minneapolis, MN. Catherine Lundoff and Michael Merriam will be there and on programming.
New book and cool 2024 lineup announcement!
A Death at the Dionysus Club (Lynes & Mathey 2) by Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold is out today! Terrific sequel to Death by Silver!
And in 2024, we’re going to be publishing more fun titles, including:
- Terror at Tierra de Cobre by Michael Merriam (Weird West novella – a re-imaging of the Magnificent 7 with an all women cast and a demon!)
- New editions of the Astreiant Series by Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett (2 volumes), plus a new novella! Look for these in June!
- Point of Hopes (Scott and Barnett – novel)
- Point of Knives (Scott – novella)
- Point of Dreams (Scott and Barnett – novel)
- Fairs’ Point (Scott – novel)
- Point of Sighs (Scott – novel)
- Point of Hearts (Scott)
Award Eligibility and Holiday Sales
First up, Little Nothing by Dee Holloway is eligible for all 2023 awards that include novella length work! BSFA, World Fantasy, Nebulas, Hugos, anything we may have forgotten. It is already nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.
SALES!
Great deals this weekend on most of our titles at DriveThruFiction for the annual Black Friday- Cyber Monday sale.
We’ve also got a sale on Amazon for the IHeartSapphFic Megasale – titles include Silver Moon and Blood Moon by Catherine Lundoff, Last Car to Annwn Station by Michael Merriam, The Language of Roses by Heather Rose Jones and Little Nothing by Dee Holloway.
The audiobook edition of Catherine Lundoff’s SIlver Moon is on sale at Audiobooks.com for the next couple of weeks.
And Bookshop.org has free shipping today!
Next month, the Smashwords sale kicks off on 12/16, so stay tuned for that too!
September events and cover reveal!
September:
- Pagan Pride Fall Festival – September 9th. Minnehaha Falls, Minneapolis. Queen of Swords Press will have a table.
- St. Cloud Pride in the Park – September 16th, 10-4PM. St. Cloud, MN. Queen of Swords Press will have a table.
- Rosemount Country Faire – September 16th, 10-4PM, Rosemount, MN. Author Michael Merriam will have a table with his books, including Last Car to Annwn Station.
- “In Conversation: Caitlin and Cadieux and Dee Holloway” at the East Greenbush Library – September 21st, 6:30-7:30PM. East Greenbush, NY.
- Columbia Heights Pride – September 23rd, 11- 4PM. Columbia Heights, MN. Queen of Swords Press will have a table.
- Braveheart Books Birthday Bash – September 23, 12-4 PM. Stephentown Center, NY Dee Holloway and Caitlin are joining the party!
- Rainbow Space Magic – September 30th- October 1st. Online LGBTQ+ speculative fiction con.
And, of course, Inkspiral Design’s terrific new cover for A Death at the Dionysus Club (Lynes & Mathey #2) by Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold, which will be out on 12/7/23! Stay tuned for preorders: