It’s our 9th birthday as a small press! We made it, thanks to all of you! We’re celebrating this week with a sale on our website 1/5/26-1/11/26 – use code BIRTHDAY at checkout to get a discount and get entered into our drawing for a Queen of Swords Press mug and magnet set! This applies only to the mainland U.S., alas, but if you’re elsewhere and win the drawing, we’ll send you a free ebook of your choice! Here’s to another 9 years publishing great speculative fiction!
And quite the year it has been!
We released 3 titles:
Award News:
Other Cool Things:
Apart from that, we did 36 events this year! That includes conferences, book festivals, bookstore readings, book events at breweries and other venues, podcasts and probably something I’m forgetting. It was a lot! If you were one of the folks who hosted us, bought our books, reviewed our books, supported our Patreon and/or generally helped us get the word out about our books, you rock! Thank you!
And a big thank you to our authors, cover designers, book designer and my assistant, Alexa, for all your hard work this year! Additional shoutout to Kate Larking who did a bunch of marketing and publicity work for us! See you all in 2026!
Point of Hopes (Astreiant #1) by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett just won the Midwest Book Award in the Fantasy/SciFi/Horror/Paranormal category! The award comes from the Midwest Independent Publishers Association and Hopes was our third finalist, first winner. Many congratulations to the authors! This also makes it our second award-winning book after The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper by A.J. Fitzwater, winner of a Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collection!
Catherine Lundoff is one of the winners of the 2025 Alice B. Readers Appreciation Awards! This is a juried award given to authors, playwrights and poets of sapphic work and combines body of work with service to the community. Other recipients have included Joanna Russ, Dorothy Allison, Emma Donoghue, Alison Bechdel, Malinda Lo and many more amazing creators! Catherine is feeling pretty damned honored.
And, just a few days later, we found out that Point of Hopes (Astreiant #1) by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett is a Midwest Book Award Finalist! This is the third time (Death by Silver and Wireless were also finalists) that we’ve had a book in the finalist circle so here’s hoping that 3rd time is the charm!
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!
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.
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!
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. 🙂
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!
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!
