Further Details About Night Shade Books

Additional information about Night Shade Books has become available.

First, Night Shade co-owner Jeremy Lassen has posted an open letter at Locus Online.  In it he explains his reasons for making the deal with Skyhorse Publishing.  He does not discuss the terms of the letter sent to Night Shade authors.

Second, Michael Stackpole does discuss the terms and why he won't sign the letter in this post on his website.

I'm not going to comment at this time, other than to say that the loss of Night Shade is a nontrivial matter that will have a major impact on the field.  Some time in the next week, I'll try to put some thoughts together in a coherent manner.

Announcing Seven Days of Online Fiction

I've held for a while that the online sources for short fiction are providing quality fantasy and science fiction, and in many of a quality at least as high as, if not higher than, the traditional print sources.  Apparently I'm not alone in this view.  Karen Burnham, at the Locus Roundtable posted a list of the works which have received more two or more award nominations this year.  While (not surprisingly) none of the novels on the list were published online, the short fiction of all lengths is a different matter.  Two of the four novellas, all three novelettes, and two of the three short stories on the list were published online.

There are multiple sources of online fiction.  In fact the online landscape can change suddenly.  New websites arrive and disappear quickly.  If you're not paying attention, you could miss something.  I thought this would be a good time to survey some of the sources of short fiction on the web.

Hugo and Campbell Awards Nominees

This year's nominees for the Hugo and Campbell Awards have been posted.  Locus Online has the complete list here, as does the Renovation site.

Congratulations and good luck to all nominees.

I don't have much to say except I don't see much in the way of sword and sorcery, at least not that I recognize.  I haven't read nearly as many of the nominees as I should have.  A few of the titles I'm not familiar with, so there may be some S&S I'm not recognizing.  Disappointing, but not surprising.

The second thing I find interesting is in the short story category.  All the other fiction categories (novel, novella, novelette) have five nominees, while the short story only has four.  That's assuming there's not an error, and one was inadvertently left off.  Of those four, only one, "For Want of a Nail", by Mary Robinette Kowal, was published in a print magazine (Asimov's, Sept. 2010).  The others were published online.  All of the novelette and all but one of the novella nominees were published in print venues.