Tuesday, August 25, 2020

We're Now Live on Indiegogo InDemand, ENDLESS Plan B, A New Forthcoming Collection, and More

Cross-posted from the latest Secret Gateways/Nox Pareidolia Kickstarter update by Robert S. Wilson: 

Indiegogo InDemand:

We are now live on Indiegogo InDemand. If you had asked me what that was more than a week ago I would have just shrugged. I know what Indiegogo is well enough. But InDemand? I had no clue about it. Until someone from Indiegogo reached out to me after this campaign ended. 

Essentially, InDemand is a way to keep taking pre-orders after your fundraiser has ended, regardless of where you raised funds from. They essentially mirror your original campaign, show what you've raised thus far and any further purchases add to that total there. I honestly have no idea what to expect from this as I've never done this before. But, if you missed out on something you wanted from this campaign, perhaps this is a way to scratch that itch. Please consider sharing it around.

I do want to mention one more thing about this. One of the reasons it took so long to get this thing up there (they recommend having it up as soon as possible after your campaign) is that we agonized over whether to carry over our remaining stretch goals from this campaign. After giving it a lot of thought, we decided, given the possibility for further delay to the two main projects in doing so, we would just remove all unreached stretch goals from there.  


ENDLESS Plan B:

So, speaking of stretch goals, I didn't want to say anything until we had successfully funded this campaign given the fact that, had it failed, we would have been looking at the end of our little company overall . But, in the event that this campaign was successful, we have been planning a Kickstarter for some time for two forthcoming anthologies (Nox Pareidolia: Volume II edited by myself and our LGBTQ Pride Flag anthology The Bleeding Rainbow: A Spectrum of Weird Fiction edited by myself and Maxwell Ian Gold). ENDLESS spawned more from a desire for Jen and I to work on something new together and while we hoped it would be phenomenal, we had no idea just how awesome just the TOC would become. 

As such, we have been considering different options for our plan B for this anthology, including considering going back to the drawing board for all three anthologies as far as how to go about this. The initial thought was to do one multi-anthology Kickstarter (to rule them all) for all three anthologies in one go. But given that we'd like to pay at least the SFWA pro rate of 8 cents per word for all three books and do deluxe color trade paperback editions of each of these titles, the goal for all of that in one Kickstarter would end up being kind of defeating. 

As such, I'm seriously considering doing each book individually in shorter campaigns, either back to back or a month or so apart each. We would do them for one to two weeks for each campaign either later this year or early 2021. December is a no go though as research shows that December is the worst month of the year to run a Kickstarter, and I doubt that surprises anybody. So, at this point, we're looking at October or November, or maybe February or March. We are completely open to feedback on this. If you have any thoughts on when we should do this or if we should do them all in one campaign or break them up, comment and let us know. 


Nox Pareidolia Has Won the 2019 This is Horror Award!

For those of you who haven't heard, Michael David Wilson and Bob Pastorella of the This is Horror Podcast have announced the winners of this year's This is Horror Awards by a different means than previous years. This year, they did a podcast episode to announce the winners and interview them. You can listen to the award episode here: 


I was especially pleased to see that my dear friend Jon padgett won for the second year in a row in the magazine category for his tremendous publication Vastarien: A Literary Journal! This is actually my second This is Horror Award in the anthology category as well (last year my cosmic horror/noir anthology Ashes and Entropy won the 2018 award). 

Nightscape Press to Publish A Highly Anticipated New Debut Short Fiction Collection!

Speaking of Vastarien, in 2018, in the first issue of Jon's spectacular journal of weird fiction and horror, I first read a spectacular story called "Singing the Song of My Unmaking" by someone I had never previously heard of, an author by the name of Christopher Ropes. I'm excited to officially announce that in 2021, Nightscape Press will be publishing Christopher's debut fiction collection!

Christopher is one of my dearest friends and favorite new authors and this is one of my personal most highly anticipated books ever. And I know that I'm not alone in that anticipation.

And I would love to tell you the title of the book but after months of Chris and I agonizing over a name for it and finally feeling like one really clicked for both of us, I received some feedback that made me reconsider. 

Chris and I both still really like title we previously decided on, but it's important to both of us for this book to have the best possible chance to succeed that it possibly can, so I'm going to do something a little different here. I'm going to list a few possible titles we've considered without telling you which one is our personal favorite to see what people lean toward:

  • Dragging This Carcass to a Snow-Covered Tree and Other Revelations
  • Complicity and Other Games We Used to Play
  • The Cheese Was On the Pizza... And Between His Toes: A Tribute to Sledwards (just kidding!)
  • Complicity and Other Revelations
  • Singing the Songs of My Unmaking
  • The Songs of My Unmaking
  • These Tales are Winter
  • Suicide, Grace, and Other Revelations

Comment and let us know if any of these titles stand out to you. And, if you're a fan of Chris's spectacular work, we'd especially love to hear from you. Thanks, all! I hope this update finds you all in good spirits. I'll update again soon when we have something worth reporting on.

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Our 2020 Kickstarter


Nightscape Press needs your help. We launched a brand new Kickstarter yesterday. After our 2018 Kickstarter for Ashes and Entropy, the success of both that campaign and our Charitable Chapbooks line as well as the incredibly positive reaction to Ashes and Entropy gave us a boost of confidence that led us to believe we could manage to launch these projects without the help of Kickstarter. This was a huge miscalculation on our part and one we've been struggling with trying to correct on our own for far too long.

Here is where you come in. We have all the content to create two amazing projects with full color artwork by brilliant artists like Harry O. Morris, Luke Spooner, Don Noble, and Aeron Alfrey, and fantastic stories by an astonishing array of talented horror and weird fiction authors.

    • The Secret Gateways hardcover boxset will be a boxed set of three hardcovers including two modern classics of unsettling weird fiction: The Secret of Ventriloquism by Jon Padgett and Gateways to Abomination by Matthew M. Bartlett; and a third slim volume titled The Latham-Fielding Liaison consisting of four weird mind-bending tales written by both authors in collaboration with each other.
    • Nox Pareidolia is my fifth anthology and a Bram Stoker Award Finalist, a This is Horror Award Finalist, and an Indie Horror Award Finalist. The book was published in eBook and black and white trade paperback editions last year and includes stories by Laird Barron, S.P. Miskowski, Brian Evenson, Kristi DeMeester, Michael Wehunt, Gwendolyn Kiste, Zin E. Rocklyn, Christopher Ropes, Doungjai Gam, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Carrie Laben, Kurt Fawver, David Peak, Don Webb and Duane Pesice, Paul Jessup, K.H. Vaughan, and more. The plan is to publish a deluxe color trade paperback edition in the same stunning quality as our 2018 color trade paperback editions of Ashes and Entropy.

We currently have a portion of the funds needed to produce these two projects but we still need more than we can reasonably raise on our own in a reasonable amount of time. So, we're doing this Kickstarter to fill our budget gap for these two projects and we believe we have a lot of great things to offer to help make that a reality. Yesterday the campaign kicked off with a bang and we made it all the way to 44% of our goal in the first 24 hours!

Interior illustration from The Secret of Ventriloquism by Harry O. Morris


Perks

In our last Kickstarter we had a lot of different physical chapbooks as perks and this caused us a lot of headaches and ended up costing us way more than we expected it to for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the printer we were working with at that time and that we had based our costs upon was Createspace and Amazon dissolved Createspace literally in the middle of our campaign. So, this time we're trying to focus more on the actual items we need to raise money for and keep the physical extras to a minimum.

But that doesn't mean we're not offering some amazing perks. We've got everything from eBooks of The Latham-Fielding Liaison and Nox Pareidolia to signed rarities that WILL NEVER BE AVAILABLE AGAIN like a one-of-a-kind brand new hand-sewn WXXT chapbook from Matthew M. Bartlett called Peak Deviations. And the bundles! There are bundles for everyone no matter whether you're a fan of eBook bundles at an incredible value or a super-collector looking for a bundle of rare spectacular books and other items to give a loving new home to. And then, for me, I think one of the greatest portions of what we have on offer are our non-physical rewards. Fantastic private Zoom entertainment like a Jon Padgett ventriloquist show with his non-human dummy, Reggie McRascal!



Publishing Schedule

If this campaign is successful, the release schedule will go as follows for all perks:

The following items are already on hand and as soon as funding transfers to us we will get them out to their corresponding backers (approximately late August):

  • Nox Pareidolia (eBook edition)
  • Nox Pareidolia (black and white trade paperback edition)
  • The Latham-Fielding Liaison (paperback ARC)
  • Ashes and Entropy (color trade paperback)
  • Ashes and Entropy (signed color trade paperback)
  • All signed unbound proofs (The Broker of Nightmares, If It Bleeds, Ashes and Entropy)
  • Charitable Chapbooks (The Broker of Nightmares, If It Bleeds, and The Invention of Ghosts)
  • A&E Chapbooks (Dr. 999 & Yellow House)
  • Cadabra LPs (Call Me Corey and Origami Dreams)
  • Blood Standard (hardcover, signed and personalized)
  • Gateways to Abomination (signed and scribbled-in proof copy)

September 2020:

  • Secret Gateways (hardcover boxset)
  • Nox Pareidolia (color trade paperback edition)

December 2020:

  • The Latham-Fielding Liaison eBook edition
  • The Latham-Fielding Liaison black and white trade paperback edition
  • The Latham-Fielding Liaison limited color trade paperback edition
  • Nightscape Press 30-Book eBook Bundle
  • Bartlett/Padgett Zoom Q&A
  • Jon Padgett Editorial Services

January 2021:

  • Jon Padgett Zoom Ventriloquist Show

March 2021:

  • Sons of Ben (signed limited chapbook)
  • Peak Deviations (hand-sewn one of a kind chapbook)


And of course, we do have some stretch goals waiting in the wings in the event that we reach our goal with enough time left over to reach them. Some electronic add ons for everyone as well as some really cool surprise additions to the Secret Gateways boxset, the Nox Pareidolia color trade paperback, and all editions of The Latham-Fielding Liaison! So, please. You can help us make these amazing books and help us make them even better. While this campaign is not for a new project, there is the possibility of a new project via the final stretch goal, should we get that far. More on that later.

Risks and challenges

The biggest challenge to this project is funding. We have a two-year track history of working with the printer we'll be using for Nox Pareidolia (their quality is amazing, as anybody who owns a color copy of Ashes and Entropy or any of our Charitable Chapbook titles can tell you) and while the printer we'll be working with for Secret Gateways is new to us, their quality is superb as well and they are an industry leader with an exemplary record.

For two years now we have been publishing our Charitable Chapbooks line and given that 1/3 of the proceeds of each of those titles goes to charity and another third goes to the author, the budget for those is very very tight. As such, we are not a profiting company. The two projects this Kickstarter is for were conceived at least partially to help bring in income toward the cost of running a small press with a focus on giving to charity and paying authors a fair rate. And, as mentioned above, unfortunately that plan blew up in our faces due to my own poor decision to avoid using Kickstarter for the amazing tool that it is.

I won't lie, our Kickstarter for Ashes and Entropy was one of the most stressful experiences my family has ever gone through. You put a lot of yourself out there, it requires an incredible amount of your time, energy, and mental health, and there is no break, no half time. There's the goal and you and it can put you in a constant heightened sense of alert from the moment you launch until the moment you hit the finish line. Even after you've hit your goal.

But, we learned a lot from the last Kickstarter and we are more mentally prepared to face this challenge this time. And we have a better handle on how to organize and run one of these things. But we also have a lot more to lose this time around. The biggest risk for us right now is the likelihood that, should we not meet this goal, the debt we've incurred in these projects will mean that we very well might have to close up shop as a publisher for good once we've refunded all previous pre-orders. But with your help, that won't have to happen and we can continue to make fantastic books of horror, weird fiction, fantasy, and science fiction while contributing to some of the most worthy and important charities working today and paying authors good money.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Slight Delay with Michael Cisco's Chapbook and More Updates!

We've emailed everybody who purchased and updated the product page but just in case anybody missed it, the release date for Charitable Chapbook #7 Do You Mind If We Dance With Your Legs? by Michael Cisco is slightly delayed and the release has been pushed back to February 28th. We're very sorry for the delay but we're working hard to get this one finished up and we can't wait to get it out to folks! If you haven't pre-ordered yet, there are still copies available

1/3 of the proceeds for this one will go to the LA LGBT Center. This chapbook sports this unsettling cover by Don Noble and has spectacular interior color illustrations by Luke Spooner

We're on track to start production this coming Friday and then copies should arrive with Michael to sign next week and then they'll be heading back to us to ship out to everybody. You do not want to miss this book, folks! Click here to check out the review that The Miskatonic Review did for this phenomenal novelette.

In other chapbook news, Charitable Chapbook #6, Gwendolyn Kiste's The Invention of Ghosts is nearly sold out! As of this writing there are currently only 12 copies remaining, so, now is the time to get yours before they're gone FOREVER (...forever... forever... forever...). The chapbook edition of The Invention of Ghosts is limited to only 100 copies, will contribute 1/3 of all its proceeds to The National Aviary, and the amazing cover and interior artwork was all done by the ever fantastic Luke Spooner

Folks are saying some really lovely things about this one. You can check out rave reviews from The Monster Librarian, The Horror Fiction Review, The Dead Walk, and more.

Gwendolyn also wrote this intriguing essay over at Kendall Reviews about the holidays and the ghosts we leave behind that ties into the core of the story in The Invention of Ghosts.

Speaking of 100 copy chapbook runs, Charitable Chapbook #3, Doungjai Gam's "watch the whole goddamned thing burn" is nearly halfway sold out. Gam is one of noir and horror fiction's best kept secrets and it's about time the cat got out of the bag. This chapbook will give 1/3 of its proceeds from the paperback edition to Trans Lifeline (a charity that is very close to our hearts here at Nightscape Press given that Jennifer and Robert Wilson's daughter just came out as trans in 2018). 

The novelette's gorgeous cover was created by Matthew Revert, and the book is also fully color illustrated by Luke Spooner. This is a perfect book to pick up for Women in Horror month, so grab up a copy! You won't regret it. Gam's story cuts like a razor and leaves you gasping and wounded. As expressed by this fantastic review over at Goodreads


We also still have copies of Charitable Chapbook #5 Michael Wehunt's Everything is Beautiful and Nothing Bad Can Ever Happen Here which came out in November of last year. This disturbing tale takes a close look at white complicity in the face of racism while also managing to be both weird and incredibly disturbing in a supernatural way at the same time. 1/3 of all proceeds from this limited chapbook edition will go to the Southern Poverty Law Center which is incredibly apropos to anybody who's read this story. And this one sports another amazing cover by Don Noble and interior artwork as always from the great Luke Spooner

Cemetery Dance, This is Horror, Kendall Reviews, Dark Intersections, F*cked Up Books, More2Read, and Read By Dusk have all left great reviews for this one for those who don't know much about it. You can also read this in depth interview with Michael to get a deeper look into the novella, his writing process and more.  

And of course, don't forget to pre-order our next Charitable Chapbook, Glorious by Livia Llewellyn which will contribute to First Book (cover art coming soon)!

We'll have more updates soon on several titles so please keep an eye out for those. Take care, folks!