Friday, February 9, 2024

Shipping will resume in March. Orders will go out every weekend in the order they were received and will all be fulfilled by April 15th, 2024 at the latest. I will be in touch to confirm updated addresses within the next week. Thank you.


Dream

Nightscape Press

Thursday, August 12, 2021

Hi folks, I just want to update you all really quickly on things. Things are really hectic right now with EVERYTHING. I've ordered the hardcover proof for The Latham-Fielding Liaison for the Secret Gateways box set and it should be arriving soon. I made some headway on formatting for the Gateways to Abomination hardcover and then last month we got our new lease in the mail and found out our rent would be going up way beyond our means in September. And between that and the fact that this year, Tennessee has become literally the worst state in the US when it comes to LGBTQ laws mostly because of several laws introduced this year that particularly target the rights of transgender folks, we decided to try and find a new place to live outside of Tennessee and started a GoFundMe to help accommodate that move. I have since made an arrangement with our landlord so that we can stay at our current rate until the end of September.

At this point however, since we still have a lot left to raise and our granddaughter who lives with us has started homeschooling through a program specific to the state of Tennessee and we can't seem to find a good affordable alternative in the other places we're looking at to possibly  move to, it's looking like we're going to have to find another place here in Tennessee for at least another year. So any donations to our GoFundMe will be put back toward when we ARE able to move to a less hateful state. But obviously, we still have to find a place and be moved out by the end of September. So, needless to say, EVERYTHING I have been working on has gotten slowed down a whole bunch. So, at this point, with the move likely happening around mid to late September, it's looking like it'll be October before we can go to press with both The Latham-Fielding Liaison and the Secret Gateways box set. I wish I had better news, but unfortunately, things are out of my control right now. 

One more thing I want to touch on is Nox Pareidolia. I am still sifting through the chaos in the wake of my medication issues earlier this year so if you pledged for and never received a copy of Nox, please let us know in an email and I'll get that shipped out to you as soon as possible. 

Anyway, again, I wish I had better news. I hope you are all well and I'm really sorry for how slow going and jumbled all of this has been. Take care and keep safe, folks.


Sincerely,

RSW 

Friday, June 18, 2021

Secret Gateways Boxset Update

By the end of this month we will have proof copies ready to look over for two of the three volumes in the Secret Gateways boxset: The Latham-Fielding Liaison and Gateways to Abomination.

Due to a change in the TOC, The Secret of Ventriloquism will be slightly further delayed but we hope to have the proof copy for it ready by mid July.

If all goes as planned (which I cringe to say at this point), the set should be shipping out to folks in late July or early August. 

If you missed out on why there has been a hold up thus far this year, you can read my most recent update to the Diapause Kickstarter for more details. We'll have more updates on other projects very soon.

Thank you all and take care.


Sincerely,

Robert S. Wilson
Nightscape Press

Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Updates, Etc.

Hi folks, I apologize that we are behind on shipments and correspondence. Between the holidays and some health issues, I've been struggling to keep up with shipping demands while also balancing that with editing demands and now the backlog of both of those things has caused me to build up a backlog of email queries that need responding to. So, all of this has begun to avalanche together. 

And to top all that off, raging ADHD plus my doctor going out of town just before I needed to refill my meds that can only be refilled via a paper script in person really knocked me for a loop this past few weeks, making it so I've had about three hours a day, if I'm lucky, where I'm actually able to focus and get ANYTHING done. Today I was finally able to get my meds and so hopefully starting tomorrow I'll be able to make a lot more progress on getting caught up. Please hold any queries until the end of the month unless they're an emergency as our inbox is so full right now that I can't even tell one email from another lately. 

Just to try and cover some of the questions that have come my way in the midst of all the craziness that has been the end of last year and the little bit of this year so far, here's a list of updates on various projects etc:


  • Secret Gateways is not yet ready for production. I have been struggling to juggle editing and formatting duties with shipping duties. I'm hoping to have editing finished any day now so long as I can get enough time away from scrambling to ship books and reply to emails to be able to focus enough on them.
  • As such, The Latham-Fielding Liaison is also not ready for production as it's a major component of what I still need to finish going over in Secret Gateways.
  • I apologize to anybody who pre-ordered The Latham-Fielding Liaison on Amazon for the pre-order getting canceled. On Christmas day it was all too obvious the book wasn't going to be ready in time so I set it up in Kindle Direct Publishing to push it back with ample time according to Amazon's rules and my changes showed as successful within the book's info but when I went out to the list of titles it still showed as scheduled for the original December release. I made the stupid mistake of assuming it was fine since I see these kinds of quirks all the time with KDP. Next thing I know we get an email saying we didn't upload the final manuscript in time and they were canceling the pre-order. I contacted them and they agreed to not penalize us for it since we had set it up but they informed us that once they've canceled a pre-order, they cannot uncancel it. So, we would have to relist the book and frankly with everything else on my plate right now, I'm a lot more concerned with getting the book ready than I am with getting a pre-order page on Amazon considering I've already done that once. When the book is ready, we'll publish it.
  • With those two titles accounted for, color copies of Nox Pareidolia have been going out very slowly but we're picking up speed now. We should be able to get our shipping backlog of currently available titles caught up by the end of the month.
  • If you ordered a book in mid December from outside of the United States with the expectation of receiving it by Christmas from a small press, I think you might just be allowing Amazon's shipping and fulfillment paradigm to skew your understanding of the resources that independent businesses have at their disposal. I would like to wish we had the resources to match Amazon's level of fulfillment service if it weren't for the fact that that very paradigm requires the consistent indecent treatment of human beings who they employ. I know because I was once one of them. 
  • Due to miscalculations of shipping costs and a number of other unexpected factors with our previous Kickstarter, if you ordered a bundle or an item that has extra items bundled with it from us via Kickstarter, from here on, all backer items in each individual order will be shipped together when they are all ready in order to save on extra shipping costs. I apologize for any inconvenience this will cause for folks but it's simply far too expensive to ship things separately as I had originally planned to. It has also managed to slow me down to an incredible degree trying to ship things individually and trying to keep track of what has and hasn't been shipped individually.
  • Unfortunately, the multi-anthology Kickstarter we had planned to launch in February to cover the costs of Endless, Nox Pareidolia II, and The Bleeding Rainbow is being temporarily postponed.  We put a lot of thought into it and we refuse to do another Nightscape Kickstarter until we have all of our previous Kickstarter obligations caught up. The hope is that we'll be able to launch the KS in March.
  • As such, between this delay of our original plans and my overall backlog of tasks, we have decided to push back the release of The Bleeding Rainbow to later this year. We'll update you all with more details when we pin down a more definitive release date.
  • Speaking of, unless I or another editor on one of these anthologies has invited you to submit a story, please do not query any of us via social media about submission guidelines. If you have a query, please send it to us via email. I get that that means it will obviously result in a delayed response but I personally am getting to the point where I'm going to start blocking people who unnecessarily query me about submissions via social media. If I stay on social media much longer. The fact that the recent events in DC even had to happen to get social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to finally do something about the very huge and awful problem that caused them to happen in the first place is more than a little disconcerting to me and I'm finding myself more and more unable to stomach the idea of continuing to contribute to the lining of their pockets. 
  • If you are one of the 200+ people who have queried me about your submission for Nox Pareidolia II, I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. If you would rather not wait any longer, please withdraw your story via Moksha and, if you sell it before we get a chance to consider it, do please consider sending us another story when we open to submissions again for the anthology. 
  • And finally, and this is not something I like having to say but I value our customers greatly. I've met some wonderful human beings through this company and some of my best friends right now are people who I met because of this past three years of  our business. But please, folks, if you do not receive a response to your query, please, please, if you do not know us personally, aren't friends with us in real life or don't interact with us regularly on social media, please don't query us via private message to our personal social media accounts. You wouldn't track down the CEO of Comcast and send him a Facebook message if your cable guy was unexpectedly late, would you? We do this out of love for the books that we publish. We do it because we love weird and horror fiction. And frankly, some of the emails and messages I've received this past month have caused me to lose more than just a little bit of that fire. Please consider your actions and correspondence toward us before you send them. We are human beings too.   
All that said, I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of things in this list but it's 1:40 am and I need to get some sleep. Happy New Year and thank you for your support and patience. 

Sincerely,
Robert S. Wilson
Nightscape Press
www.nightscapepress.pub

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!