After much busy-ness in the Whippleshield secret command centre, this last week has seen the release of Aphrodite Terra, an anthology of stories about Venus, in paperback, and Dreams of the Space Age, a collection of space stories by Yours Truly, in paperback and on Kindle.
Aphrodite Terra was published on Kindle in December 2015, but the plan was always to do a paperback edition. It just took me a couple of months to get it sorted. Why only Kindle for the ebook edition? Because, thanks to regulations on digital services (which includes ebooks) brought in by the EU last year, ebook sellers need to calculate the VAT rate in the buyer’s country, charge it, and then pay it to their own tax authority (HMRC, in my case) for disbursement back to the tax authority of the buyer’s nation. It is, in other words, a complete – and near-impossible – faff. The regulation, which was intended to prevent Amazon from avoiding more tax, has ended up pushing more business onto Amazon, as they have one of the few retail platforms capable of transparently handling all the VAT charges and payments. So that worked out well, then.
Anyway, Aphrodite Terra is now also available in paperback – on Amazon and the Whippleshield Books website. It contains six stories about Venus by Heidi Kneale, Erin M Hartshorn, EM Edwards, Rosie Oliver, Lorraine Schein and Deborah Walker.
Dreams of the Space Age is a collection of seven stories about the Space Race, or alternate versions of it. Six of the stories were previously published in various magazines. The topics covered include the first man in space, the first people to land on Mars, the Mercury Gemini and Apollo programmes, rocket sleds and Voyager 1. It is available in signed numbered hardback (limited to 75 copies, so get yours as soon as you can) available only from the Whippleshield Books website, paperback and on Kindle. At present, the hardback is available for pre-order here, and the paperback can be bought on Amazon (and will be available from the Whippleshield Books website when stock arrives).
So, what next for Whippleshield Books? I’ve published six books in four years, which is somewhat less than the “two to three a year” I’d originally planned. Admittedly, I had to write four of those six first. I’m not ruling out the possibility of future anthologies along the same lines as Aphrodite Terra, but for the time-being I think I’d sooner focus on novellas, short novels and single-author collections, 40,000 words tops. And science fiction only, literary science fiction, preferably hard (but if someone wants to try writing a Marxist space opera novella…). No fantasy, no horror, no steampunk. If you have something, send an enquiry to editor(at)whippleshieldbooks(dot)com. Right now, the production schedule is wide open…
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