After more than a year, we’re back with one of our most popular specials — 50% off preorder titles. This is your chance to pick up some great reading material at unbelievable prices. Please follow the instructions below carefully, so everything runs smoothly on our end:

1. If you are ordering via PayPal, do not go through our online store. Please send an email to subpress@gmail.com letting us know what titles you’d like, and if you’re a US resident, or International.

2. You must order at least five eligible preorder titles (each with a retail price of $150 or less) to take advantage of the special. In-print titles are not eligible. Other titles not part of this special include The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury); Smoke and Mirrors (Neil Gaiman); Mister Slaughter (Robert McCammon); Blackout and All Clear (Connie Willis).

3. If paying via Visa/Mastercard, please use our online store as normal, and mention the special when checking out. Your shopping cart total and automatic email confirmation will NOT reflect the correct price. Don’t worry, we’ll catch it when processing your order.

4. This special may not be combined with any other specials, coupons, savings certificates, or offers. You may only order one copy of a given title. We regret that we cannot offer any retroactive discounts as part of this special offer.

5. This offer is good until the end of the day, Friday, December 4, 2009.

The original story from Lewis Shiner’s massive Collected Stories, “The Death of Che Guevara” is doing double duty. We’ve just posted it along with one of David Prill’s oddball charmers, “Dispatches from the Third Word War” over at Subterranean Magazine. Give them a look when you have a spare moment.

For those eager to get their hands on Shiner’s Collected Stories, copies are done at our printer, awaiting pickup.

We’ve just added two new books to our schedule, both already well into production:

– Return (Peter S. Beagle) — a return to the world of The Inkeeper’s Song. Given we’re only printing 1000 copies of this original novella, we expect sales to be brisk.
–
Swords & Dark Magic (edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders) — This large (over 400 page) sword and sorcery anthology includes new tales by Steven Erikson, Scott Lynch, K. J. Parker, and a ton of others great writers.

We have a number of books that are already completed, sitting in our warehouse, or at our printer awaiting pick up. Our shippers are currently packing Thousandth Night and Minla’s Flowers (Alastair Reynolds) to get copies into customers’ hands as quickly as possible. After that, they’ll move on to the also sold out Alpha and Omega (Patricia Briggs).

Beyond that, we’re not sure, but here’s the current list of completed titles:

– Scenting the Dark and Other Stories (Mary Robinette Kowal)
– Collected Stories (Lewis Shiner)
– Son of Retro Pulp Tales (edited by Joe R. Lansdale and Keith Lansdale)
– Unchained and Unhinged (Joe R. Lansdale)
– The Dark Volume (Gordon Dahlquist)

SubPress Director of Production, Yanni Kuznia, and I have been very busy the week or so, sending new titles to the printer in bulk, or at least it felt like it. Titles just sent include:

– Angelic (Kelley Armstrong);
– The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury);
– Mister Slaughter (Robert McCammon);
– The Club Dumas (Arturo Perez-Reverte);
– The God Engines (John Scalzi)
– Judge Sn Goes Golfing (John Scalzi).

I should add that it’s over 90% likely that Kelley Armstrong’s Angelic will be sold out by the time it’s published, and that we won’t have enough copies to fill all orders from our large online retailer and wholesale accounts.

As we’re within days of sending Robert McCammon’s manhunt masterpiece, Mister Slaughter, to the printer for its January release, we figured now was a good time to post a huge excerpt from the novel to the SubPress site. Head over to the book’s page and read the first 171 pages of this explosive thriller, but be warned, the excerpt ends with a cliffhanger, so you’ll need to order the novel to see how the plot threads are resolved.

Lo these many months after publication, K. J. Parker’s stunning novella, Purple and Black, is still garnering positive reviews, this time from the site Robots and Vamps: “…this an excellent study in character development by bringing it down to the very the basic elements but it still retains the necessary elements for a well crafted tale. I highly recommend this novella; it may be short but it easily has twice the entertainment value.”

The trade edition is long gone, but we still have copies of the signed limited edition available.

First, a head’s up that Patricia Briggs’ novella, Alpha and Omega, done and awaiting pickup at our printer, will be shipping out of print. At this point, we’re turning away hundreds of orders from various large online resellers and wholesalers. We’ll be pulling the book from our site by the end of this week, so if you want to be guaranteed of receiving a copy, the only way to be certain is to place a direct order.

– We received another large batch of orders for Alastair Reynolds’ Thousandth Night and Minla’s Flowers, which made it out of print on publication. As with Alpha and Omega, a good number of non-direct orders are going to go unfilled for this one.

– Given the rate of preorders, Kelley Armstrong’s Angelic looks like a strong contender to join the out-of-print on publication club. If you’re interested in a copy, please place your order soon.

– K. J. Parker just turned in a typically twisty novelette, “A Room with a View”, for Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2. We also have tales promised by Joe Hill, Norman Partridge, and Kelley Armstrong, and have already accepted tales by Jay Lake and Shannon Page and Peter V. Brett — the latter a novella set in the world of his novels The Painted Man and The Desert Spear.

– In the coming weeks, we have new projects to offer for presale, including an 80+ page off-kilter tale by Patrick Rothfuss, as well as what will be one of the must have anthologies of 2010, which includes tales by Glen Cook, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Scott Lynch, Tad Williams, Steven Erickson, and many more!

If you want to gauge Caitlin R. Kiernan’s popularity at Subterranean Press, know this — of the 16 hardcovers and chapbooks we’ve published by her, all but the most recent, A is for Alien, are out of print. This leaves us quite happy to announce a full-length, 80,000 word collection of ultra-rare, top notch tales by Cait. The Ammonite Violin & Others contains twenty stories first published in Sirenia Digest, the journal that Caitlin sends out to subscribers each month. Violin marks the first time these stories are available to the general public, making it a gathering of virtually original tales by one of dark fantasy’s finest writers.

The Ammonite Violin & Others will be available in two editions, a cloth bound trade hardcover, plus a leatherbound signed limited edition, the latter include a brand new chapbook story available nowhere else. Cait already has the fully-designed book and is proofreading it, while Richard Kirk is slated to provide a dust jacket and illustrated endsheets.

As do many full-time professionals, SF writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch wears a number of hats, with that of mystery scribe being one of the most prominent. Her current series concerns an African-American PI named Smokey Dalton, whose adopted son witnessed an event that has the duo moving around the country, with one eye on the lookout while they try to lead normal lives. We’re pleased to present “Family Affair”, only the second Smokey Dalton short story. If it catches your interest, we recommend the novels unreservedly, especially A Dangerous Road.