Under Construction! - Update 2!

Hellooo!

Really sorry was not very well the last week and needed a bit of more rest than I expected. Thanks for the interest expressed to date and please find some more details below plus who has so far given dates

Reminder - What is this about?

I’ve been conscious for a few weeks that sometimes the Small Independent presses get forgotten about. Often with popular awards. When it looks like Tor is the only publisher writing novellas in some categories then I slightly think things are getting missed out by readers. Many aren’t that visible in bookshops and they don’t have the marketing campaigns some others can generate. My idea is a month-long blog/vlog/insta/podcast campaign that we talk about the books from small presses that have stuck out for us.

November means we cover a lot of times people think about award nominations; covers the time people may think of books for Christmas and Thanksgiving and we are all not compiling our own end of year blogs!

What is a Small Press?

For this I’m looking at Publishers NOT connected to the Big 5 so we can for example discount Orbit, Gollancz and HarperVoyager and also not self-published. A good example may be Unsung Stories or Rebellion. Everyone will have our favourites. For this I don’t mind what genre they publish in either - so SF, Fantasy, Horror, Romance, Crime - it all counts. Totally up to you but if you have any questions about who you have in mind then please ask

I love the Big 5 as much as you all do but for one month lets ALSO help the smaller teams

For this I’m not looking at Self-Published as Independent Press. They need to publish more than one author to count. They have campaigns like SPFBO or SBSFC that I think help give them quite a lot of publicity over a long period so feels not quite in the spirit of this one

We have a hashtag!

Thanks to Stephen Poore the rather suitable #SmallPressBigStories this feels very apt for this little project!

What Do I Need to Do?

You DO NOT need to review new books! You can talk about your favourites from small presses this year (or over a few years). You can create your own blog/podcast/vlog entry too if you wish but I am conscious we are busy, and our schedules are often tight. Then if you see our cunning hashtag then re-post and re-tweet to your heart’s content

What I do want to help with is scheduling. I’m thinking of doing this over 4 weeks and so far, these are who have expressed an interest

1 - 1st November to 7th

KK Book Reviews

Infinite Speculation

2 - 8th November to 14th

W&S Bookclub

Gwennypenpen

Ginger Nuts of Horror

Steven Poore

Cora Buhlert

3 - 15th November to 21st

W&S Bookclub

The Pewter Wolf

Chronicles of Noria

Out of This World SFF

The Monday Review

There’s Always Room For One More

4 - 22nd November to 28th

Gwennypenpen

Reader@Work

Chronicles of Noria

Druid Life

Before We Go

All weeks

The Fantasy Hive

Sue L Bavey

The Shaggy Shepherd Book Reviews

Runalong The Shelves

Fiction Fans Podcast

Finalising the schedule

Can you DM me if you’re still in and any dates to avoid and I’ll create a blog-tour like schedule.

If you think you could do one per week then let me know its 1-4

If you think you can do just one or two let me know and I’ll add a schedule. There are a few still to come back I think we can spread things out to make this work. Can you come back to me by end of Sunday 23rd and I’ll have the finalis(ish) schedule ready on Monday for you to review?

Any questions just DM me! Thank you so much for your support and help

Matthew CavanaghComment