World Weaver Press will be open to submissions for a new science fiction anthology from August 15 to November 15, 2017. Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers seeks optimistic science fiction stories set in summer.

Solarpunk is a type of eco-conscious science fiction that imagines an optimistic future founded on renewable energies. It might take place in a wind-powered skyscraper or on a solar-powered robotic farm, in a bustling green-roofed metropolis or in a small but tech-saavy desert village. Often coupled with an art nouveau aesthetic, and always inclusive and diverse, solarpunk stories show the ways we have adapted to climate change, or the ways we have overcome it.
 
For this anthology, I want to see solarpunk summers. Show me futuristic stories that take place in summer, whether that involves a summer night in a rooftop garden, or characters adapting to extreme heat and weather, or maybe an annual migration to cooler lands. Keep it planet-based (Earth or other), and optimistic. Solarpunk worlds aren’t necessarily utopias, but they definitely aren’t dystopias.

We're a northern hemisphere publisher, but southern hemisphere summers are also welcome!
 
Need inspiration? Read New York 2140 or Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, or Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology.

Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers will be a paying market, but the author rate has not yet been determined. Our usual rate for anthologies is $10 + a paperback contributor copy. We want to pay more. World Weaver Press recently contracted a translation of a Brazilian solarpunk anthology, and we will be running a Kickstarter to assist with the translation costs. Author rates for Glass and Gardens will be included in the Kickstarter as stretch goals. If we meet our stretch goals, Glass and Gardens authors will be paid semi-pro ($0.01 to $0.05 per word), or possibly even pro rates ($0.06 per word).

Check our blog and social media for updates on the Solarpunk Kickstarter, which will run August 14 to September 14, 2017.

When submissions open, please check the Anthology Submission page or the WWP blog for the correct email address to send your submission to. We're withholding it for now to discourage writers from sending before the window is open.

Submission Window: August 15 to November 15, 2017

Length: Under 8,000 words

Specifications: Standard Manuscript Format is preferred (minus the Courier font). Send your story as an attachment (.doc, .docx, or .rtf only), double-spaced, using 12-point type and a standard serif font (such as Times New Roman or Garamond). Please include your name, mailing address, and email address on the first page.

Simultaneous Submissions allowed: Yes (Please let us know ASAP if it is accepted elsewhere.)

Multiple Submissions allowed: No (If we decline a story while the submission window is still open, you may send another, but please do not send multiple stories at the same time, or a second story before we have responded to the first.)

Sarena Ulibarri is the Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press. She earned an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and attended the Clarion Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers' Workshop at UCSD in 2014. Her fiction has appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, as well as anthologies such as Biketopia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories in Extreme Futures and Dear Robot: An Anthology of Epistolary Science Fiction. She currently lives in New Mexico.

Sara Dobie Bauer: Hello, everyone! In celebration of release day, I’m here with Imogene from Bite Somebody Else.
 
Imogene: Who are you talking to? And who the hell are you anyway?
 
SDB: Oh, I’m an author. I created you.
 
I: Yeah, okay, psycho.
 
SDB: So, Imogene, you’re the lead character in Bite Somebody Else, available now! Did you ever think you’d become a literary celebrity?
 
I: Bitch, please. I’ve been a celebrity my whole life.
 
SDB: Right. Okay. Um. Tell me about Nicholas. What was it like when you two first met?
 
I: He was an annoying, posh little know-it-all. I mean, he’s not little. (Butt-head chuckle.) He was hot, but he was a total dick. I didn’t trust him at all—especially because of his spiffy suits. What kind of guy wears a thousand dollar suit to the beach?
 
SDB: Well, he is British…
 
I: So? Like they don’t have beaches there? Wait, do they have beaches there?
 
SDB: (Blank stare.) I have no idea. I think so.
 
I: So, at first, I didn’t trust him. Plus, he wasn’t interested in me, so he was obviously an idiot.
 
SDB: But you’ve never been the relationship type anyway—until you met Celia and Ian.
 
I: Dude. Don’t make me sick.
 
SDB: I’m serious. I think you would consider them your best friends. What do you think is the key to your friendship with Celia?
 
I: (Shrugs.) I don’t ever want to murder her with garden shears.
 
SDB: (Frowns.) And that’s… it? The key to your friendship?
 
I: Sort of. I want to kill lots of people with garden shears. Like my neighbor down the beach who listens to country music all the time. Or that waitress who was making googly eyes at Nicholas the other night.
 
SDB: Well, Nicholas is really hot.
 
I: You wanna be added to my death list, author girl?
 
SDB: (Scoffs.)
 
I: So, yeah, I never want to kill Celia with garden shears. Or Ian. I can’t imagine them not being around. That’s friendship, right?
 
SDB: That was kind of sweet.
 
I: Nobody calls me sweet.
 
SDB: I know. I created you.
 
I: Oh, yeah? If that’s true, what size combat boots do I wear?
 
SDB: Eight and a half.
 
I: Huh. Shit.
 
SDB: If you were stranded on a desert island with one album, what would it be?
 
I: One album! (Screams like a banshee.) Are you insane!
 
SDB: Fine. Pick a couple albums. I don’t know why I wrote you with such a bad temper.
 
I: Is it fair if I list a bunch of greatest hits albums, because—let’s face it—if I was stranded on a desert island, I assume I swam there from some wrecked boat full of sexy drunk sailors whose blood I sucked and I probably won’t be able to carry that much. So David Bowie greatest hits. Queen greatest hits: the red album, because it has “Don’t Stop Me Now” and “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy.” I’ll overlook “Bicycle Race” because I’d forgive Freddie anything. And I guess I’d have to go with The Wedding Singer soundtrack because it’s a perfect mish mash of all that was right in the eighties.
 
SDB: For someone who seems kind of ADD, that was a very detailed response.
 
I: Music is important. Just ask Nicholas.
 
SDB: Back to Nicholas: what’s your favorite thing about him?
 
I: The way his ass looks in tight pants.
 
SDB: (Eye roll.) That is not your favorite thing about Nicholas.
 
I: Then, what is, author girl?
 
SDB: He makes you laugh.
 
I: God, you make me sound like such a sap. I don’t think I like you.
 
SDB: People claim you’re based on me, so that means you don’t like yourself.
 
I: You have blue hair, bitch! I have purple. We are nothing alike.
 
SDB: Yeah. Fine. Whatever. Look, you’re one of the lead characters in two of my books, so I guess I should ask what wisdom you’d like to share with the world. You’ve been a vampire for over twenty years. What have you learned?
 
I: Don’t show up to imaginary meetings with psycho, blue-haired bitches.
 
SDB: Imogene…
 
I: You want me to get deep for a minute? Fine, I’ll get deep. Don’t change for anyone. Friends, lovers, Nicholas… they love me because I’m me. Unapologetically. I know I’m not nice, author girl. I know I say shitty things. I drink too much blood. I cuss too much. I embarrass people, and I’ve lost friends for being that way. But Celia and Ian, Nicholas, even Dr. Savage and her human—they know the real me, and they like me anyway. Oh, I guess that’s what real friendship is, huh? Knowing the worst about someone and loving them anyway.
 
SDB: (Chin wobble.) Yeah, I think so.
 
I: Oh, my God, are you crying?
 
SDB: No. I’m just proud of how far you’ve come. You’re all grown up. You should have seen yourself in book one.
 
I: Do people actually read your silly books?
 
SDB: Amazingly, yes.
 
I: Huh. Maybe I’ll write a book. I’ll call it “The Purple-Headed Monster.” Wait, I think that’s slang for a penis, isn’t it?
 
SDB: (Sigh.) I rescind my previous statement about your maturity.

Sara Dobie Bauer is a writer, model, and mental health advocate with a creative writing degree from Ohio University. Her short story, "Don't Ball the Boss," was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, inspired by her shameless crush on Benedict Cumberbatch. She lives with her hottie husband and two precious pups in Northeast Ohio, although she'd really like to live in a Tim Burton film. She is a member of RWA and author of the paranormal rom-com Bite Somebody, among other ridiculously entertaining things. Read more at http://SaraDobieBauer.com or find her on Twitter @SaraDobie. 

Please welcome to the world BITE SOMEBODY ELSE by Sara Dobie Bauer, the sequel to her 2016 paranormal rom-com BITE SOMEBODY. BITE SOMEBODY ELSE is available in both ebook and paperback today, June 20, 2017.

Sara Dobie Bauer is a writer, model, and mental health advocate with a creative writing degree from Ohio University. Her short story, "Don't Ball the Boss," was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, inspired by her shameless crush on Benedict Cumberbatch. She lives with her hottie husband and two precious pups in Northeast Ohio, although she'd really like to live in a Tim Burton film. She is a member of RWA and author of the paranormal rom-com Bite Somebody, among other ridiculously entertaining things. Read more at http://SaraDobieBauer.com or find her on Twitter @SaraDobie. 

Twice a year when I pay author royalties, I spend a lot of time staring at the sales numbers, tallying them across all the various platforms where we sell books, and trying to decipher the mystical machinations behind why books do or don't sell. I won't share specific numbers publicly, but I would like to start a tradition of celebrating our bestsellers each June and December. Below, you'll find our top 10 bestsellers for the first half of 2017, as well as a list of our top 10 bestsellers of all time. Is your favorite on these lists? Let us know in the comments!

A few notes on these rankings:

• This list takes into account all vendors (Amazon, iTunes, convention tables, etc.), from all countries, in both ebook and paperback.
• Vendors may not report sales for one to three months after the actual sale, so even though I'm calling this list "first half of 2017," it contains numbers ranging from October 2016 to May 2017, depending on vendor reports.
  
• Some of these are books that (understandably) sell quite well during Christmas season, and less during other times of the year. See above.
• Several of our 2016 and early 2017 books had very successful launches, but it may take some time for them to catch up to the books that have been out for a few years. We believe in cultivating the long tail.

        Sarena Ulibarri
        Editor-in-Chief

Guest Post by Tabitha Lord

I sometimes joke that Star Wars changed my life, but I’m only half kidding. I first saw the movie when I was seven and I became instantly obsessed. Model x-wing fighters hung from my bedroom ceiling, the Millennium Falcon I built with my dad had a light-up cockpit, my Empire Strikes Back lunchbox still had its thermos, and my Princess Leia action figure was the one with the real buns - you know, fake hair instead of plastic that you could never fix after you’d messed with it. I should have saved those toys. My collection would have rivaled any I’ve seen.
 
Over the years, I’ve loved and binged on many other stories - the original Battlestar Galactica and the later reboot, Firefly, Buffy, Supernatural, Falling Skies, Daredevil, and Walking Dead, to name a few. When I finally attended my first Comic Con, I began to understand fandom as a phenomenon. These were my people!
 
I think we fans of sci-fi and fantasy, and all the sub-genres in between, are drawn to these stories not only because they spark our imagination, but because we can explore real issues from the safety and distance of another planet, or from a parallel universe, or with superpowers. We can cheer the heroes who fight the darkness, slay the dragons of our nightmares, and build a world with a place for us all. Our fandom affords us the chance to do that in community.
 
I write science fiction for the same reason I watch and read it. First, because it appeals to my imagination on a deep level, and second, because I can explore heroes and worlds of my own creation. I can put my characters through hell, wage wars, build and destroy entire governments, design worlds. I can exercise my demons on the page. For me, the satisfaction of creating these stories is very similar to the enthusiasm I have for other people’s stories. And having fans is as much fun as being a fan!
 
Cons are places where fans can interact with artists, and where people who find joy in a good story come to celebrate that story, whether it’s found on a screen, in a comic, or in a novel. Attending Cons as a fan gave me the idea that I might have success attending them as a writer. I hadn’t seen many authors selling novels at traditional Comic Cons, and I couldn’t be sure this was a crowd full of avid fiction readers, but I took an educated guess that those who did enjoy reading would be my audience.  
 
It was easy to talk about my stories to people who were already sci-fi fans! And, because I’m a fan too, I had many enthusiastic conversations not only about my own work in terms of influence and comparable work, but about newly trending sci-fi TV shows, movies, books, collectible, and costumes. I had as much fun behind my table as I did when I was an attendee. And I sold every book I brought with me.

Read more about Tabitha Lord's Comic Con experiences in Writers at a Comic Con? How to Make the Most of Your Time

See which cons the World Weaver Press authors will be at this year on our Author Appearances list!

Tabitha Lord’s debut novel, Horizon, won the Writer’s Digest Grand Prize for Self-Published Fiction in 2016, and was named finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and National Indie Excellence Awards. Her short story “Homecoming” appears in the anthology Sirens, edited by Rhonda Parrish and published by World Weaver Press, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is also a senior editor for www.BookClubBabble.com. Her upcoming novel, Infinity, releases in June.

No one is perfect—not even a witch. Witches have amazing power at their fingertips to do unbelievable things. That magic can come in really handy sometimes too. They can make someone fall in love, poison an apple to enact a sleeping curse, banish an enemy to an alternate reality, or just to conjure up some Nutella when there is none in the house.

But what happens when those spells go horribly awry?

SonofaWitch! contains six humorous contemporary fantasy stories of magic spells gone wrong by Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Sara Dobie Bauer, Lissa Marie Redmond, Frances Pauli, Mara Malins, and Adam Millard.

SonofaWitch! will be available in ebook and paperback October 3, 2017. Add it to your Goodreads To-Read Shelf now!

“Good Spell Gone Bug” by Laura VanArendonk Baugh
“The Trouble with Love Spells” by Sara Dobie Bauer
“All the Petty Curses” by Lissa Marie Redmond
“The Perfect Mate Fiasco” by Frances Pauli
“A Matter of Perspective” by Mara Malins
“A Poppet Named Dave” by Adam Millard

Sara Dobie Bauer is a writer, model, and mental health advocate with a creative writing degree from Ohio University. Her short story, "Don't Ball the Boss," was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, inspired by her shameless crush on Benedict Cumberbatch. She lives with her hottie husband and two precious pups in Northeast Ohio, although she'd really like to live in a Tim Burton film. She is a member of RWA and author of the paranormal rom-com Bite Somebody, among other ridiculously entertaining things. Read more at http://SaraDobieBauer.com or find her on Twitter @SaraDobie.
 
Mara Malins is an English writer of romance who battles spreadsheets by day and fiction by night. She lives in Manchester with her menagerie of three cats, two turtles and a long-term partner. She has work forthcoming with Pen and Kink Publishing. Her story “Classification of Nerd” appears in Covalent Bonds.

Adam Millard is the author of twenty-two novels, twelve novellas, and more than two hundred short stories, which can be found in various collections, magazines, and anthologies. Probably best known for his post-apocalyptic and comedy-horror fiction, Adam also writes fantasy/horror for children, as well as bizarro fiction for several publishers. His work has recently been translated for the German market.

Frances Pauli is a hybrid author of over twenty novels. She favors speculative fiction, romance, and furry fiction. She frequently crosses genre barriers, believes in a hearty dose of humor, and has been known to experiment with serials, text novels, flash, and micro-fiction.

Lissa Marie Redmond lives and writes in Buffalo with her husband and two daughters. Her “James the Hipster” stories have appeared in two previous World Weaver Press anthologies: Frozen Fairy Tales and He Sees You When He’s Creepin’: Tales of Krampus.

Laura VanArendonk Baugh was born at a very early age and never looked back. She overcame childhood deficiencies of having been born without teeth or developed motor skills, and by the time she matured into a recognizable adult she had become a behavior analyst, an internationally-recognized and award-winning animal trainer, a popular costumer/cosplayer, a tabletop gamer, a chocolate addict, and of course a writer. Laura's stories have also appeared in the World Weaver Press anthologies Fae, Equus, and Covalent Bonds. Find her at www.LauraVanArendonkBaugh.com

Trysh Thompson has written just about every form of non-fiction you can think of—everything from news, movie reviews, magazine columns, marketing hype, software manuals, and was even an editorial assistant on a gardening book no one has ever read (The 7-Minute Organic Garden—see, you’ve never heard of it, have you?). To keep from being slowly and torturously bored to death by her day job, she turned to fiction as means of escape—reading it, writing it, and editing it. She also edited the geek romance anthology Covalent Bonds.

June is Pride Month, so the World Weaver Press editorial staff put together a list of some of our favorite books featuring LGBTQIA characters. This isn't a complete list by a long shot, just some of the queer books we've read and loved. Click on each book cover for more information!

Have you read any of these? Have more recommendations (especially for queer fantasy/science fiction)? We'd love to hear your reactions and book recommendations in the comments!

Below are the World Weaver Press books that feature queer characters. Please note that several of these are short story anthologies or collections, and queer characters may only appear in a few of those stories.

Want to help us expand this list? We'll be open to submissions of speculative romance novels and novellas in September 2017, and we also have anthologies that will be open to submissions soon!

I meant to do one of these in March—the one year anniversary of when I officially took over as Editor-in-Chief—but there was too much going on, and it kept getting pushed to the bottom of my to-do list. That list is never-ending and always-changing, but that's one of the things I love about this job. No two days are ever the same.

The name "World Weaver Press" comes from this phrase in our mission statement: "We believe that publishing speculative fiction isn’t just printing words on the page — it’s the act of weaving brand new worlds." Whether reshaping our contemporary world, imagining the future of the world, or conjuring a new world entirely, speculative fiction writers are always weaving new worlds in their stories. But one thing I didn't anticipate when I took over World Weaver Press was how far across our world these stories could reach. Cheryl Low, author of the forthcoming novel Vanity in Dust, lives in Sweden. K. Bird Lincoln celebrated the release of her book Dream Eater while in Japan. Next year we'll be publishing an anthology of Brazilian solarpunk stories, translated into English for the first time. Several of our authors have had the opportunity to interact with enthusiastic readers in South Africa through the Books & Everything Facebook group.

I've also been surprised by the number of international sales we get on a regular basis. Someone in Saudi Arabia decided to pick up a copy of Fae. Someone in France is reading Covalent Bonds. Several people in India have copies of Krampusnacht on their Kindles, and Heir to the Lamp was briefly an Amazon bestseller in Australia. I'm thrilled our stories have somehow found their way into so many corners of the world. Amazon just shows me a graph and a spreadsheet, but when people buy books on Kobo, my dashboard shows me a map of which country the book was bought in. I love these maps, so I thought I'd show you a couple of them.

One thing I'd like to start doing more of is actually venturing out into the world, meaning traveling to more conventions and conferences. We keep a list of our authors' events and outings (you can see it here), but you're unlikely to ever see me unless you come to the Southwest. I hope to shift that over the next couple of years. I'll have a World Weaver Press table at Albuquerque's Bubonicon in August, and Trysh Thompson, Sara Dobie Bauer, and I will all be wreaking havoc (and peddling books) at Louisville's Imaginarium in October. WWP won't have any official presence at this year's WorldCon, but I hope to make it to the 2018 one. I'd love to meet more of the far-flung authors and editors I work with in person, and share our books with distant readers who don't even know what they've been missing.

I like to believe that stories don't just weave their own worlds — they can also weave our world closer together.

Sarena Ulibarri
Editor-in-Chief