It was 80 degrees on the Oregon Coast last week, but despite the really weird (and even more unseasonal) heat, WMG headquarters was decked out for the winter holidays.
That’s because we’re testing out merchandise for our annual WMG Holiday Spectacular Kickstarter (and new store), which are set to launch over the next few weeks. More on this year’s Kickstarter in a minute.
In addition to testing out holiday merchandise, we’re also prepping for the distribution of the three holiday anthologies from last year’s Kickstarter for the 2022 Calendar of Stories. As always, Kickstarter backer get the books earlier than everyone else, and those will ship out this week.
Here’s the synopsis for these festive books:
Candy Cane Kisses
What pairs better than peppermint and hot chocolate? Romance and the holidays, of course!
In this year’s most charming WMG Holiday Spectacular anthology, award-winning editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch offers a sweet collection of romantic holiday stories to add a bit more love to the season.
Let Anthea Lawson take you to a Christmas gathering no one really wants to organize or attend, but must because of an inheritance. Join Stefon Mears as he imagines the perfect bookstore and then lets us explore it. Read how Ron Collins turns the most unromantic Christmas Eve location—an emergency room—into the most wonderful place to spend the holidays. And let Annie Reed’s charming tale of the ways love can surprise us warm your heart.
Along with stories by Julia Vee, Melissa Yi, Robert Jeschonek and more, these eleven wonderful writers touch the soul with these warm tales of holiday happy endings.
Includes:
“Ice Dancing and Crab Apple Sorbet” by Melissa Yi
“Patterns” by Irette Y. Patterson
“A Little More Aloha” by Julia Vee
“Trapped Between Book Lovers” by Stefon Mears
“She Wanted It to be Perfect” by Ron Collins
“The Mistletoe Duke” by Anthea Lawson
“The Ditty and the Ornament” by Deb Miller
“A Fluffy Black Ball of Pure Naughtiness” by Kari Kilgore
“When Nicky Met Holly” by Annie Reed
“A Decidedly Fly-By-Night Angel” by Robert Jeschonek
“Wings for Keiko” by Jessi Hammond
Crooked Little Christmas
Crime threads its way through everything, including the holidays. But for writers, that just adds some spice to their creativity.
Take this WMG Holiday Spectacular anthology, in which award-winning editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch offers holiday tales from dark to light and everything in between.
Let Thea Hutcheson thrill you as Paolo Bianchi tries to save the man he loves in time for their annual solstice celebration. Travel to Colombia as one family puts their own little twist on the celebration called Día de las Velitas. Buckle in with Irette Y. Patterson for one of those unexpected spy stories about a seemingly unassuming person. And join Karen Abrahamson in Thailand on a hot December day as she introduces you to a handful of people up to no good.
Along with stories by Leslie Claire Walker, Kari Kilgore, Steven Mohan, Jr. and more, these eleven thrilling writers capture the mischief and mayhem to the holiday season.
Includes:
“Black Deeds on a Black Friday” by Laura Ware
“The Good Girl” by Lauren Lang
“The Copper Valley Cocoa Conniption Competition” by Kari Kilgore
“Three Spectacular Capers and the Whatever It’s Called Beneath the Tree” by Steven Mohan, Jr.
“Larceny’s Love Lost and Found” by Leslie Claire Walker
“Shinier Things” by Filip Wiltgren
“The Laws of St. Laurent” by Kelsey Hutton
“The Whole Darn Package” by Karen Abrahamson
“The File Clerk Who Hid in the Cave” by Irette Y. Patterson
“Día de Las Velitas” by Liz Lazo
“A Close Shave” by Thea Hutcheson
Time Travel Holidays
Time travel might not seem like the standard holiday story fare. But in the hands of talented writers, you’ll find yourself transported to new places and new world .
In this incredibly creative WMG Holiday Spectacular anthology, Hugo and World Fantasy award-winning editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch offers a masterfully curated collection of holiday stories that travel through time and back again.
Ride along with Brenda Carre and Joey as that little explorer manages time travel in just about the best way possible. Join Lisa Silverthorne for a gothic romance with storms and broken dreams and just the right amount of hope. And travel the galaxy with Robert Jeschonek who writes an award-worthy classic science fiction tale set on Mars.
Along with stories by Irette Y. Patterson, Michèle Laframboise, Steven Mohan, Jr. and more, these eleven powerful writers add plenty of adventure to the holiday season.
Includes:
“Loss Prevention at the Hypermart” by DeAnna Knippling
“No Material Impact on the Timeline” by Irette Y. Patterson
“Déjà Vécu” by Dæmon Crowe
“Training Run” by Marcelle Dubé
“The Skeptic and the Primrose” by Michèle Laframboise
“The Space Between Us” by Lisa Silverthorne
“Heaven in 1944” by Leslie Claire Walker
“Crutnacker Sweets” by Brenda Carre
“The Yule Log” by Cate Martin
“The Last Saturnalia” by Steven Mohan, Jr.
“What Happened Between Go-Days 15 and 16” by Robert Jeschonek
For anyone who isn’t a backer of the 2022 Kickstarter, these books will be available as a reward in the 2023 WMG Holiday Spectacular Kickstarter, which launches Oct. 17. You’ll also get the 2023 WMG Holiday Spectacular Calendar of Stories with every reward. Click here to be notified as soon as the Kickstarter launches.
And if you want to read a holiday anthology right now, you can always pick up a volume or three from our previous years. Click hereto see all of our previously published holiday anthologies.
So, go ahead and start getting your eReader or bookshelf decked out for the winter holiday season!
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer, working mother, and brain tumor survivor.
It’s October, which means it’s time to get my pumpkin on!
I love this time of year. It’s the best time to have a birthday, in my opinion, because I can celebrate all things fall, like pumpkin patches and apple cider and light-up ghosts and…well, you get the picture.
To start, I took my daughter to a pumpkin patch this weekend so that we could pick out our annual pumpkins. We get several every year, some of which become jack-o-lanterns and some of which stick around until Thanksgiving (at which point they are referred to as simply gourds so as to justify their continued presence).
Oh, and did I mention my house is already decorated for Halloween?
I love Halloween, almost as much as I love Christmas. But Kristine Kathryn Rusch has me beat, because Halloween is her favorite holiday of all. She’s even curated a StoryBundle to celebrate it.
New York Times bestsellers, international bestsellers, winners and nominees of the ITW Thriller Award, the Stoker award, the World Fantasy Award, and the GoodReads Choice for Horror. Omnibuses. Novels and spooky collections. Four exclusives. This StoryBundle has all of that and more. And…the most important part…great reading.
For $20, you’ll get all the books and a chance to donate to Maui Strong to help the victims in Lahaina.
To find out more about the ten books (including three offerings from WMG—Halloween Harvest, FantasyLife and Other Stories, and Three Sheets to the Wind— plus four StoryBundle exclusives!), click here.
You can save 30% on books, 25% (plus free shipping) on merchandise (US only), and 50% on everything we offer on WMG’s Teachable site.
That 30% off on books goes for every ebook we have for sale at divingintothewreck.com, pulphousemagazine.com and wmgbooks.com. (Right now, we only have ebooks available direct, but later this year we plan to add paper books and some audiobooks, as well.)
Plus, not only do we have the Diving merchandise we included in the Ivory Trees Kickstarter—which ended on Thursday…thank you so much to all who supported it!—but we also have lots of new merchandise available for sale (at a 25% discount!).
And new for this grand opening: gift cards! You can buy gift cards on the Diving store and give them as gifts to be delivered at the date you choose!
Last but certainly not least is the 50% off on our WMG Teachable site. That discount also applies to the recently launched Flash Techniques (where every Monday Dean and Kris will talk about writing craft technique) and the just announced 2024 Advanced Craft Classes.
To learn more about the new class and to read more about the Teachable part of the grand-opening sale, click here.
As you can see from our grand-opening sale, we are very excited about our new stores! Having the capability to do storewide sales on all of our available inventory is something we could never do with our retail partners. And while we’ll continue to offer our books through those venues, we will be focusing more and more on our own stores so that we can offer our readers the best deals possible.
And like my daughter, I sure do love a good sale!
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer, working mother, and brain tumor survivor.
My husband and I have been watching a lot of movies lately. Rewatching some old favorites, actually.
We both love Star Trek, so we decided to rewatch the alternate reality movies. But once we got through the second movie, Star Trek Into Darkness, we decided to go down a Khan rabbit hole. We watched The Original Series episode “Space Seed” and then Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. (Khan as a child in an alternate timeline also appeared in Strange New Worlds Season 2’s episode “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” but that’s further down the rabbit hole than we were willing to go at present.)
I love it when you have storylines within series. It makes the universe richer.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch—a huge Star Trek fan herself and an author of Star Trek novels—is a master of the storyline within a series, as evidence by her massively expansive Diving Universe.
We’ve entered the last week of Ivory Trees: A Diving Universe Kickstarter, and we’ve hit 3 stretch goals so far, so let’s take a look at what you’ll get if you back this Kickstarter at the $5 level or above:
Bonus books:
“Rocket Girls”
“Once on the Blue Moon”
“Rick the Robber Baron”
Bonus workshops:
Writing About Building Cultures in Science Fiction ($150 value)
Writing About Relativity in Science Fiction ($150 value)
We’ve got more stretch goals to hit, too, so the value just keeps rising.
Click here to check out the Kickstarter and the many book, merchandise, and writing workshop rewards we have on offer.
It’s an adventure you won’t want to miss!
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer, working mother, and brain tumor survivor.
My daughter started school last week, and something struck me. She’s never brought home a textbook. Everything is on the computer now.
That is so strange to me. One of my favorite parts of the beginning of the school year was putting covers on my textbooks. There was an art to cutting and folding those paper grocery bags to get the perfect dust jacket (of course, I didn’t know that’s what I was making back then) and then decorating it so it was personalized.
Nola has never had the chance to make her own dust jacket. Times have changed. Technology has advanced. But it makes me a little sad.
Good thing I still have plenty of opportunities to make dust jackets (even if I’m not hand-folding them).
Take the latest novel and collection in Dean Wesley Smith’s bestselling Cold Poker Gang Mystery series, for example. I got to make a dust jacket for each of those.
Case Card, the latest novel, and Action, the new collection are both available in ebook, trade paperback and hardcover (with a dust jacket!).
Here’s the synopsis for Case Card:
International bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith returns to his bestselling Cold Poker Gang Mystery series with another twisted mystery in Case Card.
Retired detectives Debra Pickett and Sarge Carson return to the Cold Poker Gang Task Force after the pandemic to tackle the most famous of all Las Vegas cold cases: the disappearance of a college student fifty-one years before.
Becky Williams entered her apartment building on November 24, 1971, and vanished without a trace. Now, Pickett and Sarge have one last chance to solve the case before a building remodel destroys whatever clues remain.
But the twisted trail they follow in their investigation might prove the strangest and just downright Las Vegas-weirdest case they have ever solved.
International bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith offers up eight thrilling puzzle mystery stories in his bestselling Cold Poker Gang Mystery series.
If you love puzzle mysteries, complicated cold cases, and detectives tackling the most twisted crimes, take this opportunity to introduce yourself to this talented group of retired Las Vegas detectives playing poker and solving cold cases.
These eight stories each feature a new cold-case mystery and offer a look at the hard-to-solve crimes found in all the Cold Poker Gang novels.
So, go ahead and grab these great mysteries for your fall reading pile. And if you have some naked hardcovers at home and want to try your hand at making your own paper bag dust jacket, check out this video tutorial here!
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer, working mother, and brain tumor survivor.
The Diving Universe is so vast that it spans not only multiple star systems but also millennia. Set far in the future, and 18 books in, we readers are still exploring new worlds and new times and new technology with each new installment in this amazing series!
And tomorrow, you can join us, too, on the next part of this adventure!
First, of course, is the new novel. In Ivory Trees: A Diving Universe Novel, Kris takes us back to Wyr (which savvy readers will remember from City of Ruins), where we learn a whole lot more about The Spires of Denon, the Amnthrans, the Empire, and an ancient tech.
There’s no Boss or Coop in this one, but avid readers will recognize some familiar faces if they pay attention.
And for the first time ever, we have Diving merchandise! Thanks to the amazing art created for us by the incredibly talented Philcold, as well as a new logo for the new book, you can now join the Diving Crew with mugs, coasters, a blanket, a pillow or a calendar.
Plus, of course, all the books in the series, including some that are only offered in Kickstarters.
And for writers, special workshops, of course.
Click here to go to the Kickstarter preview page, which will convert to the Kickstarter link once the project goes live about noon tomorrow and check it out.
We can’t wait for you to join us on this journey!
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer, working mother, and brain tumor survivor.
