Goodies in my post box

I love to receive interesting things in the mail. I love to get new books. I love to be in books. So imagine my joy today when I received four books in the mail – three contributor copies of Seizure Issue 4, featuring my story Deep Sea Fishing and my copy of Horn by Peter M Ball from Twelfth Planet Press.

I’m loving the stuff coming out of Twelfth Planet Press at the moment. And so are other people – in the recent Aurealis Award finalists announcement books, anthologies and stories from Twelfth Planet and its authors received as many or more nominations than all the big publishers like Hachette and HarperCollins. That’s a fantastic achievement for Twelfth Planet and a ringing endorsement of small press in general.

In fact, the delightful Angela Slatter went so far as to post the numbers on her blog:

Number of nominations for works published by indie Twelfth Planet Press: 7
Number of nominations for works published by rather large press Allen & Unwin: 7
Number of nominations for works published by also rather large press HarperCollins: 5
Number of nominations for works published by again-with-the-rather-large press Hachette: 4

So yeah, that is freaking sweet. To celebrate, Twelfth Planet is offering their titles with free shipping in Australia throughout December – see here if you’re interested in taking advantage of that.

The other reason that I was keen to get a copy of Horn is because it’s one of the books that got a Horror Novel category nomination in the Aurealis Awards while MageSign, though entered, didn’t. I figure you can’t go wrong reading stuff that gets nominated for awards and that’s the kind of stuff you can learn from as a writer. I’m always trying to improve my craft, so reading the good stuff is absolutely essential.

Anyway, more lovely Christmas reading for me!

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