Book Smugglers Publishing Announces: 2016 – The Year of the Superhero

We have a couple of big announcements to make so brace yourselves: this is going to be super awesome.

BOOK SMUGGLERS PUBLISHING

PROUDLY PRESENTS

2016 – The Year of the Superhero

First there were Subversive Fairy Tales. Soon, there will be tales of First Contact and the pulp-y, hard boiled Cinderella Noir.

Next year, Book Smugglers Publishing is proud to deliver Superheroes. We’ll formally announce our open call for submissions around this theme very soon, but we first wanted to share the news of two super awesome acquisitions!

Hurricane Heels Series by Isabel Yap

We are delighted to announce that we have acquired HURRICANE HEELS, a series of five interconnected and serialized short stories by Isabel Yap!

Growing up isn’t easy, even with goddess grace and supernatural ass-kicking powers. The Hurricane Heels series looks at the lives of five magical girls – Alex, Ria, Natalie, Aiko, and Selena – through the years, as they balance slaying the forces of evil with school, secrets, falling in love, and staying friends.

Each story will be told from a different character’s point of view – one story for each of the five girls – starting with a bachelorette party gone terribly wrong.

The series will be published in quickfire succession in Fall 2016.

About the Author

Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California, Tokyo (for 96 days!), and London. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Tor.com, Shimmer, Interfictions Online, and Nightmare. She is @visyap on Twitter and her website is isalikeswords.wordpress.com.

Extrahumans Series by Susan Jane Bigelow

For Book Smugglers Publishing’s first novel acquisition, we are beyond thrilled to announce that we will be publishing Waking Gifts by Susan Jane Bigelow – the fourth book in her Extrahumans Series. In addition, leading up to publication of book 4, Book Smugglers Publishing will repackage and relaunch the first three books in the series: Broken, Fly Into Fire and The Spark (originally published through Candlemark & Gleam and edited by Kate Sullivan).

Waking Gifts will be released in Spring 2016.

About The Extrahumans Series

In a post-war dystopian future, certain people possess supernatural talents – flying, speed healing, lightning-quick speed, incredible strength, prescience, and so on. The Extrahuman Union is the organization to which every so-called extrahuman must belong. Featuring complex character arcs and dramatic, encompassing storylines, the Extrahumans Series dives into important and poignant issues, offering social commentary, exploration of gender issues, and romance. Oh, and some really badass superpowers.

About Waking Gifts

Be careful what you ask for…

Jill feels like a nobody. Her extrahuman powers are weak and pathetic, and yet they still got her run out of her job and her home. She’s a second-rate thief with few friends and even fewer prospects. Jill just wants to be somebody, just once.

Then, during a break-in gone wrong, she finds a mysterious alien orb–and everything changes. She gets all that she ever wanted, and then some.

Now Jill is thrown into a quest for answers that will take her from the high mountains of Valen to the depths of interstellar space to a bizarre prison planet where old friends and enemies both are held captive. By the time it’s over the fate of her friends, her world, a vanished alien species, and the entire Confederation will rest on her shoulders.

And through it all the orb whispers in her mind… awaken and take flight, for the dream has ended.

About the Author

Susan Jane Bigelow is a writer, librarian, and political columnist from Connecticut. She is the author of five science fiction novels, including the Extrahumans and Grayline Sisters series. Her short fiction can be found in the magazines Strange Horizons, The Toast, and Apex Magazine, and in the anthologies War Stories and the Lambda Awards-winning The Collection: Short Fiction From the Transgender Vanguard. Her weekly column on Connecticut politics can be found at CTNewsJunkie.com. She lives in northern Connecticut with her wife and a herd of very fuzzy cats, where she spends her days writing and playing video games.

A Word from Your Friendly Neighborhood Editors

We couldn’t be prouder or more excited about these two acquisitions.

Hurricane Heels was originally submitted to us as a short story for our First Contact open call. While we weren’t convinced that it fit the First Contact prompt, we fell in love with the story and immediately saw the potential for a series. As we already had a superhero season percolating for 2016, we were only too eager to contact Isabel Yap to discuss a potential series. We have been huge fans of Isabel Yap’s short fiction and we believe this series will be superlative in every possible way.

The Extrahumans Series has been a Book Smuggler favorite for years and as such as we are overjoyed to make the official move into publishing our first full lengths novels by working with Susan Jane Bigelow. To make things even cooler? Benderspink and Kevin Iwashina’s Preferred Content are going to produce Broken, the first book in the series, as a TV Show. FINGERS CROSSED, everybody!

For more information about Book Smugglers Publishing, our books, artwork, and authors, make sure to check out our shiny publisher site: www.booksmugglerspub.com

And stay tuned – we will announce our open call for superhero themed story submissions, along with guidelines and instructions, very soon.