Wildside Press

Last updated
Wildside Press
Founded1989;35 years ago (1989)
Founder John Gregory Betancourt
Kim Betancourt
Country of originUnited States
Headquarters location Rockville, Maryland
Distribution Diamond Book Distributors [1]
Key people John Gregory Betancourt
Kim Betancourt
Publication types Audiobooks, CDs, Books, E-books, Magazines
Fiction genres Science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, speculative fiction, romance, non-fiction
Imprints Borgo Press, Cosmos Books, [2] Point Blank
Official website www.wildsidepress.com

Wildside Press is an independent publishing company in Cabin John, Maryland. It was founded in 1989 by John Betancourt and Kim Betancourt. While the press was originally conceived as a publisher of speculative fiction in both trade and limited editions, its focus has broadened since then, both in content and format.

Contents

Its website notes publication of works of mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction, as well as downloadable audiobooks and CDs, [3] ebooks, magazines, and physical books. [4] Wildside Press has published approximately 10,000 books through print on demand and traditional means.[ citation needed ]

Writers

The company has published work by a number of contemporary writers, including Lloyd Biggle Jr., Alan Dean Foster, Paul Di Filippo, Esther Friesner, S. T. Joshi, Ionuț Caragea, Michael Kurland, Paul Levinson, David Langford, Nick Mamatas, Brian McNaughton, Vera Nazarian, Paul Park, Tim Pratt, Stephen Mark Rainey, Alan Rodgers, Darrell Schweitzer, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

In addition to newer writers, the company works at keeping established older authors in print, such as James Branch Cabell, H. Rider Haggard, and Clark Ashton Smith, as well as lesser known scribes like R. A. Lafferty. The publisher has a specialty reprint project, reproducing old issues of such pulp magazines as The Phantom Detective , Secret Agent X , and Spider .[ citation needed ]

Wildside Press has also published Robert E. Howard's ten book series called Weird Works, which comprises Howard's entire body of collected work published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales , and restored to the original magazine texts.[ citation needed ]

Imprints

Magazines

Current

Defunct

Ebooks

In addition to selling ebooks via its website and other booksellers', Wildside Press maintains a "Freebies" page on which it sells both permanent and weekly free selections. The weekly freebies are typically either "megapack" or "minipack" compilations. [7]

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<i>Weird Tales</i> American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of US science fiction and fantasy magazines to 1950</span> Science-fiction and fantasy magazine history

Science-fiction and fantasy magazines began to be published in the United States in the 1920s. Stories with science-fiction themes had been appearing for decades in pulp magazines such as Argosy, but there were no magazines that specialized in a single genre until 1915, when Street & Smith, one of the major pulp publishers, brought out Detective Story Magazine. The first magazine to focus solely on fantasy and horror was Weird Tales, which was launched in 1923, and established itself as the leading weird fiction magazine over the next two decades; writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard became regular contributors. In 1926 Weird Tales was joined by Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback; Amazing printed only science fiction, and no fantasy. Gernsback included a letter column in Amazing Stories, and this led to the creation of organized science-fiction fandom, as fans contacted each other using the addresses published with the letters. Gernsback wanted the fiction he printed to be scientifically accurate, and educational, as well as entertaining, but found it difficult to obtain stories that met his goals; he printed "The Moon Pool" by Abraham Merritt in 1927, despite it being completely unscientific. Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, but quickly started several new magazines. Wonder Stories, one of Gernsback's titles, was edited by David Lasser, who worked to improve the quality of the fiction he received. Another early competitor was Astounding Stories of Super-Science, which appeared in 1930, edited by Harry Bates, but Bates printed only the most basic adventure stories with minimal scientific content, and little of the material from his era is now remembered.

References

  1. "diamondbookdistributors.com - Publishers". www.diamondbookdistributors.com. Retrieved May 10, 2020.
  2. 1 2 "Cosmos Books / Wildside Press - Bibliography". ISFDB.org. Retrieved March 10, 2015.
  3. "Audiobooks and CDs". Wildside Press. Retrieved August 19, 2015.
  4. "Home page metadata for Home page". wildsidepress.com. Retrieved August 19, 2015.
  5. Scithers, George H., ed. (September 1, 2008). Cat Tales: Fantastic Feline Fiction (paperback ed.). Wildside Press. ASIN   B00CC4382O.
  6. Scithers, George H., ed. (April 16, 2010). Cat Tales 2: Fantastic Feline Fiction (1st ed.). Wildside Press. ISBN   978-1434409126.
  7. "Freebies". Wildside Press.