43 Hours Press

The Sleeping Seer // the book

The Sleeping Seer Moodboards // Lilith

The Sleeping Seer Moodboards // Luke Kakiro

The Sleeping Seer Moodboards // Ellie Kakiro

On Sale Now: 

The Sleeping Seer by Morgan Blue Malory

What IS this?? We call it Modern Fantasy, because, yes, it's fantasy, and at 758 pages it definitely qualifies as a Big Fat Fantasy--but you can check your fantasy book assumptions at the door. Divided between present-day Philadelphia and locations harder to quantify, this tale features siblings Luke and Ellie, the last survivors of an ancient line of seers, an all-women gang of street racers, and a society of people who might or might not be human. There are no supernatural creatures and no quest: just a story that demands you come prepared to question your assumptions, buckle up and hang on...and plan to stay up reading, because you won't be able to put this one down. You should have seen people try to talk to me while I was reading this for the first time.

But don't just listen to me. Kirkus says, "[This ambitious tale weaves an intricate tapestry." I say you won't know what you're missing until you experience it.

As of this writing, the Kindle version is available on Amazon, but they haven't picked up the print version yet. We're still working on getting the Read Free section of the site set up, but we hope to have it available in the next few days. We'll update things here when it's ready.

For now, read more about The Sleeping Seer on our website.

There’s a lot of anecdotal data suggesting that books made available for free sell more copies than those whose publishers closely guard access. We think this is because such books become the growing medium for communities of readers and story-lovers, who share great reads in every way they can--and because people are generally disposed to reciprocate the gift of a story that touches them with the gift of support in whatever way works for them. Whether that means buying a copy of a book they loved for themselves or as a gift, putting money in an online “tip jar” or a Patreon or Kickstarter fund, or helping spread the word about the book, that return gift not only supports the author and helps the publisher keep the lights on, but it also creates the kind of connection between author and audience that both readers and writers crave.

Books, especially big, thick books, are getting increasingly expensive. We think it’s vitally important that readers don’t get shut out of reading because there isn’t room in their budgets to pay full cover price—particularly since there are so many ways of supporting authors that don’t require big outlays of cash. Likewise, we believe that giving emerging authors opportunities to build readerships is an important aspect of developing their careers, and letting people taste before they buy will only benefit everyone.

When you read one of our books on our website, it helps to support the author by raising her profile with search engines; ads on the read-for-free pages help to defray publishing costs, which in turn means the author gets paid more and faster. Naturally we hope that, if you love the book, you’ll buy it in print—which also supports the author, and has the added benefit of giving you (or the recipient of your gift) a better reading experience. Our print books are beautifully designed, and they contain story extramatter that’s not available in the read-for-free versions. But if your budget won’t allow that, you can also support the author in other ways: by buying some of the cool merch related to the book, or dropping a little something in her tip jar; by spreading the word to others who might love the book too (we’ll be building handy links for sharing on the book pages and read-online areas); by asking your library to buy the book, which will allow even more people to find out about it.

If you enjoy what you read on our site, we hope you’ll join our community by signing up for the newsletter, “Liking” us on Facebook, or following us in other social media places. We hope you enjoy hanging out with us as we create and share great stories with like-minded people. Most of all, we hope you’re as inspired by the books we publish as we are.

We're still building the Free Reads section of the site. If you'd like to be notified when new content goes live, you can join our newsletter.

A pleasure to see you here! Welcome to the blog home of 43 Hours Press, our current publishing experiment. Between us, Morgan Blue Malory and I have seen a couple decades in the exciting and ever-changing world of publishing, time spent working with emerging and independent and not-quite-famous authors. While running Mercury Retrograde Press, I worked to create a space in which authors who needed to put their creative lives ahead of business concerns could thrive--and developed a philosophy I called Slow Publishing, intended to give everyone involved in the development of books enough space in which to do their best work. We pioneered giving away ebooks for free with the purchase of the corresponding print book, which seemed to make a lot of readers very happy. But I don't think we went quite far enough with any of those ideas. 43 Hours is here to see what happens when we push them further.

We're vitally concerned with the problems both readers and authors face in today's book market: with the increasing expense of print books, which is difficult for many readers, and the simultaneous whittling away of support for the libraries that sustained readers and writers alike; and with the issue of ebook piracy, which seems increasingly to get in the way of authors being able to get books published. Meanwhile I've seen a significant amount of evidence suggesting that sharing books for free online in a way that supports rather than undercuts their authors actually increases authors' earnings. One of the most important things we're working on is a systematic way to do just that, which we believe will benefit everyone. More on that in an upcoming post.

Likewise we're fine-tuning our approach to Slow. Blue and I are both passionately committed to maintaining healthy creative lives in order to continue developing stories worth sharing. We're still working on balancing business and creation. Right now our motto is One at a Time: working on one project until our part of it is done, then moving onto the next, and only when everything is complete bringing the results to the world.

As you'll see with our current projects, living that philosophy is a work in progress.