Prime Books is looking for additional freelance designers. Previous professional experience required, preferably with fantasy and science fiction. Projects will include marketing and catalog materials as well as some book covers. Applicants must be familiar with print industry standards for files and color and adept with Photoshop and InDesign software. Ability to meet short deadlines is an absolute must. Although being an artist is not a negative, understand we are seeking a highly creative designer, not an artist to execute original art. http://pinterest.com/primebooks/prime-books-2012-schedule/ for a complete year’s worth of our covers. Further examples can be found here on our website. This is the level of work we are seeking. If you aren’t yet producing this caliber of design, we are not interested. We pay professional rates. Please contact the publisher, Sean Wallace, at prime (at) prime (dot) com with link(s) to your portfolio and previous work.

“A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong” by K.J. Parker will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Gina Guadagnino interviews Parker on the story.

Obviously there’s a motif of ‘the caged bird’ in “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong.” Which came first, the idea of the caged bird, or the characters and the story?

As always with me, the characters came first, and the characters are the walking wounded I intercept as they limp away from the battle between right and wrong. I’m very much a one-trick pony. Everything I write deals with the debatable land on the border of good and evil. In ‘Blue & Gold’ I had a whole lot of fun with the idea of someone who was (a) a leading philosopher and scientist and (b) a conman and habitual liar always one jump ahead of the law; all I had to do was turn him loose and follow him around for a while. This time, I took a similar character and locked him in a confined space with his exact opposite. (If there’s a Society for the Ethical Treatment of Characters somewhere, I imagine I’m quite high up on their hit list). To that extent, the idea of putting caged birds on a window ledge so they’ll overheat, suffer and sing is something of an in-joke, since that’s what I like to do with the characters I write about.

MORE: Read the entire Interview

We’ve taken done the expired giveaways so as to avoid confusion, but there soon will be more!

Everything Is Broken, A Song Called Youth, new The Crow comics and more. Interview on Firefox News.

“That staple of cautionary science fiction, the near future, becomes especially ‘near’ in this disaster novel from one of fantastic fiction’s most hard-hitting talents….EVERYTHING IS BROKEN emerges as a violent, vivid, viscerally upsetting and wholly unflinching nightmare of a novel, which profoundly illustrates the very point of having a civilization in the first place, and the risks we undertake by dismantling infrastructure in the name of short term savings. It’s not just a compelling read, but an important one…..GRADE A.”