It’s my favorite time of year again: time to announce a new season of Smart Pop titles.

I’ve included the book-specific sign-up form for each title below, so if any of these pique your interest and you want to get a head’s up when we post advance excerpts or do giveaways (along with, of course, a reminder email on pub date!), just enter your email and hit the submit button.

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First up, in December 2012, is The Panem Companion:

The Panem Companion is a new unofficial Hunger Games guide that delves into Panem itself: how it could have come to be; it’s culture, socioeconomics, and ideas of race, ethnicity, and gender; and the effects on the characters we know and love. Plus, it dives into some contentious fan debates, like “The Curious Case of Prim ‘Everdeen’” and who the true main architect/s of the rebellion were.

If The Girl Who Was on Fire is Hunger Games 101, this is the grad school class. The author, V. Arrow, is the co-creator of this map—

—which you may have seen around the web lately—like, at io9, the AV Club, Entertainment Weekly’s Shelf Life, and msn.com, to name just a few. But I think my favorite quote comes from NerdApproved.com’s post on the map: “Seems like it would be the companion book to have because V. Arrow clearly knows her sh*t.”

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We’re also very pleased to be announcing, for the first time, the late January release of Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader—a collection of great YA authors writing about Cassandra Clare‘s Mortal Instruments series, with Cassie as editor.

As you can see, we don’t have a final cover yet, but one of our very favorite illustrators, Cliff Nielsen (who also does the art for the Mortal Instruments novels), is working on finishing the art up now. I’ve seen the sketch, and it looks fantastic.

The topics we have lined up so far range from Alec/Magnus (my personal favorite Mortal Instruments couple) to the power and magic of ink (or stele) on skin.

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And finally, in February—a handful of weeks 6 months or so before the Ender’s Game film comes out—we’ll release Ender’s World: Fresh Perspectives on the SF Classic Ender’s Game, with Orson Scott Card at the helm.

(Great illustration, right? That’s Nick Greenwood‘s work, under Card’s direction—so you know that’s what the battle school really looks like in his head!)

The contributors are a mix of SFF, YA, and other writers—including two military strategists—writing about Ender’s Game, plus a series of in-depth Q&As with Card about various aspects of Ender’s universe, like why the battle room is in the shape of a cube and why children were chosen as the ultimate soldiers.

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It’s a small season, but one we’re really excited about. All the pieces of it I’ve seen so far have been fantastic—only the battery-death of my e-reader kept me from finishing V.’s first draft manuscript in one sitting, and the topics we’ve gotten for the two anthologies have been really stellar.

I can’t wait to share them!