Seductive Secrets

Well I don't want to outface Nicola's news, I couldn't if I tried, but I did just get the most beyoootiful cover art for my June release, "Seductive Secrets," the first in the Secrets Trilogy.
Georgian England again, and all three of these books take place outside London, two in country houses and one in a small town.
Isobel has a lot of secrets her new husband, Lord Cardington, doesn't know until after the marriage. But Nick loved her years ago, and has come back for more, so he thinks he's prepared for what lies ahead. He isn't.
I put a bit of the new technology to mid-Georgian England in each book, so the first book has a bit of the agrarian revolution, the new developments in agriculture. It was so enjoyable to write and I'm so pleased the book is coming out. And with such a lovely cover, too. Vivat Anne Cain!

Another one gone

Sadly, it looks as if another epublisher has gone. Dark Eden Press is closing because of the illness of its proprietor. My best wishes to Debra and everyone orphaned by the closure.
Again, sadly, it's given the detractors and the gossips another stick to beat the epresses with. I've been epublished since 2000, and I've seen the constant criticisms and detractions, and like most generalisations, while there's a nugget of truth in it, there's also a lot of misinformation.
You can't any longer tar all epublishers with the same brush - if you ever could. Many are print publishers as well, which should more accurately bring them the title of small press. And some are definitely larger and more stable than others. They just aren't the same thing any more.
And risk. Every venture carries some risk. A risk assessment of the publishing industry is no different. When I was at business school, many years ago, risk assessment was a whole discipline to itself. and it still is. You can put numbers to it. I'll show you in the next entry. Everyone going for publication should really take the risk assessment into account, but they don't.
That's why I don't intend to send work to any more smaller of the small presses, if I can help it. But it took me a long while to get here and when I look back, I can see, much to my surprise, a career structure. Who'd have thunk it?

Tittle-tattle

They're at it again.
Last year, when Triskelion Publishing got into difficulties, it was astounding to see how the gossips gathered around. What should have been a private author loop leaked like a sieve and what was always thought to be private ended up on public blogs.
And the vultures gathered around the corpse.
In truth, the company went down because the print program was a failure. Too much investment, too fast, led to cash meltdown and that was that.
But if you read the blogs you would have thought it went down because of incompetence and selfish behaviour by the owners. It wasn't. If they had made a roaring fortune from the print books, they would be laughing now, and they could have shaken off the critics. But the money ran out. At least they went bankrupt. In the past, epublishers just melted away in the night and the poor author rarely got closure.
The company has gone now, and remains as a Grave Lesson.
Now it's starting up again with another company. These things come in cycles, it seems.
I know nothing about the company currently under the spotlight. I've never had books there, never submitted any, but it is one of the longer-established epublishers and it has its way of working. Leaked emails are appearing all over theplace, to be lampooned and cut apart, when the emails weren't even meant for them. I have no bone to pick this time. I'm completely neutral.
But in the wake of every company that dies, whether it is because of its own faults or something else, it leaves a slew of bitterly disappointed and upset authors.
However, this is a symptom of market development. It really is. The smaller companies will either find themselves a niche or they will die, taken over or blown to the four winds. Bigger companies are venturing into epublishing and it's beginning to show.

New contract!

I've been offered a contract from Ellora's Cave on the third Pure Wildfire book, MOONFIRE. I am so pleased that Jake's story will be out!
Jake is a sweetie, but nobody's fool, and when he returns to his home town of Springwater, Texas, he finds more than he bargained for, and a woman who can stand up to him.