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The premiere story of my new series releases today. You can read Meant To Be for ONLY 99 Cents!

Mark Miller's One, exclusively from Trestle Press, is an exciting e-book series that will feature a variety of authors sharing their personal experiences with their faith. The series will focus on many different beliefs. The authors want to share true stories of inspiration and emotion. Hopefully, the stories will be eye-opening and remind us that we all have to share this One World.

In Meant To Be, the debut installment, I lay the groundwork for the series and share a personal story. I tell the unbelievable tale of how I met someone special and very important to me.

For ONLY 99 Cents, read a touching story and put some inspiration on your Kindle!

Macmillan Children's Books has created an animated cover for the e-book of Frank Cottrell Boyce's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again, which it hopes will attract the interest of bloggers.

The covers can be seen at www.chittyfliesagain.com. The book itself will be published on Friday 7th October.

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Over the next several months, you are going to see me talking a lot about some other authors I am affiliated with through Trestle Press.

These authors come from many different genres, but they all have one thing in common: We want you to read and enjoy what you are reading!

I think what I'll do is give you a nice overview of several authors here. Then for the rest of the week, I will get in depth through some of my different social sites.

Without further ado:

Robert Ford is the author of The World of Hek, a supernatural series, and Curse of the Translucent Monster.

Wenona Hulsey offers paranormal YA with Burden of Blood.

Sam Lang, another horror author, has the Reprisal series and looks to be starting a zombie collaboration called Severed.

S. L. Schmitz breathes new life into Bram Stoker's Dracula with Mina's Daughter, a steampunk series.

These are the authors and that was only a sampling of what they offer. Watch for more posts and tidbits all week.

Gardners Books has partnered with US company Baker & Taylor to use Blio, a free reading application.

The deal will allow Gardners Books' nearly 1,000 e-book publishers to reach customers around the world via Blio, which Baker & Taylor says is forecasted to be pre-installed on millions of consumer reading devices worldwide.

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By Caragh M. O’Brien

My short story “Tortured” (Birthmarked 1.5) came about as a dark experiment, the sort that goes wrong and stays with you.

At first, I was faced with a unique writing challenge.  The tie-in story was intended originally for readers who already knew Birthmarked (Book 1) but who had not yet read Prized (Book 2).  It was a precarious window.  I pondered: how could a story add something to both books and yet stand alone enough to work as a short story? When would it take place?  Who would it be about?  How could it not be a spoiler?  It couldn’t simply be a misplaced chapter.  It had to matter. 

At the time, I had been routinely receiving emails from readers of Birthmarked who asked about a certain character, one who was doomed to suffer.  A visceral, pivotal scene began to formulate at the edge of my mind, and I had this insidious feeling I’d be forced to face it.  I didn’t want to.  I’d been creeped out enough by the twisted dungeon stories of opium-loving, cousin-marrying Poe, and I had little desire to explore the parallel side of my own mind.  Yet the more I resisted, the more I felt this powerful urge to see where my own dark side could take me.  Besides, I cared about my character.

So I started with this murky prison scene, and as it sucked me in, I followed along, letting events materialize before me.  It was told from a new perspective, not Gaia’s, but the setting felt deeply familiar.  I wrote with no concern for explaining anything to anybody because I assumed the characters and my reader knew all of the first novel as back-story, complete with its events and relationships.  A spare character from a story I’d written for my blog spontaneously came down the stairs when I needed him.  Working in reverse, I culled details from a character’s memory in Book 2 so the story would have satisfying continuity, backward and forward in time.

Despite its grimness, it was incredibly fun to write.  As I revised, I found holes, and then my editor found many more.  I had explaining to do, after all.  The story went through half a dozen drafts.  Then it went through copyediting and proofreading, just like the process for a full-length novel.  The art team worked on a cover, and when I said I wasn’t keen on my title, my publisher proposed a new one: “Tortured.”  “Ew!” I thought, squirming, and then realized that it fit. 

How on earth did I, sunny as I am, become the writer of a story called “Tortured”?

If you’re curious about the timing of this story, I can tell you it was originally intended to be e-published for free in October, a month before Prized was released.  That’s the part of the experiment that went wrong.  Ironically, though neither my publisher nor I will earn anything for the story, we still needed a contract for it, and since this was new ground legally, vetting the one-page agreement took longer than expected.  In the end, however, I think this timing is fine.  It will work to read the story before or after Prized because it adds a layer, either way.  Now the story matches these dark, gray days of December.  I would read it curled up beside the fire.

Over the past few months, Amsco School Publications, Inc. has been mentioned in several national publications, blogs, and on educational Web sites. We think that our blog followers might be interesting to see what is being said about us.

E-Commerce News.com January 24, 2012
The iBooks Profitability Puzzle
By Erika Morphy
MacNewsWorld Part of the ECT News Network 01/24/12 5:00 AM PT

Apple's new iBooks textbook market saw lots of activity over the weekend as users downloaded 350,000 copies of books, according to Global Equities Research. If iBooks catches on in a big way, it'll certainly be profitable to Apple. But whether it will be a good deal for authors and publishers has yet to be determined.

Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iBooks textbook initiative, launched just last week, has clearly struck a chord in the market. Ditto its accompanying textbook authoring tool, iBooks Author. Both have taken off at a significant pace, according to a report by Global Equities Research.

More than 350,000 textbooks have been downloaded via iBooks over the past three days. In addition, there have been more than 90,000 iBook Author downloads. iBook Author is a free authoring tool to create textbooks for Apple iBooks.

A Big Impact
The numbers seem to indicate many students and educators at least interested in seeing how Apple wants to break into the market. However, as the ramifications of the textbook store and authoring tool become clearer, some industry observers are having second thoughts as to whether this would be a good thing.

For starters, textbook publishers could find their margins squeezed, perhaps uncomfortably so. As Global Equities notes in its report, more than 50 percent of textbook industry revenues come from the sales of introductory books.

Then there is the lock-in for authors that use Apple's authoring tool. Migrating to other platforms is simply not an option, at least with this current platform.

Global Equities Analysis
Global Equities' initial take on how publishers will fare in the system is that they will in fact make more money selling an iBook textbook priced at US$14.99 versus a traditional printed textbook priced at $125.

That is because 50 percent of the textbook industry consists of used books, which deliver zero revenues to publishers. Also, the textbook supply chain is a complicated one, consisting of distributor, wholesaler, retailer and finally student. At each step the markup is between 8 percent to 15 percent, for a total of between 33 percent to 35 percent -- excluding actual distribution costs.
Conversely, the cost of an iBook production is 80 percent less than a print product. Global Equities declined to provide further details.

Some publishes of textbooks, though, disagree with Global Equities' assumptions, not to mention its math. Larry Beller, president of Amsco School Publications, told MacNewsWorld the firm has been offering its own e-books for roughly a year and a half. Pricing for the two products -- print and e-book -- must remain roughly the same in order to provide revenues for the authors, he said, which are compensated differently than authors of fiction or non-fiction books.

"With Apple's platform coming out we will have to rethink some of the numbers, but it won't be a significant difference. It can't be." He added that there is still an important print market for college students -- and especially elementary and high school students -- that won't go away even if this platform becomes popular.

An iOS-Only Tool
For others, the authoring tool is the one that raises the most concern. For instance, writers who use iBooks Author to write books they intend to sell may only distribute them through Apple's services.

"There is a lot about this tool that I don't think authors will realize at first," Br

I’m using yesterday’s topic of borrowing and lending to another level today. For those who’ve worked their way into the publishing business in the past few years, the preconceptions of what it means to be a writer have learned the new definition. They’ve also learned about the new work ethic of writers.

Today’s Writers

Writers shamelessly promote their work, and the work of others, everywhere they can because their careers’ futures depend on that promotion. Also, the big publishing houses today simply don’t have the promotion budgets they had in the past.

Other writers encourage us to guest blog on their sites, whether for self-promotion to a new audience or for a new book recently released. Guest blogging can also be used to promote a new voice/viewpoint about a specific topic being discussed. Either way, both the borrower of the audience and the lender of said viewers come away with something needed.

For the first time in centuries, writers are taking charge of their own livelihoods in the business. Many independent-thinking writers, who created their own presses, have turned their backs on the major publishing houses. They no longer consider it wrong to go without an agent. These career-oriented writers have changed the face of the industry in the past decade.

Small presses, POD’s and eBooks are making profits harder to come by for the big boys right now.

Future Possibilities

Whether I give information out for free, or I receive such information for free is irrelevant to the overall picture. The reason I can say that is because it’s beginning to look like the industry will soon be owned by the writers themselves in some respects.

Blogs and newsletters written by and for writers are created every day. They cover all the genres, and they take no prisoners. Whatever a writer wants to know is out there. Surfing and search engines make it impossible to overlook much that’s available.

When you consider that writers, editors, bloggers, along with magazines are ranking websites, newsletters, etc. on a regular basis, the built-in watchdogs guarantee that a careful user is safer from publishing scams than they used to be.

As encouragement, universities across the country are making free writing courses available by the dozen. Paid courses are also easily found and evaluated as to viability to the particular writer and well and skill set desired. And if a writer is determined, she can take an MFA degree online, or as a low-residency program from numerous colleges across the nation.

Advertising and promotion is easy to come by. Small, writer-controlled, publishing houses are moving in to entice new writers and secure established ones. A combo house—one which publishes both eBooks and POD simultaneously can take a well-written manuscript and turn it out to the public in a matter of only a few weeks/months instead of one to two years as happens with the big publishers. The lead time depends on the editing necessary for the manuscript and the dedication of the publishing staff.

Many of these same small presses use talented editors, promotion—including trailers and online, and help with marketing after the release of the book.

Building Publishing’s Future

Whether the new face of publishing comes at the expense of the major houses around the world isn’t the question. We should be asking if we want to