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My writer friends Charlotte Bennardo and Natalie Zaman are back with another wonderful YA.  The authors of SIRENZ and SIRENZ BACK IN FASHION  have just released a new book titled BLONDE OPS.    Publisher’s Weekly calls BLONDE OPS “…a light mystery with entertaining dialogue, an energized pace, ever shifting suspects and a glimpse into the benefits and drawbacks of art and fame…”   

Blonde OPS (St Martin’s/Dunne) – April 2014

The SIRENZ Series: (Flux Books)
Sirenz
Sirenz: Back in Fashion

Visit Charlotte at:  http://www.kidlitresources.wordpress.com/

Visti Natalie at:

http://www.nataliezaman.blogspot.com

Picking up where Jane Friedman, book publisher of Open Road Integrated Media, left off yesterday at Digital Book World, when she urged book publishers to broaden the participation of libraries in the distribution of ebooks, LJ’s Josh Hadro moderated a panel today that helped publishers understand why, and how, that must be accomplished.

“Consumers and library patrons are two sides of the same coin,” Hadro said to a roomful of publishers, who included execs and others from the big children’s book publishers, smaller houses, university presses, and distributors. The current one book, one loan ebook model “mirrors the print” buying and lending; “DRM [digital rights management] software [protects publishers] caus[ing] the lend to expire at the end of the loan period,” explained Hadro.

Yet many publishers still don’t sell their latest ebooks to libraries. “Current content is king,” New York Public Library’s Chris Platt said, pointing out his frustration that, “We can’t get Freedom (FSG) as a download for our library. And even though Keith Richards made a public appearance at NYPL, “We couldn’t put his epub [Life (Little, Brown)] in our collection,” said Platt. Then Platt held up The Oracle of Stamboul (HarperCollins), due out in February, another book his patrons won’t be able to borrow as an ebook.

Librarians are left trying to explain to their users both that the publisher has not made the book available through the library and that many ebooks won’t work on their users’ ereaders.

Platt further made the case that “We teach people literacy…we point [them] to your new books….Libraries are connected to many of the people you want to reach, on Twitter, Facebook.” As the price of smartphones drop, he said, libraries will be able “to serve all parts of the community.”

Ruth Liebmann, Random House VP, reinforced Platt’s remarks. “A sale is a sale,” she said, noting that libraries are a revenue stream that publishers like Random want to “protect, even grow.”

Baker & Taylor’s VP for libraries and education, George Coe, told attendees that the “acquisition model will change drastically” with the ebook. “Library budgets can’t change,” he said, but users can become buyers with “buy buttons” on library online catalogs. He cautioned, however, that by using different formats, christian book publishers are “confusing our patrons.”

OverDrive’s CEO Steve Potash also said that the idea of a library purchase “cannibalizing sales couldn’t be farther from the truth…we’re converting library borrowers into point of sale users” in the digital world. As for the one book, one user model, Potash said that OverDrive recently made Liquid Comics ebook graphic novels available via a multiple user subscription model.

Hi Alyson, I am so excited (and all geeky nervous) you agreed to stop by.

**pause for the gooby starstrucked feeling to pass**

So before we get into marketing, let's pretend as if no one knows who you are and tell us a little (or a whole lot!) about yourself.:)

I’m the author of ten novels for adults and teens, including the bestselling THE IMMORTALS series, which you can read more about at my author web site or the series web site.

In addition, I run a blog

Psst!!! In case you didn't notice, Alyson is being very modest about her bio. In addition, Shadowland, releases on November 17th and is already getting rave reviews. But what did we expect :)>


So how was your road to publishing? Did you start any of your platform or marketing prior to getting an agent or selling your book?

Well, the embarrassing truth is, I was as green as they come. Seriously, there was no one as clueless as me. And while I wanted to be a writer since I read my first Judy Blume book back in sixth grade, I didn’t get serious about it until late 2001, just after 9/11 happened and I was working as a flight attendant in NYC and figured it was as good a time as any to go after my dream. So I started writing in whatever spare time I had, on layovers, on flight delays, on cocktail napkins, you name it, I was determined to get it done.

The moment I typed “The End” I bought a copy of Writer’s Marketplace, jotted off a query letter, and sent it directly to a long list of publishers, mistakenly thinking I didn’t need an agent (I can’t even begin to stress how very wrong that is). And while every one of them requested the full, they all rejected me in the end. Still, they were the nice kind of rejections, the kind that welcome you to resubmit if you choose to revise.

So I enrolled in some online writing classes, and through one of those classes I met a fellow student who referred me to her agent. He read my mss, loved the voice but told me my structure was a mess (it was!), and suggested I read STORY by Robert McKee. I bought it straightaway, read it in two days, took the next three weeks to ruthlessly revise my mss