Also, because this pub just kind of intrigues me, I did a little further digging on the
Legend of Rhyme series, which along with the travel books, seems to be BMP's main focus.
The first book came out on Dec. 3, 2014. Second book on May 8, 2015. So that's a fast sequel, but it's possible the author had it ready to some extent, maybe? Third one came out on Oct. 19, 2015.
She says in this video that she's working on the fourth, and reads a little from #3.
I pulled a quick search for all of these books on Chapter's Indigo (Canada's B&N, starting with my location in Nova Scotia. If I want to buy these in NS, I'm outta luck. So I popped Toronto. Not stocked there, either. The third one doesn't even appear on the Chapters online listings. The first two do.
I tried running some of the travel books but am running up against both the author's name
and the book titles being very similar to others on the market. Nothing is popping at all in Chapters for those.
One of the books hit the
Atlantic Books Today PEI bestseller list for March 2015. This is supplied by Chapters, so it's possible it was stocked closer to launch. If it was, it's not now, and my experience with Chapters' ordering is
not good even when you do know what you're looking for, which I won't in this case.
On her Facebook's about page, the author says the books are only stocked in local PEI stores. PEI's a tiny buy beautiful province overrun with tourists, so this isn't all bad, but we can't say this book is widely distributed to readers and it kinda looks like this publisher doesn't have much sales plan beyond the author herself. From ansky's post, it looks like they're taking a nice cut of royalties for not having distro, too.
I've got nothing against this author. She seems like an imaginative young writer with a fairly interesting fantasy world. My main thing is that I'm having serious, serious deja vu with this stuff for the small pub I used to work at. At the time, I knew much, much less than I know now. That pub was not a good deal for authors, but I thought so at the time mostly because we tried hard. Trying hard isn't enough. If you've put all this time into writing a great book, you've done your work. You deserve someone who can do their job to get it to the public.