Breaking My Word About Aspen Mountain Press

Yeah, yeah--I really thought I was done.  There are a lot of things I could be blogging about, but this one is sticking in my craw.

Since all this mess started, Sandra Hicks has been maintaining a low profile.  The splash page on the AMP website reads:

The Aspen Mountain Press web site is temporarily suspending operations.Over the past five years we've demanded high standards in all areas of the company from authors to editors to administrators.  Due to the current health of the owner these standards have not been met.We'd like to thank you for your support and patronage over this past half decade and apologize for any inconveniences this decision causes.

Due to the current health of the owner...

Makes it sound really bad, doesn't it?  Like the situation is dire?

Well, then let's take a look at the owner, Sandra Hicks, and her personal Facebook page. Her personal Facebook page tells an entirely different story.  This Sandra Hicks doesn't seem to have many health problems.  According to her posts, she is shopping to finish decorating her son's bedroom, going to concerts, baking pumpkin pies and...quoting Bible verses. A lot of Bible verses.

And yet, this is the same woman who just a few weeks ago in an  open letter to her unpaid and rebelling authors and staff claimed, "I can only work about two hours a day."

Obviously, if one is shopping, decorating, baking and going to concerts that doesn't leave a lot of hours in the day.  And, curiously, while the AMP authors and staff remain unpaid, Ms. Hicks can miraculously afford to redecorate her son's room?

Amazing recovery on her part--both financial AND physical.

I've canvassed the AMP authors and staff over the past few days.  Despite a minuscule trickle of rights reversion letters 10-14 days ago, no one has been paid or received their rights back since then.  I know since I had the 'latest betrayal in a long line of betrayals' voice message (ironic since apparently me not getting paid the royalties she owes me is now some kind of betrayal of her?) I haven't heard a peep from Sandra Hicks or Aspen Mountain Press.

We are now into November. I have not received any pay from Aspen Mountain Press since June.  That means that on November 15th, we'll be at the FIFTH consecutive month without receiving pay.  And yet, Sandra Hicks apparently feels holy enough to purchase the makings of pumpkin pies, to pay for concert tickets, to redecorate her son's room--and all with the royalties that AMP authors and staff members didn't get paid for.

How easy it is to steal someone else's money and spend it on yourself. And so, despite numerous articles and blog posts about the thievery ongoing at Aspen Mountain Press, including from Writer Beware and sites of that nature, Sandra Hicks apparently feels well enough--and safe enough--to spend the money she has illegally withheld from the authors and editors who actually EARNED that money.

Nice.

The time for excuses is past.  The time for spurious claims of ill health or some other incapacity to follow through with her sorely abused authors and staff and to rectify her mistakes is long past.  At any time in the past five months, Sandra Hicks could have made even a tiny effort to recompense the well over a hundred authors and staffers for the over four hundred books that were published by Aspen Mountain Press.

She has not.

Instead, while claiming poor health, she's engaged fully in her new AMP-free days: spreading the word of God, baking pies, redecorating her son's room and attending concerts, sharing the joys of her life and the bounties of God's grace with her new pals from church, none of whom appear to be aware that she is responsible for financial hardship across multiple continents and blithely unconcerned with the suffering she's left in her wake.  She's not responding to emails, or phone calls, or registered letters, or text messages.  Nothing.  Nada.

And yet I am the betrayer for spilling her dirty little secrets, despite the fact that I almost lost my house while she redecorated hers?

Whatever.

Allow me to make myself VERY clear.  If Aspen Mountain Press and its owner, Sandra Hicks, do NOT respond in a clear cut fashion and make an effort to make amends to the writers, editors and staff who've been stolen from, I will release every single piece of correspondence, every financial record I was provided or had access to, and every single word of the transcripts I have for the multiple staff meetings I attended/ran as the managing editor at Aspen Mountain Press on this blog, other blogs, and whatever sites want to have them.  I will provide those materials to each and every author at Aspen Mountain Press for their legal cases. I will give that information to the journalist in Aurora, CO who's been asking me for an interview and whom, up to this point, I have refused.

A brand new countdown clock has just started. I would have been happy to deliver this message to Ms. Hicks in person and privately, but she's not answering her mail OR her phone these days.  But I'd damn sure be willing to bet that she's watching her Google Alerts, or that her husband, Jeff Hicks, the owner of 1PlaceForRomance (Mr. Hicks was also involved in an unsavory situation last year when AllRomanceEbooks sued him for copyright infringement and the third party site cancelled AMP's ability to upload books to the ARE site, naming Sandra Hicks as a co-respondent in the lawsuit) is.  As a matter of fact, judging from the undeniable truth that the only time Ms. Hicks has contacted me since my departure from AMP had to do either with getting money from me (the Aurora Regency deal) or to accuse me of betraying her as the result of a blog post, this is probably the ONLY way to get the warning to her ears.

Close the doors permanently, Sandra.

Give the authors their rights back.

And then pay the people you owe the money you owe them instead of going on about your business like there's not a thing in the world wrong with what you're doing.

There is something very wrong with what you're doing.  You have become what you once preached against--you, the leader in the fight against the scam publishers that burned you and your rights back in the day.

No matter how many Bible quotes you regurgitate, you have become a scam publisher yourself--an electronic pirate garbed in the spoils you've earned from the labor of others.

Just get it over with.

There's not a person in the world stupid enough to believe that you're at death's door when you're spending your energy, time and OUR money redecorating your son's room.  Seriously.

A Month In The Life--Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Ah...the first full day of the RT convention!

I was excited for lots of reasons. First off, the AMP ladies got in yesterday for the most part.  It was really great to meet my EIC, Sandra Hicks, for the first time--and Laura Baumbach, who is the EIC of MLR Press and a legend as far as I'm concerned.  But I also got to meet some of the writers I edit.  LB Gregg is adorable--little and sassy and spunky and shoes I would quite frankly kill for.  Helen Hardt is tall and elegant and drop dead gorgeous; Sam Cheever has the market cornered on cute and manages to do more things at one time than I do without looking like a spaz--like I do.  Lizzie T. Leaf took one look at me and instantly adopted me, I think.  Instantly, our relationship went from editor-writer to younger sister-older sister.  She told me what to do all week and I loved it.  Then, my husband went to pick Cynthia Vespia up at the airport this morning--she's staying with us in Lancaster.

The first thing I did this morning was head over to my spot on promotional lane.  Last night, I went to set it up and realized that we'd left the cover flats at home.  You know: the things with my names on them? Otherwise, all I had was a shelving unit with some Carnival masks hung on a board covered with fabric.  I ended up putting a few water bottles and document stands on the shelves, thinking I'd come back this morning and fill it all up.

Much to my surprise, it was totally empty this morning. Nary a bottle or document stand to be found. So, I decorated the space as I'd originally intended and stepped back to take a look.

No one else on Promo Lane had anything like I did.  Most of the other writers were giving away bookmarks in baskets.  So when this hit the convention:

--it got a lot of attention.  It also stayed fairly empty throughout the week, even to the point where people would grab them out of my hands while I was trying to restock.  Great fun overall, though--by the end of the convention I'd had my promo items, bookmarks from Lizzie, magnets from Eden Elgabri, flyers from Cynthia Vespia all on my promotion spot and every single darn thing was GONE.  We amused ourselves by wondering how many authors would go vertical next year with raspberry colored water bottles and red document stands in LA next year, and then by coming up with increasingly more outrageous ideas for what I'll do.  I'm thinking lights and fountains.

After all--it is LA.

I hit a couple of workshops on Wednesday afternoon, but the most important things I had to do were agent/editor appointments.  I had two scheduled for Wednesday afternoon and I was nervous about pitching to them.  I wasn't one hundred percent sure of what I was doing, so I took the time after lunch to narrow down and perfect my verbal pitch, implementing the information I'd learned the day before from the writers' panel at the pre-con workshop about pitches.  So when time arrived to pitch I was ready.

And I was stood up. TWICE.  Two totally different people from entirely different companies pulled no-call, no-shows for their appointments.  I found out later that the no-call no-shows were completely beyond their control, but that didn't help matters at the time.  I was pissed, and in my opinion, rightfully pissed and that was the state of my mind all the way through until the opening night party.

The first party was Ellora Cave's tenth birthday party and, as you can imagine, it was a little bit on the wild side.  We hung out there for a little while and then returned to the bar, where we could drink and gaze upon the beauty that was the banner--the book covers LB and I had put on that banner that now every drunk at the convention was staring at.  Those drunks (and not so drunks) were in turn stared at by the morticians' convention that was sharing top billing with Romantic Times.  I thought it was about the funniest thing I'd ever heard of: romance writers and funeral directors?  How funny!

I continued to think so until the next night. More on that later.

At any rate, I'd decided that I was going to nail down every single free spot on the pitch session schedule the next morning.  The workshops were all fine and good, but I was at RT to pitch my manuscript and that had to take priority.  Back in the bar, we befriended a trio of male writers: Brett Battles, James Scott Bell and Robert Gregory Browne.

 After a long evening of writer talk and quite a few beers, we all went our separate ways. 

It's Out! Apostle of Asphodel Published by Aspen Mountain Press!

Well, it's finally done. The final book of my epic fantasy series The Asphodel Cycle has just been released. Apostle of Asphodel, the follow-up novel to Temptation of Asphodel is now available from Aspen Mountain Press.

Here's hoping that all of you Asphodel fans enjoy the conclusion of the story. After the other Asphodel novels did so well and won so much recognition, especially Temptation as a Preditor and Editor Top Ten Novel of the Year for 2008 and runner up to Christine Feehan's Murder Game in the 2008 Golden Rose award voting, I'm praying that Apostle keeps the standards up.

I'll just go ahead and cheat and let you know that out of the four books in the series, Apostle is my favorite.

So now I have to ask myself--what's next? Is there another story down the road for Tamsen and Brial? There are other options in the Asphodel world for stories--the next generation, perhaps, or maybe a couple of secondary characters. I've played around a bit with some of them. Who can say? But for now, Tamsen and Brial are quiet. They've earned their rest after all; they've been running around for years now. Maybe that peace they're always talking about will come to them at last. Maybe they can actually have some fun for a bit.

Or maybe they're taking it easy on the Elysian Fields, where all of the other great, dead heroes of mythology end up. They could be hanging out with Achilles and Odysseus for all we know...

Guess you'll just have to buy the book to find out.

Thank you to everyone who's shared the journey of The Asphodel Cycle with me. And a huge thank you to my editor, Sandra Hicks, who is also the publisher at Aspen Mountain Press. If I breathed life into these characters, she made them toe the line. A huge shout out to Renee George, who creates such lovely covers for these books and who I devoutly hope does every cover for every single one of my books in the future.

But most of all, thank YOU for reading--and loving--the world of Asphodel. So for now, from the soaring streets of Leselle and the blossoming orchards of Asphodel and the busy markets of Geochon, we bid you all a fond adieu.

For now.