The Megan Martin Curse!
(The Short Version)
Since Bryon began writing the Megan Martin novel series he's encountered one obstacle after another. It took over 2 years to find an agent then another 2 years to find a publisher. Anything and everything that could go wrong went wrong and a few things you couldn't have imagined, simply because (in the words of the Barns & Noble CEO "It's impossible." Maybe so but it happened to Bryon.
The first copy of the second book The Underworld was printed with his cover and someone else's lesbian porn novel inside! As a novelist writing for young people he was shocked beyond words! The representative at Lightning Press (owned by Barns & Noble) said "This kind of thing just can't happen!" They couldn't find any reason for it and that problem never happened again.
A short time later no one was able to order any of the Megan Martin novels and the prices were all wrong. The publisher would set the prices right in the morning and at midnight the next night they were wrong again! People ordering books could not get them for over a month. Finally after writing the CEO at B&N a certified letter he called her and set a team to find out what the problem was. They said a computer in shipping was changing the price of his novels in the main computer every night at midnight. They said someone ordered one of my books that was not priced correctly and put a hold on that novel saying "when you get the price fixed then send it." So the shipping computer was not only stopping all MM novels from being shipped it was resetting the price in the main computer keeping the prices more than double what they should have been. The CEO said it can't happen but it did.
The problems continued one after another until the publisher went out of business, no doubt at witts end convinced these novels were cursed. The novels went out of print and that seemed to be the end of that. It was the frequent requests of his fans that Bryon decided to rewrite and condense the first novel and try to find a new publisher. Publish America seemed to be the way to go and they promised that any book store can order his books and they would help place them, they just didn't explain to him how that was going to work. They greatly inflated the price of the novels to $25 each sending him Emails to buy books and they would send the same order to any book store of his choice. Meaning he was to pay them to put his books into the stores.
That's one thing sure but what kid is going to pay $25 for a book? When a product is priced out of the reach of the target audience it's a lose lose scenario.
To complicate things P.A. either lost the first two orders for books or refused to send them. Numerous calls and Emails were sent and the people on the phone said "I don't see any orders from you during those dates." And one lady said "this is odd, other orders are here but yours is not." But Bryon had the CC reports showing the transfer of funds to them for the orders. He sent a certified letter to the CEO of P.A. only to have it refused and returned. A week later he was contacted by one of their agents with an apology saying "your books are on rush order, we are sorry for the inconvenience." 8 weeks later the books finally arrived. Now he's afraid to order any more of his own novels for fear he won't get them.
He's not sure if P.A. is behind it or if some other "entity" is. He's sure his former publisher couldn't have caused any of the problems that happened before but we are all convinced that something did in fact orchestrate the problems. No one can have that many fantastic said to be impossible problems in a row by coincidence!
It doesn't stop there, something seems determined to prevent these novels from reaching the hands of the readers. Ever heard the saying "Making a deil with the devil?" Someone becomes a fantastic success at something and people say "What did they do, sell their soul to the devil." It may not be far from the truth. You can say all kinds of good things about anyone or any business you want even if it's a lie and no on will care, but what ever you do don't say anything bad about them even if it's the truth. ;-) You can get into trouble for telling the truth.
Today 12-5-2010: The majority of Bryon's websites went off line. He logged in to find out why to find a notice his sites were shut down for a violation of server rules. Like what? He's been there for how many years and they have shut his sites down 7-10 times without explanation. They check it say there is no report and turn them back on again. A person can't run a web based business when their sites are going down every other month for no reason. So this is why this news page exists on the newly moved Ember Reign.com website.
