biancadarc.com Blog

Chippewa & Lady Aibell Closing

I found out this afternoon that both Chippewa Publishing and Lady Aibell Press will be closing at the end of the month. You may not realize this, but Chippewa was the very first publisher to ever offer me a contract.

Near the end of 2005, I saw an announcement on the EROS list about a vampire romance anthology competition offered by Chippewa for their Vamprotica 2006 collection. I’d never written a vamp story before, but had read a bunch and loved the genre. I figured, why not?

I wrote the story in about an hour – there was a 5k limit – and sent it off, not really expecting anything would come of it. A few weeks later, though the story hadn’t been selected for the anthology, I was offered a contract for One & Only to release as a single-title. I was floored!

That was in October. In November, I did NaNoWriMo for the first time and decided to try another new topic – dragons. I finished writing Maiden Flight in about 3 weeks. Building on the newfound confidence of having One & Only contracted, I decided to send Maiden Flight off to Samhain. It was contracted shortly thereafter. Although Maiden Flight was my first book to actually come out (on Valentine’s Day of 2006), One & Only was the first ever contracted, so it holds a special place in my heart.

I also went on to write more vamps and expanded the world to include weres and fey. Rare Vintage came next, then Phantom Desires, which did make it into the Vamprotica 2007 anthology. Forever Valentine went to Samhain, as did Lords of the Were, and in a few weeks, Sweeter Than Wine will join the collection.

There is some uncertainty regarding those first three stories right now because they won’t be available for sale after November 30th. However, I’m already looking for a new home for them and will underoubtedly be expanding them before they are re-released somewhere else. Stay tuned. I’ll let you all know when I know where they’ll be going.

In the meantime, I’d just like to thank the folks at Chippewa and Lady Aibell for giving me my start. I suppose this’ll be one of the last times I get to post the covers for these books. I created them and had a lot of fun doing so. Thanks again to Chip/LAP for allowing me to stretch my wings artistically.