As Founder & COO of Author & Company, LLC

Best-selling author Laura Van Wormer has been a force in fiction since 1988 with the publication of "Riverside Drive" (now in its 6th edition). She spent a year working with a rocket scientist (literally) to create eBook editions of 12 of her 13 backlist novels and as a former bookseller, editor (Doubleday) and author, Laura was able to see certain things in the eBook industry that most “traditional book people” didn’t.  While trying explain the trap doors in backlist eBook publishing to authors, agents, editors and author groups it rapidly became clear that unless Laura herself built an eBook publishing company—the eBook publisher everyone wished existed—there would never be a better alternative for authors of books for which no electronic files existed.

Her goals were these:

1) To find new readers for authors of previously published books.

2) To radically increase eBook earnings for authors.

3) To use the eBook edition to re-establish the author on the current literary scene.

4) To issue royalty statements and payments six times a year.

5) To manufacture EVERYTHING in the USA.

6) To create a retail site driven by authors, readers, agents and author groups.

7) To make a variety of eBook marketing subscriptions available to any author or heir or

literary estate.

In 2011 Laura hand-picked some of the best book publishing, scientific, business and marketing minds in the country to work with, and Author & Company was born.

For the Unicorn Writer’s Conference Laura will explain the different kinds of ePublishing routes that are available today for both published authors and aspiring writers. A primer on eBooks will be given out which explains the industry in terms which make sense to book people. (“The reason why so many traditional book publishing people throw up their hands and run at the

mention of electronic publishing,” Laura says, “is because technocrats designed the system to make them throw up their hands and run. Otherwise international technocrats—without a scintilla of book publishing experience—could not hijack the industry.”

As Author bio:

Best-selling author Laura Van Wormer has been a force in fiction since the publication of 1988’s "Riverside Drive,” now in its 6th edition. Her engrossing plots, memorable characters and insider knowledge of the media professions have won praise from the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping and People.

Laura grew in Darien, Connecticut and by sixth grade knew she wanted to be a novelist. By the time she graduated from high school she also knew she needed to study something in college by which she could support herself and entered the University of Arizona as journalism major. She quickly found she infinitely preferred bar-hopping, student-union pool sitting and visiting her boyfriend in Colorado over studying and after a year her parent cordially invited her to get her act together.

The following year Laura transferred to the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, choosing a concentration in their new book-publishing program. In her “Introduction to Communications” class, she learned that all jobs in media—TV, Radio, Newspaper & Magazine, Book Publishing, Advertising and Film—paid nothing at the start, but after five years one’s salary would start to climb and after ten, soar. The only exception was trade book publishing, where 9 out of 10 books lost money, and where at best one could hope to make half of what their peers did in other media.

Everyone but Laura and two other students promptly changed concentrations and Newhouse dropped the book publishing curriculum.

Her father said, well, Laura, now what are you going to do until you’ve lived long enough to know anything about anything to write a novel about it, and her mother said study whatever you like, dear, but it will be good typing skills that get you a job where you want to work.

After thinking long and hard about it, Laura decided that writers who didn’t know anything must write for TV and so that, TV, and became her concentration.

After graduating from Syracuse Laura went to New York in search of a job typing soap opera scripts. She got a tip from a friend that the secretary to the Editor-in-Chief of Doubleday had just quit and Laura moved heaven and earth to pass the typing test so she could apply. She got the job. "Every day my head was spinning there," Laura says. "Everyone from Leon Uris to William F. Buckley, Jr., Victoria Holt to Phyllis Whitney, Edna O'Brien to Stephen King, Arthur and Alex Hailey, Allen Drury—they were all publishing with Doubleday at that time."

Laura rose through the editorial ranks somewhat specializing in celebrity and mass media-related books. Caught in a deadline crunch one year, Doubleday and 20th Century Fox flew She-Who- Knows-TV to the West Coast to create a book based on the hit series, "Dynasty". Upon her return to New York she was offered a job by “Dynasty” rival "Dallas," to write and produce a book for them, and Laura accepted the offer and left Doubleday, completing that assignment and began working on her first novel.

Her first novel ended up being a mess and she took another assignment, to write and produce a book for “Knot’s Landing,” to continue to support herself while she altogether scrapped the first novel and begun on the second.

"Riverside Drive", was published in 1988 and Laura has been a full time writer ever since. (West End, Benedict Canyon, Any Given Moment, Talk, Jury Duty, Just for the Summer, Exposé, The Last Lover, Trouble Becomes Her, The Bad Witness, The Kill Fee, Mr. Murder and Riverside Park.)

She is a member of The Authors Guild, Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. She lives in Connecticut, New York and Nova Scotia.