Self-merchandizing is the way of the world these days. Writers are increasingly expected to be go-getters who enjoy Facebooking and Tweeting. Often they form power couples or write reviews that lavish praise on writers who are inclined to return the favour.
But some authors still prefer to be discreetly prolific. Maybe they're shy, maybe they're naïve. Or maybe they're nostalgic for the days when publishers were supposed to do the job of making a book public.

Then again, maybe they prefer to stay home and become better writers by reading a lot of books. Tanya Lloyd Kyi read 65 books in 2013. She's hoping to read 75 in 2014. She got ahead the old fashioned way-by paying her dues.

After 22 books with three Canadian publishers, Tanya Lloyd Kyi now has a YA novel, Anywhere But Here, with Simon & Schuster, based on her upbringing in the Kootenays. It combines her memories of "the good and the bad that comes with small town life.";

Sixteen-year-old Cole Owens wants to escape his small-town life and pursue his passion for filmmaking, but instead of spending time behind the lens, Cole finds himself cooking for his drunken dad, giving the local stripper a safe ride home and acting as a dating service for his best friend. Everything seems to be conspiring to hold Cole in his hometown forever, including a wounded deer, the wacky ex-girlfriend, the pushy school counsellor. Are his relationships a spider web, waiting to trap him, or a net, ready to save him?

Born in Vancouver in 1973, tanya lloyd Kyi was raised mainly in Creston in eastern British Columbia after her parents opted to escape from the big city. They also lived in a nearby community on the eastern shore of Kootenay Lake called Crawford Bay (pop. 350).

Her parents taught her how to find her away around a vegetable garden and a restaurant that was opened when she was ten. "I can balance a lot of cokes on a tray,"; she says, "and translate 2 e s/s, wh into two eggs, sunny-side up, white toast.";

The limitations of small town life led her to skedaddle to Vancouver where, by age 21, she became one of the province's bestselling authors by ghostwriting and assembling travel and photography books for Whitecap Books, "raving about the beauty of places that I had never actually visited."; Her main uncredited accomplishment was Canada: A Visual Journey.

After a stint as a staff writer for the Commonwealth Games in 1994, Kyi attended the University of Victoria.
Kyi's first book not dominated by photographs was an inspirational anthology entitled Canadian Girls Who Rocked the World (Whitecap, 2001), illustrated by Joanna Clark. It profiles more than 25 unusual, creative and courageous women born in Canada.

Promotional material notes she was an avid Ultimate player who married "the world's only Burmese occupational therapist."; In the 21st century she bumped her surname Lloyd in favour of her Burmese married name when she published her first young adult novel, Truth (Orca, 2003) as Tanya Lloyd Kyi.
Anywhere But Here was written as Kyi was preparing to send her youngest child to kindergarten. "I knew I wanted to spend more time writing fiction,"; she says, "so I shipped a draft off to Patricia Ocampo in Toronto. She was my cross-my-fingers-and-pray-hard agent choice because she had great publishing know-how, experience in marketing and editing, and she just looked so darned friendly in her photo. She's the one who arranged to have Anywhere But Here published by Simon Pulse [an imprint of Simon & Shuster]."; 978-1442480698