Waitsfield, VT July 10, 2012 – Shannon Gilligan, Publisher of the well-known and loved children’s book series Choose Your Own Adventure® announced today that Melissa Bounty has been named the Associate Publisher of the series. Bounty is based at Choose Your Own Adventure headquarters in Waitsfield, Vermont.
Bounty, who was previously the Senior Managing Editor of the series for five years, will become the first Associate Publisher for the series during its decade-long publication by Chooseco, LLC, a company formed in 2003 by series founder and author R. A. Montgomery to bring the book series back into print and also translate the famous brand into new media venues.
“Melissa joined us as a recent college graduate in the late summer of 2005,” says Gilligan. “She has been a key figure in helping us return the series to home and library bookshelves. Melissa brings both her own childhood passion for Choose along with a unique take on the role of books, media, and interactive experiences for children into the current publishing world. She has been invaluable on an editorial in helping us introduce the series to a new generation in both print and electronic formats. She also has exceptional instincts for marketing in today’s complex media environment.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work that Chooseco does and my part in it. Choose Your Own Adventure is a transcendent brand that communicates something positive and empowering for adults who remember it and kids who are just encountering it for the first time. I think we are in exciting times for the brand, when personal technology amplifies the sense of powerful decision-making a child experiences reading an interactive story,” said Bounty. “I look forward to continuing my work here at Chooseco as we branch out into other media platforms, including film and tablet apps.”
Bounty joined the Chooseco team as a very early employee in the company’s history, and has overseen the publication of 60 titles and numerous international and digital editions. She helped conceptualize a modernized younger reader version of the series called Dragonlarks and has recently worked to port the titles to location-tracked, touch-screen eBook for the iBookstore, forthcoming on Nook and Kindle. A ten-year resident of Vermont, Bounty graduated Magna Cum Laude from Johnson State College, where she was the Assistant Managing Editor of the Green Mountains Review and earned a bachelor’s degree of Fine Arts.
######
About Chooseco, LLC
Founded in 2003, Chooseco, LLC publishes The Choose Your Own Adventure series. Widely commended for its appeal to reluctant readers, the series is among the most popular series for children ever published, with more than 255 million copies sold in 38 languages. Each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character’s actions in response to the plot and its outcome. Find out more at www.cyoa.com.