Jun 27, 2017

Greetings Supporters of Crow’s Gambit,

The Nerdist Contest is only a few hours away from ending. I’m sorry to say we will not be finishing in the top 3. With 123 unique orders we are securely in 5th place. However, don’t feel bad. This is still a great accomplishment. There are some strong books in the top ten and according to Inkshares there were over 180 submissions.

I cannot express my gratitude for all the support the story has received. Orders were placed by strangers, co-workers, high school friends, local supporters, and even several of the top ten authors in the contest. I thank you all.

The journey is not done for Crow’s Gambit. While winning the contest would have been GREAT there is another option. I can still try to sell enough Pre-Orders to secure publishing. A full publishing deal would require 750 Pre-Orders…that is a bunch and probably outside my time available at this point. So I have decided to try for the Quill level that requires 250 Pre-Orders. This deal would not get the book onto physical store shelves and would only involve light editing…but the story would get published and that’s a start.

This means we now shift to Plan B and spend the next couple months trying to sell more copies. With 136 copies already sold we only need 114 to get to the Quill level. There are two things to remember in this:

• While the contest was focused on unique Pre-Orders, Quill is focused purely on number of orders. If everyone who has already purchased a copy bought one more tonight we would be at Quill.
• The pledge to support the Le Sueur Public Library remains. If the book gets published $1 of the proceeds from every copy will be donated to the library.

So stay with me. Keep spreading the word to your friends. Updates will come a little less frequently but hopefully will include more interesting tidbits.

PT