Dear readers,

First off, I want to thank you all for your support. I have gone from seeing a notification email for a pre-order every few days to now having daily emails, often with gmail having to group these emails together in bundles of 3, 4, or even 9. I'm amazed at the momentum picking up, and I owe it all to you for stepping up and believing in this project.

Today I want to announce the start of my a blog series which for the next few months will run biweekly, featuring our own Inkshares fantasy and science fiction authors. (I've connected with so many great authors here that as of today, I'm actually already book up to October 16th!)

World Builders is a series where speculative fiction authors have a chance to talk about the aspect fantasy I love the most -- world building. My first Inkshares guest is C. Brennecke, whose book, Seven Shards: The Color of Wine, you can find out more about by clicking the cover below.

Here is her post. I hope you all enjoy, and please leave comments if you'd like:

https://epicfantasywriter.wordpress.com/2015/08/26/world-builders-c-brennecke/

We will both be around throughout the day to respond to any discussion. Hope to see some of you there!

I'm at it again...

Hi guys, 

Do me a favor; if you’re not the kind of person who reads whole newsletters, make an exception for this one. I’m trying to do something and I need everyone’s help.

Friends, acquaintances, enemies-spying-on-me, I’m at it again! A week after I sent in the final draft of The Life Engineered, Inkshares is having another contest. This time it’s for the Nerdist Collection. Did I throw my hat in the ring? Of course I did!

Am I going to ask you to pre-order my other book, A God in the Shed? I guess so. I mean, I’m eager to do a final version of this book and revisit the world and characters from it, but what I really want us to do is break the contest. Let me explain:

• The Sword & Laser Collection contest was as stressful as it was awesome but it became a crazy competitive environment.

• Crowdfunding benefits from cooperation and sharing potential readers. Especially if the contest focuses on unique reader pre-orders like this one does.

• The real prize, the important prize, the one thing worth winning above all is the opportunity to get published.

• Getting published isn’t limited to the top five books in the contest. It’s available to everyone who meets their goal (750-1000 pre-orders)

• All the people you might see as competition in this contest? They’re going to be your contemporaries. Your friends. When this contest ends, they’ll become your buddies and you’ll wish you’d cooperated anyways.
  

So here’s what I want to do; I want us, you and me and the other writers, to blow this contest up. I want this to reach so far that in the end, not only will there be five books with the most pre-orders but another five books getting published by having reached their pre-order goal. 

Nerdist is a pretty big deal. A lot of eyes are going to be on this contest. We can work in silos and five of us can get published with 600 to 700 pre-orders while another gets into the Nerdist Collection. Or, we can get a bunch of us published, help Inkshares capitalize on the publicity and huh… maybe they’ll throw in a little something extra since they won’t have to foot the bill for publishing books that didn’t meet their actual goals. Just putting that out there. You never know.

The process is simple; since this contest is based on unique reader pre-orders (and I’ve been assured that there are measures in place to avoid dummy accounts taking advantage of loopholes) we all need to rally as many people to pre-order our books. However, while they’re on Inkshares, why not point them towards another few books or set up a referral link so they can get credits and pre-order more books. The idea is that each book is bringing in a certain amount of readers that are specific to them. In the previous contest we had a tendency to keep these readers to ourselves in the hopes that they would order multiple copies of our book and increase our numbers. However, if we share our reader base, if we spread the love so to speak, we can have several books break from their existing audience and not only climb to the top five, but reach their publishing goals in record time.

It’s an experiment. It’s steeped in optimism and feels like a ‘Canadian communist’ thing to do but I strongly believe that it can be done. Competition will yield five winners. Cooperation might yield ten or more.

Let’s get books published.