All of you have received an email from Inkshares this week informing you of a refund for ILLEGAL. It was sent out in error. I’ve been struggling to figure out what is going on and how this will be fixed and I wish I could write and tell you what will happen but I can’t. Basically the Inkshares team says they don’t know what triggered the mass refund but they can recharge credit cards and get those orders back. However, they do not want to re-issue orders that used credits--when the campaign began the platform gave you credits to encourage participation and they have since discontinued that practice. This seems unfair to me and I’m trying to reach out to them to come up with a better resolution. I don’t know what that will be but I’m also not sure how long it will take to figure out and I know many people were confused and curious about what was happening and I wanted to be transparent and share all I know. As you can imagine this is a very frustrating situation for me and I appreciate your patience and support, probably more now than ever. 

Campaign Week 1

Day seven of the campaign and the crowdfunding competition is now drawing to a close.

It has been an intense week.

The support from my friends, family, and the community has been astounding. In seven short days, you have all ordered 125 copies of Human Resources! That is crazy — Human Resources is now 50% of the way to guaranteed publication on the Quill imprint!* What’s more, that has been enough to push the book into first place in The Launchpad Manuscript crowdfunding competition!

Unfortunately, second place has not been idle — they have been working hard to erode my lead in the competition, so we can’t slack off now! If you haven’t yet ordered a copy, it would be great if you considered doing so. Other things that are incredibly helpful are all the posts people have been making on social media, and the fantastic reviews / recommendations people have been leaving on Inkshares. Please keep it up!

I’m working on some special campaign content for the coming week -- keep an eye out for the next update :)

* If you would like to know what the Quill imprint is, and how it differs from the full Inkshares publishing service, I talk about it on my blog here.

Judges’ Top 50

Today the The Tracking Board announced the second round finalists from the formal judges stream — the Top 50. Guess what? That’s right, Human Resources made the cut!

Some more information about Inkshares

I know a number of you haven’t encountered Inkshares before, and some of you haven’t heard me speak about it before. I want to take the opportunity to familiarise everyone with the Inkshares model (my apologies for those this is old news to).

Inkshares is a book publishing company that selects the books it publishes through crowdfunding. The books not yet published on this site (i.e. Human Resources) are author drafts — they have not gone through a publisher’s editing process. When projects successfully fund, that means there is a delay before books are available for those who pre-ordered. Once a book is funded, before you receive your copy, the following must happen:

1. The author makes final changes to their manuscript.
2. Inkshares editors work through and enhance the manuscript with the author.
3. The polished manuscript is published (design, production, shipping).

There is more information available on the Inkshares FAQ and on their “How it Works” page.

The short version:

1. The excerpts you’ve all read are not the final versions.
2. The book won’t be available immediately after the campaign finishes.
3. You will be kept informed every step of the way.

Thank you again for your support,

Robert
https://www.inkshares.com/books/human-resources

No map today, because I’ve gotten a bit lazy in my efforts to convert the rest of my continent map over.  When I do get around to finishing there will be 5 more pieces, bringing it up to an 8 part map.

I do have new content to share though.  We hit 50 unique readers over the weekend, so that means I get to upload another chapter to add to the already way too long list.  I fear I may be addicted to sharing chapters.  Remember that for every 20 new unique readers who order I’ll share a new chapter, so for everyone following who hasn’t ordered get to enabling me already!  Seriously though, thanks to everyone.

I’ve decided to abandon the sequential release of the chapters this time, because I’ve been wanting to share what is one of my favorite fight scenes of the book for months now.  Because of the leap ahead that’ll happen I’m going to summarize what leads to this scene. 

At this point in the story it has been revealed that Palkaz has come to the mainland to hunt down his brother(and the titular Magus) Pentaz and drag him back to Thierdenvolgenlund to face real justice for his use of magic.  There’s a couple of reasons for this, but you can be certain that one of those is Palkaz’ wounded pride after Pentaz so thoroughly humiliated him during his escape.  His pursuit has led Palkaz to a small village in the Frozen North, where he soon discovers that Pentaz’ actions as he was passing through has led to the village being plagued by a shall we say "sizable" threat.  The resulting confrontation does a good job of showing off Palkaz’ snarky confidence as well as his unshakeable determination(not to mention his combat abilities).

The upload always messes up my formatting, so I’ll have to take time to fix that.  You should be seeing the new chapter before too long today though. That’s all I’ve got for today.  We’ll continue our dragon talk this Friday.  Until then, thank you all for your time and support.  Keep reading and enjoying!