Come check out this action-packed adventure with tons of interesting characters, morally ambiguous choices, mysterious aliens, sarcastic A.I., high-flying space craft, and a story of family and loyalty. Get it now, don’t wait, the price increases as the week goes on starting at ( 0.99 U.S.D). So hurry and get your ebook today, the promotion runs from now until July 10. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071LSVGFT

So Nerdist contest is over and Battle Flag made it to 25th! Yay!

Okay, I’ll stop being sarcastic now. :)

In fact, I never really expected to have much of a shot in the contest and that helped keep my spirits up. I wasn’t expecting much but I took my shot anyway and I’m happy with things. The preorders, however, are obviously still going on and will keep going until Sept. 30th so somewhere down the line I hope everybody who gets this will put in a preorder before then.

Talk to you later.

Good day my friends, human or otherwise (I don’t judge),

Oh boy... It’s finally happened. I’ve pulled the trigger on the funding campaign for the sequel to The Life Engineered: Arch-Android. (pre-order now!)

Well, it’s like The Life Engineered, but more and better. The one complaint I got about The Life Engineered that I could never really shake was how the world was intriguing but not fleshed out enough. Good news: that is exactly where Arch-Android is going. Now that I feel more confident as a writer, I feel better equipped to write a longer, more complex book about the Capek and their evolving civilization. Expect more about their universe, new characters and several familiar faces. Check out the details and book trailer (voiced by the amazing Amy Landon, who did the The Life Engineered audiobook) on the campaign page.

Well, obviously you’ll want to pre-order a copy. If you feel like doing more but can’t order a bunch of books, lend your copy of The Life Engineered to a friend and recommend that they check out Arch-Android. Let’s grow the family. 

I’ll be sending more of these updates of course, but to really stay on top of events, follow Arch-Android, or join my mailing list at jfdubeau.com/books (scroll all the way down).

Thanks for your support!

JF

Do you not have a Kindle? Maybe you prefer paperback over e-book. Well congratulations!  Through the Ghost is now available in paperback via Create Space/Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071LSVGFT

This will be the last update I post before the contest ends.

Proteus remains in fourth place. We’ve been absolutely tenacious in keeping up with the top three. We’ve more than doubled our overall orders over the course of this week, and I have it on good authority that we’ve scared the pants off the competition. We are the charging bull. They are fleeing us.

They’re still probably going to win, but at least we’ve given them a really, really good chase.

It’s not impossible to win from where we stand. The last day of my Tantalus Depths campaign I brought in something like 80 pre-orders, so I know that’s a thing that can happen. But I’m also not going to sweat it if we don’t. The top three books have earned their spots, and I won’t be sorry to see any of them win. In any case, I’m already looking forward past the end of this contest. I didn’t get as far as I’ve gotten by not thinking several steps ahead.

Win or lose, I’m enormously grateful for all of you. You really came through in a big way, and I’m proud to have friends and supporters as loyal and enthusiastic as you are.

A few more hours remain in this contest. We might win, we might lose, but either way, let’s make them work for it.

Hello once again my friends.

This has been a very, very long week. This time last week we were in the top three, Now we’re trailing behind in fourth by 22 pre-orders. But it was 29 pre-orders this morning! We gained a lot of ground today, and that’s something I think all of us should be proud of. We can’t stop yet, though. We can’t even pause.

Less than three days remain in this contest. The victors will be decided on Tuesday, and I aim to be among them. 22 pre-orders is both so little and so much. So little because it is definitely, absolutely possible for us to get them and catch up to where we were; at the beginning of this contest, we were able to get that many in just a single day, and a few days ago we were able to get 18 all in one day. But...it’s so much because that was then and this is now. That was before I called upon everyone I know for help. That was back when I had enough money to run a couple ads, that was before most of the people I knew I could count on had placed their orders. Right now...I don’t know where those 22 orders are going to come from.

So once again, I’m calling out to you all for your support. If you haven’t yet, talk to your spouse about this. Talk to your parents. Talk to your siblings. Your best friends. Your coworker who’s always reading during lunch breaks. Talk to anyone you can think of; if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this campaign and the one for Tantalus Depths, it’s that you absolutely never know who might be willing to help you when you need it.

The odds are not quite in our favor right now, but I insist on optimism. I must proceed as if victory is a forgone conclusion. If I try as hard as I can and fail, I will be content. If I give up when I could have won, I’ll never forgive myself. So I take the path of positivity, just like our final highlighted character, Katie Salvador.

Katie Salvador

When civil war divided the crew of The Somnambule, it was the first true conflict ever witnessed by the third and fourth generation crewmen. To the naive and isolated descendants of The Somnambule’s original crew, the terrors of battle and mutiny were an awakening, a loss of innocence. For most noncombatants, the mere notion that their fellow crew members were killing one another in the mid-decks was enough to crush the youthful optimism fostered by a lifetime of security. Not so for Katie Salvador.

A fourth generation member of The Somnambule’s crew, Katie was a constant source of positivity and optimism, sharing her excess of cheer with every member of the ship’s crew she encountered. Like everyone else born on the ship, Katie was selected from a young age to fulfill a set of specific roles within the ship’s hierarchy. Katie was selected to join the ship’s medical staff, and while she took to her assigned job with the same zeal she applied to the rest of her life, her natural desire to help others led her to voluntarily pick up additional responsibilities in the ship.

By the age of twelve, she was already spending much of her free time in the hydroponic farms on the ship’s inner decks, taking great pleasure in tending to the various crop plants and helping them grow. She continued with this side work into her teens, even while she began to work full shifts in the ship’s infirmaries.

When Marion Krieg led her rebellion in an attempt to seize control of the ship, Katie pulled double shifts in the infirmary to treat the wounded, and continued to do so until the conflict resolved to a tense stalemate when Krieg’s rebels retreated to the lower decks.

Though the loyalist members of the crew had successfully thwarted Krieg’s initial rebellion, it had come at great cost. Many members of The Somnambule’s security force were killed in the battle, and with the conflict remaining unresolved, new recruits had to be drafted from the ship’s civilian population to replace them. Seeing a new opportunity to serve, Katie volunteered to take up arms and join the security force.

Training under her father, the head of the security force, Katie quickly learned the basics of combat. Her extensive medical training saw her fit well into a support role as a combat medic. Though still only 16 years old, Katie served as a vital member of the loyalists’ makeshift militia, not only for her skills as a healer, but for the warmth of her personality. Katie provided her brothers and sisters in arms with an endless supply of positivity in a time when morale could not have sunk lower...

Well folks, I have news and I have news.
None of it is very good, though.

We continue to fall behind in the contest. Right now we’re sitting at 22 pre-orders behind third place. On the plus side, we have been doing really surprisingly well with getting new orders in every day the past couple of days Everyone else has just been doing better than we have.

We all have good days and bad days, though. I’m hoping one of the next couple of days will be a bad one for them, and that all of mine are good ones. I lack the ability to quit, and I’m still way too close to the top three to seriously consider doing so, so I intend to proceed as if my victory is a given.

In other news, apparently Inkshares goofed and announced the wrong deadline. The contest ends not on the 25th, but on the 27th. So two extra days. Honestly, I would have preferred the closer deadline, but I can work with this too.

Please remember: I have absolutely zero hope of finishing this thing without your help. I’ll be honest here and say I am running out of people to ask, and I have nowhere near the time I’d like to find new ones before the end of this contest. I am heavily dependent on you who have already supported me this far bringing in your friends and families to help me. To that end, please remember I am running this promotion for anyone who successfully refers someone to pre-order. I like to think my art is at least passable enough as an incentive.

Press on, loyalists. Like the dedicated crew on The Somnambule, we are dedicated to one mission and one only: Always keep the ship moving forward.