Hi Kate!  I am the author of the Book that Jane-Holly mentioned, Twisted Tales for Tacky Children.  Twisted Tales is an illustrated children’s book that is currently in production at the Quill level. I think I have some "lessons learned" that will be helpful for you.  The first is pricing.  When I was selling pre-orders for my book, I priced it at $30.00 for a hardcover book.  I’m glad I did, because it was really important to me that my book had color illustrations.  Because I only reached the quill funding level, there was some question about if I would be able to include color illustrations, but because of the way I had set my pricing, this worked out.  The Inkshares team was great to work with on this front, and always responded to emails quickly.  If in doubt, I recommend writing to them.  The second thing I learned with my inkshares page, is that the "preview" chapter feature didn’t seem set up to feature a kids book in the way I wanted to display.  I solved this problem by creating a website for the book (I used wix-- they are free and looked really professional.) Whenever I sent out a reader update to my followers, I’d say something like "I’ve posted a new poem here" and include a link to a poem and illustration.  I liked this much better, and it made my inkshares page look way cleaner. Other tips I learned were to clean my illustrations up in illustrator before posting them (I’m a watercolorist, and the illustrations looked much more professional without the textured white background in the negative space) and I also discovered the amazing (and free) website Canva where I created my book cover and marketing materials.  I have zero graphic design experience, and all of these were things that were easy to learn as a beginner.  I hope this information helps, and congrats on your kids book! 

Boy, this place gets pretty quiet when there aren’t contests running.
Any rumors of more contests coming?
Even genre would be interesting to see what kind of story ideas it creates.
Hopefully, fantasy...
You know my book The Dead Wizard is a long and exciting book. Just the thing for these times when you are waiting for a contest to enter. ;-)

It is scary! I remember when I first shared my writing with friends and family. It’s not that bad, but once I shared with other writers, English majors, and professors while taking a creative writing seminar it’s a whole different story. You get much better feedback from other writers, some a bit more harsh. But I think I grew more as a writer from learning from other writers. I hope you find yourself thinking the same after a while.

What I am liking about Inkshares is the connection and networking with other writers. Some have more experience here than others and that is helpful for somebody like me. I self-published my first novel last year using CreateSpace. With the completion of my second novel, I wanted to try something different. Thirty unanswered agent and publishers later, I’m not quite ready to go back to CreateSpace so I thought I’d try Inkshares.  I have launched a FB campaign to draw in the FB community. What about Goodreads? Has anybody tried to use Goodreads to draw followers from there? There is an Inkshares Groups at GR but there isn’t much activity over there.

Launching again. 90 days didn’t seem like a lot of time. And I’m not a salesman. But check it out. I’ll see about making more art work to advert it. I’m going to go through it one more time and resume work on the sequel. If you like the story pre order and I’ll get it out there one way or another.
Lord give me strength. Amen. :-)

I was wondering if about the use of "rewards" to encourage pre-orders. I have a scenario in mind and am curious as whether Inkshares would disapprove, as wells as what the community as a whole thought of the idea. So I am posting it here instead of direct messaging Inkshares support.

I have a book that I ran through funding and failed. But I am still committed to the series. So I was thinking of self-publishing the first novel and using discounted sales of it as a reward for those who pre-order the second novel which I would put up for pre-order at Inkshares.  Because it would offer instant fulfillment instead of the wait for final production and could help encourage pre-orders. Though it would also be offering a lesser quality product (less edited, poor quality cover image, etc.) and might turn off people from pre-ordering the second book.

It seems like a reasonable tactic but since it would be promoting a book that would be published outside of the Inkshares system I can understand why they might prohibit it. And I understand that it could be seen as taking advantage of the Inkshares network to make a little money even if I fail to get the full pre-order goal.

I am also curious if anyone else had tried it and what the results were. I know I’m not a great proofreader, which is why I want a publisher, but I also want to finish the story and if I can’t get anyone to read it then the rest of the story seems pointless.

Anyway what are your thoughts?

I, having just lately heard of the Blair Witch remake and the Crypt TV contest, think I will ad a pre chapter to the list. A disappearance at Bear Lake.

I’d be interested to know how published authors find the Inkshares experience, compared to what they’ve done before.