We're close to the end, and ALL the authors are begging for their followers who haven't pre-ordered and their wonderful Readers who have to invite their friends and family members (and letter carriers!) to pre-order now. Some of the authors promise premiums to induce you to pre-order their books.

We need that kind of help from our Readers and followers, too, but we don't have anything to offer you except the chance to bring a well-written, exciting young adult story that even adults will love to an audience that needs proof that they belong. Geeky kids, gay kids, disabled kids, minority kids. Aliens. Kids who need a book like ENHANCED.

The best part is that ENHANCED's heroes are everybody's heroes. They're fighting against exclusion. Of anyone. For any reason.

So are we. That's why we want you to take a look at some authors whose work we believe deserves more support than they've gotten. Even if it's at our own expense -- although we hope you will support us as well.

Tonight, please take a look at Jamie Brindle's two entries, both exceptionally well written and nothing alike. First, Presenting Complaints, an hilarious Pythonesque romp through a hospital in England's National Health Service and Story, easily the most lyrically compelling adult fairy tale you will ever read.

Thank you. Thank you very much. 

With one week to go, I think it’s fairly safe to say that I won’t be winning the Inkshares/Nerdist writing contest. Not even close. So, in the closing days of the contest, I’d like to offer some thoughts on my experience.

POST-MORTEM, DAY ONE

It should be obvious that, unless you have a very close, very broad extended family and/or circle of personal friends, you cannot win a contest like this. Your first stop will likely be the fans of your writing, but not many of us have enough (I obviously don’t) to be able to leverage them to succeed. It becomes necessary, then, to reach out to individuals and groups in the hope that they will start a cascade effect (aka: going viral) that will report your need to the far reaches of the Internet and generate a lot of preorders from people you don’t know.

Some of my friends amplified the message that I was in the contest and needed help (and thank you, you know who you are); unfortunately, this did not appear to significantly increase my preorders. In addition, I did reach out to people I knew, however slightly, and organizations that I thought might be helpful in my cause. Unfortunately, although I made some connections that might help me in the future, they did not help me in the present situation.

Sigh.

Why? I can think of a couple of reasons.

Most of the books in the contest are fairly mainstream, and certainly easily categorizable. Because of this, they have natural constituencies they can call upon for support. This point was driven home to me by a woman who told her followers that she was hoping for help from a steampunk organization. Those who wrote zombie novels could expect help from people who enjoy zombie novels; those who wrote post-apocalyptic novels could find support in that community, and so on.

I believe that mine was one of only three or four humourous novels in the competition. I briefly thought that people who liked humourous science fiction would be my natural constituency, but when I started looking for them, I found that they were incredibly difficult to find, and the few I did approach did not respond to my call for help. Otherwise, a novel about everybody in the world changing sex doesn’t fit neatly into one of science fiction’s sub-genres, making rallying support for it difficult.

In the end, my inability to muster support beyond my circle of friends and family made it impossible for me to do well.

Dear Following,

We've advanced to 18th place! And, as of this writing, are just 7 back of 17th. None of the authors are sitting idle, however, so we mustn't either!

Thank you for the tremendous support you've provided to push my book yet higher. We've got only 7 days remaining and still very far to go. The top-5 get published and, right now, we need to better 376 readers.

"Impossible!" you say? Nay! Mere weeks ago, where the hell was my book but gathering dust on an old, moldering hard drive ... seen by five people besides me? Now, over 200 eyes (assuming everyone has two, my apologies if I'm incorrect) have seen it! What's 250 more sets of eyes, right? Right????

I don't care how far away the goal may be. There is still time left to push, so let's continue to push, shall we?

If you believe in this project, if you are proud of your support -- I'm going to use the p-word here -- PROSELYTIZE! I'm going to keep hustling and -- if each of you could convince just two more people to check me out, get their $10 in credits and walk away with a pre-order and penny -- well, 5th place is right there for us!

-Steve

P.S. Take a look at Enhanced (it just slipped from the top-10, let's get it back up there) and Single Version (Scott and his wife just had a baby. His book has slipped from the top-5. Help him get back in the winner's circle).