Slow and steady... 

I welcome each and every one of you who follow either me or Sarcasm Font or both. I'm abnormally excited about the 6 of you who have actually pre-ordered Sarcasm Font. Mostly because I haven't done much to promote it. Oh, I've pitched it more than a few times, but I think most of the authors I've pitched to whiffed it and chose to  "click the 'IGNORE' button to quietly disregard the pitch (we won't tell the author)." So I hafta believe you must have read my excerpt, enjoyed what you read, and wanted more. After all, that's what our Reader counts are suppose to represent, right? "Unique" individuals voting with their cash or credits, saying, "Hey Inkshares! I'd buy this book."

Right?

We all got the memo from Jeremy Thomas (uh, CEO of Inkshares, people!) explaining how wrong it would be to ask each of your family members and friends to pre-order from several different email accounts, thus creating "clone" Readers (the opposite of "unique"), to artificially bump up our numbers, and thereby our rankings, in that urgent scrabble to the Top 5.

So I'm puzzled. How does "exchanging pre-orders" differ from that? I mean, I get that it doesn't exactly create clone Readers, but it doesn't exactly say to the potential publisher, "Hey, I'd buy this book." In fact, it artificially bumps up the numbers, and thereby the rankings, in that urgent scrabble to the Top 5.

But somebody thought it was a clever idea, cleverly spreading it in the privacy of a pitch, and some other bodies have passed it along. Publicly. In their updates. I just want to go on record -- probably not vinyl though cuz that's expensive, and I'm a minimum wage kinda guy -- to say, I won't dance. Don't ask me. If you like my  excerpt and want to pre-order my book, thank you. Thank you for the vote of confidence. But don't do it expecting me pop on over to your project page and pre-order yours in return.

Have some self-respect.

If people read your work and like it, they'll pre-order. If you're promoting your work as hard as you can and people aren't pre-ordering, then maybe you need to go to your room and think about what you've done. Maybe you need to re-write. Maybe you need some heavy editing. I mean, Stephen King would roll over in his grave (not yet of course, cuz he's not dead), seeing the tens of thousands of adverbs in the hundreds of thousands of words posted in this contest. (Personally, I'm inordinately fond of adverbs. Like the brain-sparkingly inspirational Douglas Adams. Suck on that, Mr. King.) But the adjectives? You know what? Some nouns and pronouns like to walk alone. Most of them need to walk alone. 

I don't even want to get started on showing instead of telling.

But the upside is that most readers are indiscriminate. Especially your family and friends. Not my Readers, but look at most of the self-published crap on the market. Not your crap -- I mean your self-published masterpiece just waiting for someone to tip off the Nobel committee folks that it's out there with the Truth, but that other crap. The stuff the authors asked their ninth grade English teacher or their younger sister who has an AA degree in creative writing to edit instead of paying the exorbitant rates of professional editors. You know which crap I'm talking about. All that crap out there that's just not very well written.

Well. That was cathartic.

I'd urge everybody who's "exchanging pre-orders" to stop it, but I doubt they'd listen to me. I have only 6 pre-orders. From people I don't know. Discriminating people who have earned the title, "Reader". And it feels good.

So even if I never break into the Top 250, I'll walk away from this with my self-respect in tact, feeling hopeful that I can build a vlog out of Sarcasm Font, and they will come.

Till next time, 

Romero Russo

Your prologue is so rich with story rather than background, that it doesn't really read like a prologue. Maybe you should just call it Chapter 1. The reason I suggest this is that I posted a prologue -- actually background information for a story -- on Reddit a year ago, open for critiques. Without exception, the recommendation was to eliminate the prologue and incorporate the information into the story organically. In fact, most of the guys who commented said they never read Prologues. Some of the women felt that way, but not most. Me, I read every word. I'm curious, why do you see this as a prologue? The first paragraph is disconnected from the actual story, but if you put it as an anonymous quote or maybe a quote attributed to one of the characters, like the mysterious Rudra, or maybe just an old Vai'kel saying, it works as a great lead-in.