Dear authors and readers,

Thanks again to all who completed our recent surveys. Your feedback, experiences, and insights continue to inform how we advance Inkshares as a community, publisher and creative IP marketplace.

In the first survey, a vast majority of you stated that you found credits helpful, but with caveats. Many communicated that the credits policy is confusing and needs to be more strict, and that overall it’s too generous a system to continue in its current form. We agree.

The intent of the credit system is to encourage engagement with the platform.  Specifically, we want to incentivize readers to re-engage with the platform after their first purchase and to reward readers that bring new users into the Inkshares ecosystem.  At the same time, it’s important for us to be proactive in preventing harmful uses and abuses of this system.

To that end, we are updating credits to make them more sustainable. Starting today we will issue two types of credits:

Referral Credit for referring someone who buys a book (one credit per book): $2.50

First Order Credit for first-time users only, earned after their first purchase: $5

As always, we welcome feedback and questions.

Have a wonderful weekend!

I’m definitely in! I’m not sure how this works lol but sounds fun!

I’ve had some girls be pretty shitty towards me growing up. I also would just love to help cause I think this book looks great! When did you need it by, ladies? :) @Lena (Helena and Malena) 

Hello Inkshares community! I sent a message to our followers, and was advised by the IS folk that these forum threads are also a great way to reach out. And I didn’t even know about the forum threads! Excited to be finding a new part of this great site.

So we wrote a novel (Sparked) that is finished, and now we’re getting ready to launch our funding campaign in September. Before we do that, we want to make a book video to promote the novel. Do you know a teenaged girl (a daughter? a niece or neighbor?) who might be in the range of, oh, let’s say ages 11-29? We define adolescence loosely, not convinced that we’ve fully outgrown it yet ourselves...

Sparked is a novel about what happens when mean girls get superpowers and have to save the world. For our launch video, we need quotes from a couple of teenage girls. We’d be super-grateful to anyone who is willing to participate. It’s quite simple. All you need is an iphone or whathaveyou. Film yourself making a video selfie answering the following questions:

a) What’s the meanest thing any girl has ever done to you?

b) And/or: What’s the meanest thing you’ve ever done to another girl?

Your answer doesn’t need to be more than a sentence of two (the entire video is going to be less than a minute). E.g. “One time my so-called friends got together and made a list of all my worst qualities and read it out to me so I could ‘work on myself.’ It was five pages long.” (True story!)

If you are willing to help out by filming yourself answering these questions, or if you know a teen who might find this exercise amusing, please send the video to helena.echlin@gmail.com ormalenawatrous@gmail.com. Of course, you will earn a place in the acknowledgments and our undying gratitude. We would also be happy to share a PDF of the whole novel with anyone who wants to read it now as a show of our gratitude. For any aspiring writers, we’d be more than happy to read a chapter of your stuff and/or offer general advice on careers in writing in exchange for participating in the video. Oh, and we have a writing advice column, so you can also send questions here:

http://www.bay-ata.com/sparked/dear_lena.php

Thank you so much in advance for your help! This is such an amazing community of writers supporting each other in all kinds of ways. It’s really exciting to see how we can build each other up and get our books out into the world.

Warmly, ’Lena (Helena and Malena)