Hey all,

My birthday is Saturday, and you can give me a present that will cost you nothing. It would be awesome if we could get both my AMAZON and GOODREADS reviews passed 100! We are so close. If you haven’t read the book, READ IT, you bought it. When you’re finished, please rate/review!

Thanks so much!

Kyle T. Cowan

Hi everyone!

I hope you all are enjoying or have enjoyed reading The Love Fool. I wanted to let you all know that The Love Fool has recently received 5-star reviews from Readersfavortie.com, Amazon, B&N, Goodreads and more. Thank you to all who have reviewed The Love Fool so far, and for those who haven’t gotten around to it yet, please don’t be shy.

In other news, I’ve been busy planning and appearing at some author events here in New England. Recently, I participated at Author’s Night By The Sea event held at the Redhook Brewery in Portsmouth, NH.

Saturday, April 28, is Independent Bookstore Day! I’m very excited to participate in this awesome event. I’ll be a “guest bookseller” at Cabot Street Books & Cards in Beverly, MA (4pm-6pm), signing copies of The Love Fool, giving away specially designed bookmarks [pictured below], and recommending books that inspired my writing.

On June 3, I will be engaging in an Author Meet & Greet at Barnes & Noble in Burlington, MA – signing books and handing out more of my fun bookmarks.

And in July, I’ll also be participating at the New England Authors Expo in Danvers, MA.

I’m keeping myself busy here in New England, while continuing to market The Love Fool online.

For updates and events info visit thelovefool.com

A writer’s work is never done.

-Lorenzo Petruzziello

Dear all,

It has been a month since the official release of the book. I know that there have been some delays with the international delivery of the books. Though most of the orders have been delivered, if you still haven’t received your hard copies, please tell the publisher about it on hello@inkshares.com, they will check with the courier service and will get it fixed.

I’m starting to receive many good reviews from the readers. It is very pleasing. The book is now 4.73 on Goodreads based on 51 reviews and 4.9 on Amazon.com based on 26 reviews.

When the book gets to 100 reviews, Amazon and Goodreads start to suggest it to readers.

Can I ask you for one small favour?

If you haven’t already done so, could you please put your rating or review on Goodreads and Amazon. It will take just a few minutes. Here are the links:

Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1942645902/ref=cm_cr_ryp_prd_ttl_sol_0

Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39068789-everything-is-normal

Thank you very much!

Regards,

Sergey

Well, backers, it’s out in the world.

I’ve just started receiving notifications that the first copies of Blue Water are being received. I’m not quite sure the timeline on eBooks yet. I’ll contact Inkshares and have an answer for you shortly.

I am so excited/terrified right now in the best possible way. I know this book is the culmination of not only my work but of everyone along the way who ordered one and told a friend. I hope you enjoy it.

 And if you do, please tell your friends again. We don’t get the full brunt of a massive advertising campaign to get this book noticed. It’s just us and the word of mouth. I know some people were nervous during the crowdfunding stage to purchase a book by an unknown author from an unknown website without the promise that it would ever get published you’d get your money back. So now, thanks to the people who believed in this book enough to still throw in some cash, we can take care of all those issues. Except for the unknown author part. Blue Water is a finished novel, people are reading it currently, and it’s available for pre-order from Amazon, a more well-known retailer (no offense to Inkshares, who I still encourage you to purchase the book through.)  So share that info with anyone who was on the fence, especially if you really like it. 

 Thank you all again for paving this road. I wouldn’t be here without literally every one of you. 

Joseph

Dear friends and followers,

It has been a rather intense two months. February and March were both spent going over the book with a fine-toothed comb and rewriting significant parts of it. Streamlining. After spending two months doing absolutely nothing except This Book, it feels more than a little strange to suddenly not be working on it. The pretty-much-final document was sent in to design last week, and now it’s out of my hands.

For now, Inkshares is sending it around to various people and places to get blurbs and reviews--I wouldn’t know where to begin, personally. I’ve heard that some really nice things have been said, and it’s all very exciting.

For you, though, you’re probably wondering when you’re going to finally get your hands on the finished product. Near as I can tell, we’re looking at an official publication date of 31 July 2018. Now that all the vagaries of writing and editing are over, I doubt if there’ll be anything to change the date again.

The question now is, who should I kill next?

Quick update on Under The Rug. We are into phase 2 of content and development editing. It’s looking good. After this round, we’ll go through a line edit(line by line, cadence, sentence structure, etc.), then it’s on to the copy edit(punctuation, grammar, etc.); that’s the final stage. Once again, thank you all for the love and support. 

Update!
Just a short one today, but a worthy one.

Proteus has finally passed 300 preorders! We officially have more pre-orders than the Somnambule has crew members (conscious ones anyway. We still need to sell about 49,700 copies to match the number of colonists in stasis. We’ll get there). This is solid progress! We’re slowly crawling up on the halfway mark, and I’m hoping to reach it within the next two weeks. We’re slightly behind schedule, but not by very much, and progress has still been pretty steady overall.

I’ve mentioned it before, but the stretch between 250 and 500 pre-orders is a vast, empty wasteland for a pre-order campaign. We’re right in the middle, so we don’t get to feel the surge of excitement that accompanies the first couple weeks of a campaign’s launch or the similar surge as we see the finish line approaching. Right now, nothing seems to make an impact. But I assure you, it does.

Please keep showing your support by liking and sharing Proteus on all your social media. Tell all your family and friends about this book, online and in person. I know I say that every time, but I can never overstress how important it is to spread the word. If you haven’t yet pre-ordered a copy, or if you think you’d be willing to order a second or third one to support the project, I implore you to do so. Proteus only becomes a book with your help. I’m just the writer here; you’re the ones who can turn it from a concept in the notes on my computer to a printed book on shelves worldwide and in your own hands.

Thank you as always for your support, it means more to me than I’ll ever be able to express. I cannot wait to share this book with all of you.

It has been five months since Murder Happens snatched first place in the final minutes from The Vampire and the Dragon in the 2017 Inkshares Horror Contest.

And now I feel compelled to post an update to all you wonderful supporters who I cajoled, bribed, threatened, blackmailed, extorted and wooed into supporting my book with a pre-order. 

Why now? 

Because the next finish line is very close and soon I will let go of the manuscript that is haunting my life. 

I am not a fast writer but I have attended to the story every day and sometimes it makes me laugh and I am amazed at the words I read and often times I worry that it is a big heaping pile of crap. 

The usual stuff.

A couple more passes through the draft and then I will review the Inkshares submission documents and send it off after my fellow Black Hats Writers Group editor reviews it and picks out the darlings I must kill.

Once submitted, I will take a break from writing although I do have another project posted on Inkshares. Better to use the time to create a marketing plan and begin executing it. 

Because executing is fun.

"Cry ’Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war!"

The time has come at last. It has been almost a year since my first attempt to fund Proteus. In that time, I have spent most of my time and resources working on my development draft for Tantalus Depths. I severely underestimated how long it would take for me to finish that first round of heavy edits (I fully thought I would have had them done well before the end of the year), but at last, they are finally done. I sent the manuscript back to my editor about a week ago, and while I wait for him to work through my revised manuscript, I finally have nothing I have to do with that manuscript.

Which means it’s time to switch gears again.

For the next month or so, I am free of any responsibilities with Tantalus Depths, and I plan to take advantage of that opportunity to finish my Proteus campaign, which I started almost an entire year ago. I am still very determined to secure a publication deal for this second book, and thanks to my extension, I still have all the progress we made the first time I campaigned this book. There is still a long way to go, though.

At present, Proteus has 275 pre-orders. It needs 475 more to receive the publication deal I’ve already earned for Tantalus Depths. As of today, I have 97 days to get those orders. This is very doable, but it’s going to be a big challenge. I’ll need as much help as I can get, from all of you.

If you ordered a copy of Proteus last year, your order is still active. You’ll receive your copy when the book eventually comes out. I could not be more grateful for the support you’ve all shown Proteus and Tantalus Depths already, and I absolutely hate having to ask you for help yet a third time. If you have not already ordered a copy of Proteus, I would be extremely grateful for your support: you will be helping me establish my new career as a published author. If you have already ordered a copy and want to help more, you can absolutely do so by ordering a second or third copy. I would be eternally in your debt, and I simply cannot understate how much such a gesture would mean to me.

If you’re not in a position to support the book directly by ordering a copy, you can still help. I’ll be posting a lot more Proteus content soon, and I need to get it in front of as many people as possible. Please like and share as many of these posts as you can, and tell all your friends and family about this book. The more exposure we get, the better!

Thank you for your support, and I look forward to sharing a lot of exciting new content with you very soon.