Dear all,

This is the final pre-publication update about " Everything is Normal: The Life and Times of a Soviet Kid"

·      The book is now being printed in the US and various ebook versions are being finalised.

·      Ebooks will be sent to pre-orderers ahead of the official publication date – on March 16th.

·      Printed copies will be mailed to pre-orderers on March 16th too and should reach you within a week or so, depending of the speed of mail in different countries.

·      IMPORTANT: If you have moved address since you ordered books in April-May 2017, please log into Inkshares and update your shipping address.  https://www.inkshares.com/

·      On a separate note, I’m happy that the book is getting positive reviews from the advanced readers and some interest from the media. Got a great blurb two days ago. Will show-off a bit now:

"Everything is normal" is a wonderful, funny and evocative account of growing up in the Soviet Union. It brings vividly to life the stodgy food, the dead hand of the state, and the lure of the west, all told through family life in late communist Leningrad. Some of the gags are hilarious. Who knew that that The Empire Strikes Back was released to USSR audiences as The Empire Returns the Blow? Sergey Grechishkin is a major new talent and a writer of humour and verve." Luke Harding, author of  #1 New York Times best-seller "Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win"  

The long journey is finally over. Thank you again for all of your support!

Regards,

Sergey

THANK YOU, Inkshares Staff Syndicate!
The Inkshares Staff Syndicate selected Rock of Ages to support and now there’s a fancy badge on the book page and we’re up to 503 orders! I was so excited last night that I was running and jumping around the house! Thank you, thank you!!

53 days left and 247 orders to go. That’s 4.6 orders a day. We’re going to do this! Now is the time to join the list of Super Readers or supporters! 

A favor and some exciting news...

First the favor: the more reviews I get on Amazon, the more Amazon sees traffic going to my page, and the more they work their Amazon magic for my book. Getting past the 100 review mark would be huge.  So PLEASE go to the link below and WRITE A QUICK REVIEW.  It doesn’t have to be much, just a sentence or two saying what you thought of KILL CREEK (hopefully good things).   Just click the link below, go down to Customer Reviews and click "write a customer review."  It only takes a few minutes.  I’ll wait while you did it:

https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Creek-Scott-Thomas/dp/1942645821/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518405122&sr=1-1&keywords=kill+creek

Sweet!  Thanks for the review!  Now on to the exciting news.  KILL CREEK has been officially nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel!  The Stoker Awards are one of the most prestigious and well known awards in horror literature, honoring fiction, nonfiction, short stories, poetry and screenplays.  This year’s ballot includes huge names like Stephen King, Owen King, Joe Hill, M. Night Shyamalan, Guillermo Del Toro, David Lynch, and Jordan Peele, among many, many others.  Past recipients include Stephen King, Thomas Harris, Dan Simmons, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub--you get the point.  This is HUGE, and I know it’s a cliche, but it truly is an honor to be nominated.  The awards will be announced at a banquet in Providence, RI, (home of H.P. Lovecraft) on March 3, so I’d appreciate it if you’d cross any available fingers for me.

The book continues to gain momentum with over 5,000 copies sold and a steady stream of very cool responses on Instagram and Twitter, including an amazing tweet from Joyce Carol Oates, who called KILL CREEK an "intensely realized & beautifully orchestrated psychological Gothic/horror first novel set in once-Bloody Kansas."  I’m thrilled and humbled to hear people from all over the world saying how much they enjoyed my book.  I couldn’t have done it without the support of all of you.  Thank you for believing in this novel and for helping me make this lifelong dream a reality.

Hope 2018 is treating you all well.  I’ll be back soon with more updates.

Oh, and if you didn’t stop to write that review while I waited earlier, why not do it now?  It’ll give you a few more minutes of "staring at your phone" time, and who doesn’t want that?

Best,

Scott Thomas

Meet Sarovek. Knight. Monitor. A hunter. A killer. A noble daughter of a powerful house of Corvidia, the kingdom of sky-dwellers. If you’ve read chapter one of “The Animal in Man” then you know Sarovek leads the attack against the hyena the story’s hero Maxan had been shadowing through the streets and alleyways of Crosswall. 

“A Corvidian knight in plates of polished armor plunged from the skies. Her legs and lower talons led her way, the tips of her hawk wings trailing high behind her, a long spear gripped tight, angled at the clustered hyenas. She fell like a meteor, inches from where the fox crouched on the walkway, then flapped her wings outward at the last possible instant to break her fall. The blast of air sent immense clouds of dirt rolling away. The knight’s spear sank through a hyena’s back and deep into the ground, an explosion of blood changed the dirt to mud.”

Sarovek is quite the badass. I believe she perfectly embodies the type of book I wanted to write. Her character, her choices, her choices all provide the type of experience I wanted to craft for my readers. I grew up reading action-packed stories of warriors gritting their teeth and swinging swords and narrowly escaping grave dangers with their lives. Sarovek may not be a barbarian, but she’s just as ferocious a fighter as Conan. She may not be a drow ranger, but she’s just as stoic as Drizzt.

If you haven’t heard of “The Animal in Man”... If you haven’t had the chance to really dive in and see what makes it so special, then go check it out. Spend a little time in my world.

I have some very, very exciting news to share with everyone coming up in the next update. Stay tuned, My Dear Animals! And as always, thank you for your support and patience!

(Immense thanks to artist Ellinsworth for his amazing sketch of Sarovek! Visit his portfolio for more awesome artwork!)

425 orders! Amazing!

That means we have 325 to go with 62 days left. I’ve talked to almost everyone I know, so now I need your help. Please send your link to folks you know, in a Facebook message or email (not just posting or tweeting...make it as personalized as you can so folks know you are asking them specifically!). I’m going to be doing some special prizes for my top referrers (Think Amazon gift cards and other good stuff!). 

I’m meeting with someone from the Claremont Courier tomorrow and I just recorded with ABC Book Review Podcast so there will be some new press out soon.

We’re getting there! Thank you so much for your support!

Hello everyone, welcome to 2018!

Work on Blood Capital has been progressing at pace since NYE and we are now close to completing the developmental edits (at last!). Check the progress chart below and you can see I’ve almost completed the rewrite, and that all of Acts One and Two have had my second pass. Once this is complete, it should just be a matter of getting the final development notes from my editors and incorporating them, then we move into copy editing (grammar and spelling).

Everyone has been wonderfully patient with me over the past year, and that has made this process so much easier. Thank you. I’m aware the journey has been long — I had no idea how long it would be when I entered the competition back in 2016. To provide an idea of the work behind the scenes, I’ve been averaging almost 18 hours a week on the novel, which multiplied out over nine months (roughly how long I’ve been working on edits), adds up to more than six hundred hours so far. 

We are now on the home straight, and Blood Capital is set for release at the end of July. A marketing plan is coming together to support the launch, and I’ve now seen an early version of the cover art. As soon as the cover art is finalized, I’ll send out a special update, but for now I can tell you it’s going to stand out on shelves.

Cheers,

Robert
https://robertbatten.net 

Dear Sweethearts, 

I hope that you all are doing well and that you’re staying warm, and that you’re having a lovely evening! I am writing to share some exciting news, a video that Health Magazine did based on "How to Get Run Over By a Truck" recently went up online! You can take a look here :) 

Amazingly, after it was posted by Health - People Magazine, Hello Giggles and Real Simple all also shared it, and just this week it reached over 1 million views! I wanted to share this with you, because none of this would have been possible without you and your support of me and this story! 

I have said this before, but I REALLY mean it this time, thank you x 1 MILLION! 

Heart,

Katie 

Ladies and gentlemen...we are published!!

After four years of development, the first book of the Storm of Fury trilogy has been released! You can order it here on Inkshares or find it on Amazon! If you pre-ordered, you should already have your ebooks, and your physical copies have shipped out to you.

I want to thank everyone who supported me from the beginning of my campaign and endured the long road to publication. I can’t believe it’s finally here! I’ll have another update for you in a few weeks, detailing my next steps and how you can help bring Storm of Fury to new readers. In the meantime, thank you so much for everything, and enjoy the novel!

Regards,

Andrew Wood