Dear friends:

Every once in a while, I get an e-mail from Inkshares with the subject line “You’re Selling Books.” Opening those e-mails is like opening a long awaited present. Those e-mails mean that a bookstore has decided to take a chance on my novel, and it will be carrying one or several copies of The Catcher’s Trap.

The first thing I do when I get those e-mails is googling the bookstore,  finding out where is located and then sending them a thank you tweet for taking a chance with a new author.

So far six independent bookstores will be carrying my book: A. C. Vroman, in Pasadena, Ca. Common Good Books, in St. Paul MN. Tattered Cover in Denver CO. Prairie Lights Book, in IOWA City IA, Mysterious Galaxy Books, in San Diego CA and Flyleaf Book, in Chapel Hill NC.

There are over sixteen hundred independent bookstores in the U.S. It would be a dream come true if all of them carry my book, but, in the meantime, I’m thankful for those 6.

Hopefully, a bookstore in my home state of Connecticut will take a chance on me.

I also dream about taking a road trip and visiting every single one of the bookstores carrying my book. So far my map looks like this:

My trip would cover 4 thousand miles and it will take 61 hours of driving. If I’m lucky, and readers love my book as much as I do, many other stops will be added. Maybe I’ll have to take a year off to cover them all. An author can dream, right?

 Have a wonderful weekend!

Hi everyone! I have things to tell you about!



First, Kris Calvin’s One Murder More is currently 99cents for Kindle. This was the first Inkshares book I read and I enjoyed it! I love murder mysteries, and I bet some of you do, too.

Amazon allows ebooks to be gifted via the wonders of the internet... so the first FIVE of my readers who like this update will receive the ebook of One Murder More as a gift! (Just readers who have purchased my book, not followers; this is a thank-you gift! And if you don’t have a Kindle, apparently Amazon has a free app so you can read it on your computer. I’ve never tried it, though.)

We all want to relax and chow down on a political thriller while we lounge on the beach (or something), right?!



Also, there’s a new syndicate in town, and it’s a book club!

For those who don’t know, syndicates are a sort of book-of-the-month thing where you pledge $10 (ebook) or $20 (print) to purchase a book agreed upon by the syndicate each month. If the price is different from the pledge, you are refunded the difference.

Elan Samuel’s Inkshares Book Club Syndicate will select and read a currently available Inkshares book every other month and discuss it together! Syndicates have mainly aimed to support currently funding books to help them get published, so one that selects available books is a new angle to take. Since it has to be monthly at this point, the syndicate will support funding books on the off months.

Consider checking it out!

FINALLY, a She Is the End update:

I have untangled the disaster that was Episode VIII, and Alex is currently doing developmental edits on Episode VII. I solved a problem in the final climax that was leaving the ending too weak, and in general we’re tightening things up, cutting like mad, and I AM SO. EXCITED. TO SEND THIS BOOK TO BETA READERS SOON.

And when I do, I will be taking a little break from writing. It will be... Art Time. I’m going to be sketching out the illustrations for my
book!!!

Until next time, my space-faring friends...

We have a publication date – March 28th 2017!!!

This awesome little addition was made to my Inkshares page last night.

Thank you all for being so patient with me, I know many of you didn’t realize just how long a wait it was going to be when you generously supported my quest to publish The Bones of the Past. To tell the truth, I had no idea how involved the process was myself. I’m now on a schedule to make edits and respond to questions from a sequence of editors through to October.

First up is the developmental edits where plot holes are identified, chronology issues are addressed, fat is trimmed and any big issues fixed. Then comes the copy edits to fix the overall quality of the writing and address any weird word choices I might have made and managed to ignore over my repeated rewrites. Then proofreads, looking at the layout of print and eBook formats… all of which is going to take longer because I can’t manage to tell a story in less than 460 pages… And of course during all that, the interior and cover of the book are going to be designed.

So there’s still lots of work ahead for me, but it’s a hugely exciting process where I get to work with a great bunch of very talented people. The end result is going to be so much better than I ever could have managed alone.

March 28th is a long way off and yet it’s tight for all the work still going into the book and then the marketing efforts that roll out before Bones lands in bookstores. But you won’t have to wait quite that long – Inkshares orders usually show up about a month early! 

Thank you all for your continued support, interest, and *cough* great taste in books! March is just around the corner!

Here is the latest illustration for SQUIDS IN from Eugene.

In this scene, Toby’s friend Baker is drinking beer while Toby looks up the details of the animal lab break in on his phone. I really like how Eugene has made Baker look. I’m not great on describing people and scenes in my writing but the process of getting illustrations created by someone has forced me to figure out how these the scene looks, what the people are wearing, how they would act in certain situations. I’m really enjoying working on both the actual writing of my book and working with Eugene on the artwork.

SQUIDS IN has received a good run of orders over the past few days and this will hopefully continue given some interesting things that will be happening soon:

The weekly WriteBrain podcast that discusses the Inkshares platform and community will be mentioning the book in next weeks episode (recording tonight). Hopefully JF and Paul like my project page and give it at least one thumbs up out of the four (I assume) they have.

Also, Angela from Inkshares has been in touch to ask me to write something for an upcoming Inkshares/Nerdist blog post, so hopefully that will spread the word to a few people who have not heard of the contest previously and bring them to the site.

Thank you to all of you for your continued support!

Matthew

Greetings Destiny-followers,

One of the joys of taking a vacation is a chance to read the stuff  I had previously ordered on Inkshares. And here are three I would absolutely recommend!

An Unattractive Vampire by @jimmcdoniel - a tremendous take on the modern-day vampire story (available now).

Rune of the Apprentice by @jamisonstone - an awesome, rollocking fantasy (available now).

An Adventure with Dada by @michaelhaase - a hilarious read and somewhat at the ribald end of the spectrum (pre-order at this stage, I’m reading an advance copy).

Apologies for not linking through with the above books, but the phone is proving difficult to deal with!

I’m also still in the hunt for a top three position with Destiny Imperfect (sitting third with fourth hot on my heels!) and could do with a boost if you feel like jumping on board. 

Have a good one and check out those books!

Cheers,

Peter

“Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.” Just wanted to quickly give a shout-out to my homie Billy Shakespeare. That’s from his latest novel “Macbeth,” now trending on inkshares.

Please tell me you didn’t fall for that. Only a slice of the above is true; that quote is indeed from Macbeth. It is one of my all-time favorites. If I’m reading it right, it means that saying is not the same as doing. So in the spirit of DOING, I wanted to give an ACTUAL shout-out to two dear friends of mine who ARE DOING IT, whose books truly ARE trending on inkshares right now.

The books of Mr. Zachary Tyler Linville and Mr. Richard Heinz were mentioned on Publisher’s Weekly top anticipated books released in Fall 2016. THIS IS HUGE NEWS! I’ve personally had a few peeks into their stories and I can vouch for this praise. I’d say “these books will be great,” but the truth is, I already know they are. If you haven’t invested in a copy of them, what are you waiting for? (Saying “Publisher’s Weekly’s endorsement!” is an answer that doesn’t hold up any more, bub.)

There have been other, newer, projects that caught my eye on Inkshares also. If you can click a mouse button more than once, I’d highly recommend you do so HERE (“Destiny Imperfect”) and then HERE (“The Glorious Denial”), in no particular order. Read the chapters you find there. They’re good. Good enough to spend money on. I say so from experience.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a scene to write in which an owl fires cobalt-colored lightning bolts at a fox while he clambers up the side of a landmass hovering mid-air because of some distortions in his world’s magnetic field. Some weird, complicated, science-or-sorcery stuff in “The Animal in Man”, folks. In Billy’s spirit of DOING, I #AmWriting. Stay tuned.