Great! Also patching up the little like bug too.
Hi Readers!
A few exciting updates for everyone. First of all, Phantom Forest has only **2 MORE DAYS** to qualify for the Launchpad Competition! Would love to get as many pre-orders as possible between now and the 16th, so tell your friends! Your book clubs! Your blogs! Whoever you think might enjoy the read! If I do not win the competition, we only have 30 days left to hit the minimum 250 orders for the Quill publishing deal. In a nutshell, we need another signal boost! The final 100 orders must be filled!
We also now have a cover artist and shot a book trailer over the weekend, which is very exciting! I’m really grateful to have such wonderful creatives in my midst who are loaning their time and energy to this project. The trailer and some art samples are coming ASAP, so be on the lookout!
Enjoy your holiday cookies, cocoa, tree decorating, and vacation planning this week!
Love,
Liz
I’m sorry to say that I am withdrawing my book from Inkshares. I will be forever thankful to all the people that supported me along the way. It is a great disappointment that so many people worked alongside me to help us get those 750 orders and to now have to walk away. I will try to make this up to all of you. It was a tough decision to make but I’ve lost all faith and trust in the company and think walking away is the best option. An except from a strongly worded email I sent to the CEO yesterday:
For you to say that all credit orders are invalid is completely unacceptable, and I think this is what our problem comes down to--you don’t see an issue there. You should. Among those credit orders was your predecessor at CEO. If that’s not a mark of approval for using credits, I don’t know what is. To say you decided you don’t like the system anymore does not invalidate what happened previous. The company explicitly promoted credits to users for a long time, to pretend like that didn’t happen because it suits your current interests is wrong and you should know that. It sounds like this is what this all comes down to, for Inkshares to publish my book I must concede this point. I won’t.
I don’t know what I’ll do now. It’s been a very frustrating experience these last few months to say the least and the prospect of starting back at square one is daunting, but Illegal will be published and hopefully soon. This week I’ve been working on another round of editing and I’m happy with the progress I’ve gotten there. I’ve created a simple page for anyone to follow the project here. I’ve also written up my experiences with Inkshares here and invite other authors/ readers to comment freely.
This will be my last message from Inkshares. Thank you again, everyone. I’m sorry it didn’t turn out the way we expected but I’ll do my best to make it right with all the wonderful people that supported me.
"This is future shock delivered in real time and with max voltage. The most chilling part about "The Walls are Closing In" is that the walls really are closing in. We have just endured a presidential where truth was discarded and ignored, so it does not seem like such a leap to enter a world where truth, beyond what the powerful deem it to be, is unknown."
"Castle has crafted an eerily believable future for America that is reminiscent of George Orwell’s "1984". From the giant wall insulating America from the rest of the world, to the propaganda on mandatory, controlled television, to the cameras monitoring the protagonist’s every movement, I was chilled. This is a fascinating read about how 75 years from now, everything could be totally different in our world."
Inkshares has had problems with refunds on other campaigns and I wanted to make sure everyone who bought Illegal has received their money back. The refund should have gone out on October 24th and reached your account a few days later. If you were not refunded please reach out to hello@inkshares.com and let them know. Also let me know and I’ll stay on their case.
On a related note, many of you have been asking if they should re-order. The answer is no. The team has done a very poor job handling their mass-refund mistake, and there are refund issues with at least one other campaign so I would not trust them with money at this point. I’ve lost a lot of trust in the platform and the team running it and at this point they would really have to go above and beyond for me to change my mind and still let them publish my book. That seems unlikely to happen at this point. Save your money.
I’m going to push them to give me a real answer next week about how they plan to resolve this. If they can’t tell me or it doesn’t include them going above and beyond, I’ll walk away and seek better options.