Hello Inkshares Community,

Elena here, your friendly neighborhood customer service representative, with a PSA about Pre-Order Swapping. In the past few weeks, we’ve received many notices of these types of actions. We want to address this now before it becomes a more widespread issue.

The goal for each and every one of the authors on Inkshares is not just for you to reach your funding goal, but for you to be a success on the market after publication. Books with broad reader interest sell better in places like independent bookstores, B&N, Amazon, etc.

This means that the whole, “if you pre-order my book I will pre-orders yours” trend isn’t allowed, nor is it a sustainable method of crowdfunding. It doesn’t promote broad reader interest. Relying solely on this method would require you, as an author pre-ordering other authors’ projects, to spend $2500 just to reach the Quill goal, which isn’t feasible for most people, and goes against the democratic nature of the crowdfunding model.

So here are our thoughts: if you have a genuine interest in someone else’s writing, you’ve read their drafts and you want to support them, that’s fantastic! If you make a deal with someone to swap pre-orders not on the basis of genuine interest in their work but solely to receive their pre-order, we cannot condone it. If you have any questions about this, please feel free to comment or email me directly at hello(at)Inkshares.com. I am always happy to help.

Additionally, please see our Terms of Service for clarification.

Thank you and keep writing the good write!

Elena