Once you start going through the potential ramifications, it could get messy. So I’m wondering exactly how it would work. 

Is this something we would have to request for each instance? Or would there be an automated facility where we could click "link accounts" and if the other account accepted the request, it would go through. Of course this should only happen at the project level for each specific project.

Then there’s the issue of royalty splits.  For my Journey project, I take the majority of the profits and my collaborator gets 10%.

In the anthology project Mykl Walsh and I are taking 10% each with the remaining 80% to be split equally between all of the winning entrants whose writing is included. 

As it is now, my single account receives all of the royalties and I distribute the royalties I owe to others in Quarterly installments. This works because of the openness of Inkshares. Anyone can see how many books are being sold and I will give copies of the Inkshares Royalties statements to my collaborators.

If anyone wants to question (audit) those statements, I imagine that Inkshares would cooperate in verifying the information I provided.

So each joint project might need specific royalty split requirements.

Also under the current situation, we can mention on the project page who our collaborators are and each collaborator can help pitch the project to their base of supporters and explain the join venture.

With potentially 15 accounts participating the anthology, that also could get messy.

Bottom line is I am open to the idea, but am also OK with the current situation.

Due to the issues I mention above, (and others I may not have thought of), it seems that it might mean a lot of extra work for Inkshares to implement. But if they are receptive to building in the capability, I’m enthusiastically on board.

If Inkshares is willing to handle all of the royalty splits and paying each collaborator separately, that’s the biggest benefit for me as it relieves me of that responsibility, tracking, 1099ing etc.

Hello Inkshares Authors and Readers! 

I have a question for Inkshares and the Inkshares community about co-authorship and how it’s represented/integrated into the Inkshares site. 

First off I have been really loving the updates to the Inkshares online platform, including these forums! Thanks so much @Thad @Jeremy Thomas Inkshares is looking/feeling really great and the new additions have deeply enhanced the online experience! In that vein of improvement, I offer the following observation and question:

So far, (and please correct me if I am wrong) I seems that only one Inkshares account can be the "author" of a book project, but as we know many books have two or more authors. While RUNE OF THE APPRENTICE only has one author (me!) I have co-written another book which am very excited to begin funding on Inkshares in the next month or so. (I will spare you the details because promoting that book is not the purpose of this post.)

So I’ve gotten a ton of messages about how I got The Punch Escrow to "Quill" in 10 days. Hopefully this is useful to some of you. I think it basically boils down to: Treat it like a job. It’s your job to get your book sold. If you believe in what you’ve got, if you think you know the audience you wrote it for will love it, then invest your time, energy, and money in your project.

Discrimination between author and reader wouldn’t do you any good. Authors can be readers and vice versa. All it would encourage is authors having two accounts on Inkshares. Their author account, and their reader account. 

There are different sales tactics for different people. Just because something feels icky to you, doesn’t mean that it’s the right or wrong way to do things. What is your trash, might be another persons gold mine. 

I DO think that Pitches sorted by Genre would be a fantastic idea, same with search bugs being fixed. So I’ll echo those. I read my pitches, I buy books based on pitches within my genre. 

There aren’t even enough authors to carry someone to full publishing through preorder swaps anyway. That being said: I’m still in favor of in-genre swapping. I think it fosters connections and the good outweighs the bad. 

If you want your book to actually be published, you are still going to have to bring hundreds of readers of your own to the site and to buy your book. Author swaps open up additional target audiences for you to cross-sell. 

No matter what though, nobody should look at Inkshares as their sole platform of marketing and sales. 

If you don’t have enough of a crowd to begin with, the harsh truth is you should not be crowd funding. Read any crowd funding site, or any crowd funding guide. Before you even enter a project into it’s funding state: You need something like 30% or more already lined up. 

Inkshares, at this moment, doesn’t have the reader base to be a platform. Authors bring their OWN readers who are interested in supporting THEIR Author in a contest VERSUS other authors. 

In a contest: My readers aren’t generally interested in supporting you. They want me to win. Not you. After the contest is over, my readers are going to fade away into the shadows. Leaving only the authors behind to support other authors in future works.

That’s what we are currently seeing. What inkshares needs to do, is pull those faded readers back to the front. Which is highly unlikely given the turn around time for books being around 1-2 years. They will forget. 

That being said, with what is currently happening: The idea of giving the authors credits to hand out to their active readers to draw them back into the site for other people. Is actually a really, really, really bad-ass idea that I fully endorse.