My book is up on Inkshares

Shaggy

Vice Admiral
Alright dudes and dudettes, I put my first book up on Inkshares a couple of days ago with the first two chapters if you want to check it out at https://www.inkshares.com/books/battle-flag-the-road-to-hell
Why should you care?
Well like everybody here I'm a massive Wingnut and The Battle Flag series spun out of my love of Wing Commander and I thought you might be interested in the story.
The other reason, and apologies to the Mods if this is inappropriate, is I am looking for some. The thing is, with Inkshares, if I can generate 750 preorders Inkshares will give the book the full publisher treatment. That means E-books and physical copies both on the site and sent out to brick and mortar bookstores. If I hit 250 there's the Quill imprint that will do print on demand and E-book if I can't go the whole hog route.
Right now the project is in what is called the draft stage so you can follow it but nothing is set to order yet. But this will give folks the chance read what I've posted and critique it.
You'll have to sign up for an account, to follow and critiques stuff, but you would have to do that anyway to preorder.
I hope you guys like it because it is aimed squarely at you.
 
I put up two more sample chapters, from much later in the book, to anyone interested in checking out the later stages of the story.
Let me know what you think, either here or on Inkshares.
 
So I opened up Pre-orders for my book and they'll be available until Oct. 16 2016, wish me luck!
By the way, to the mods, if this is inappropriate for the forum please accept my apologies. This book has been a long time coming and is sort of my uber-fanfic for Wing Commander, even though it's NOT actually about WC, I just thought other Wingnuts would be interested in checking it out even if they don't buy it.
 
By the way, to the mods, if this is inappropriate for the forum please accept my apologies. This book has been a long time coming and is sort of my uber-fanfic for Wing Commander, even though it's NOT actually about WC, I just thought other Wingnuts would be interested in checking it out even if they don't buy it.

Hey, you're good. If someone came out of nowhere to start advertising a random product, we would zap the thread, but if our regular posters use the off topic forum to talk about a side project, that's fine. Good luck with the book!
 
Well I'm just finishing up my first month on the campaign and I've got 6 preorders, which doesn't bode well for the campaign. But I'm not terribly upset if no one wants to buy it, I've offered it to a lot of agents and been turned down by all of them, so I'm used to rejection. :)
What I've really been short on is any critical input. Everyone I know is too busy with work or other books, or not into Sci-Fi at all, to really critique what I've got so I wouldn't mind a little criticism or discussion on it.
The nice thing about Inkshares is that if it fails to fund I can take another crack at it down the line. So I'm not gonna stop until this thing gets printed.
 
Well I'm just finishing up my first month on the campaign and I've got 6 preorders, which doesn't bode well for the campaign. But I'm not terribly upset if no one wants to buy it, I've offered it to a lot of agents and been turned down by all of them, so I'm used to rejection. :)
What I've really been short on is any critical input. Everyone I know is too busy with work or other books, or not into Sci-Fi at all, to really critique what I've got so I wouldn't mind a little criticism or discussion on it.
The nice thing about Inkshares is that if it fails to fund I can take another crack at it down the line. So I'm not gonna stop until this thing gets printed.
HEY SHAGGY CONGRADULATIONS ON YOUR BOOK IM IN THE PROCESS OF DOING THE SAME THING. IM 194 PAGES INTO TYPEING IT ON COMP. WHATS THE NAME OF YOUR BOOK?
 
HEY SHAGGY CONGRADULATIONS ON YOUR BOOK IM IN THE PROCESS OF DOING THE SAME THING. IM 194 PAGES INTO TYPEING IT ON COMP. WHATS THE NAME OF YOUR BOOK?
It's all there in the link, but to keep things simple, it's called Battle Flag: The Road To Hell.
There's a few sample chapters but what other Wingnuts may find interesting is the The Battle Plan sample, which isn't really a chapter but details my overall plans for how the series will be shared amongst any author that wishes to write for it.

By the way, Pwest, when you look at the length of your book go by word count and not pages. The Road To Hell is around 913 pages, formatted to industry standards for novel manuscripts, counted the way that Word tallies page counts. However, it's around 183,000 words which, according to the Inkshare's prediction of what the printed book will be, is about 512 pages. Your page count will fluctuate a lot when you change font type and size, not to mention altering your margins will throw that number out of whack too. But good luck to you as well.
 
Well I just crossed the halfway point in my preorder campaign and I've only got 7 orders.
I could really use all the help I can get, I've gotta hit a bare minimum of 250 preorders before they'll print it, and I'm hoping some of the Wingnuts might want to pick it up. Even if they don't I could use some ideas and help letting people know about it.
I've gone through my Facebook friends list, but I only have 74 contacts and a couple of those are businesses that were setup as a personal page and several are cousins too young to buy anything online, so I'm just kind of lost on the publicity front.
Anyway, a week from Friday I'll be heading off to Disneyland with the family so maybe I can push the fretting out of my mind for a bit.
 
So I got back from Vacation yesterday and checked on the book's campaign and I have 27 DAYS LEFT and only 8 orders.
So if you folks want to read this thing I could use all the help I can get. Orders, referrals, advice, whatever will help drive those orders up to the minimum.
 
Well two weeks left to reach at least 250 preorders. Without some sort of miraculous surge in orders this book isn't going to happen, at least not right now. It could happen, but I would have to get at least 18 orders every day from now to the end of the campaign.
 
Well I've been debating on whether to put another post on here or not but figured I might as well.
The preorder campaign for Battle Flag has failed so it won't be printed, right now. It's dropped back into what's known as the draft phase and I'm going to let it sit there for a little while. I'm going to redo the project page and try post a video about the book on the page. I'm also going to post the sample chapters in a linear order rather than the jumps ahead I tried before.
If there's any Wingnuts out there that want to critique my work I'd love to hear from you.
 
Why the heck are you torturing yourself with Inkshares? Just use Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Sounds like you instantly get the same benefits as your 250-preorder Inkshares thing for free. Create Space is also free and sets you up for the physical books available via Barnes & Noble's website and other online book stores.
 
Didn't know about those and I'm not really "torturing" myself with Inkshares.
If you check out the The Battle Plan sample, which is the only thing left of the sample chapters on the page after my recent tear down, it outlines my plans for turning the whole series into a universe shared among me and any other author who wants to write for the series. I plan to allow more than one ship\crew to be represented and the preorder funding model allows the series' readers to actually direct the course of history within the series. I even have plans for integrating non-canon stories into their own sideline, no matter how outrageous or ridiculous the stories are. If I can get it setup at Inkshares I can also setup a collection for the series, which is how I intended to keep the series together in a shared manner, which sends a cut of the sales to me and that would be sent into financing bigger resources to keep building the series, like websites and wikis for authors' research.
At the end of the day, if I can't pull it off at Inkshares, I'll look into these other options to get it going. I've got other stories I could take to Amazon or Create Space and maybe, if I hit it big with one of those, I can spin the fame into jump starting Battle Flag.
Inkshares isn't the end of the road for me, it's just another step.
 
Inkshares just seems like a bit of a trap to catch people like you who have big aspirations and few resources. But it doesn't have to be that way. There are other places, like Amazon, that very much lower the barrier to entry these days that I strongly encourage you to look into more.
 
Inkshares just seems like a bit of a trap to catch people like you who have big aspirations and few resources. But it doesn't have to be that way. There are other places, like Amazon, that very much lower the barrier to entry these days that I strongly encourage you to look into more.
I don't know that it's really a trap. It's very akin to regular self publishing with the exceptions that, there is no guaranteed publishing unless the goals are hit and most if not all of the publicity you have to do is on the front end, rather than the back end, like traditional self publishing.
I'm actually kind of enjoying talking with other authors on the site and backing some of the really interesting projects there.
I'm going to make another go at getting Battle Flag published there and if it doesn't work out I'll start gearing up for the self publishing route.
 
You deserve a lot of credit for giving it a go! It's a very good idea for a 'universe'... the big problem, I think, is that the deck is stacked against new things to begin with and it's very tough to sell someone on a prose project.

When you're ready to give it a go again, I'm happy to try and offer some tips for the campaign; I think you have to treat this as similar to a crowd funding project, which comes down to things like your social reach and coming up with good ways to keep spiking attention back after the launch wears off.
 
One of the things I realized, as the campaign came to an end, is that I kind of approached things a little backwards with the publicity. I hit up everyone I knew on Facebook and waited a bit for them to put in an order and things went kind of slow. As I closed in on the last month of the campaign I went to everybody that was following me or the project on Inkshares and my orders jumped up very fast but it still wasn't nearly enough.
I've got about zero web presence, outside of Facebook, and I'm working on ideas for changing that but the next couple of months are going to be busy and a little crazy, for obvious red suited reasons.
 
So I'm giving the campaign another go. I started it on June 1st to try and capitalize on the Nerdist contest.
More importantly, since the failure of the first campaign I rejiggered the project page and posted fully HALF of the book so if you want to get a really good idea of what the story is like there's a lot of it there. If you want to order great if you just want to read a bunch of it free that's great too, I hope you enjoy it. This will be my last run at it on Inkshares and if it fails I'll probably look at going through Amazon or Createspace. I've got another finished book, not in the same series, that I may try and get published
traditionally and then use any success I garner from that to loop back around to Battle Flag, so we'll see what happens.
To the Admins I apologize for bringing up a somewhat old topic but I figured it would keep things nice and tidy just to use what I posted before.
 
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