A very good day

Hey all, Robin again. Like many people, I suffer from depression from time to time. But I must say I've been "riding high" for the past few days.  What gets my endorphins running? Generally, it's when I help others (especially creative people).  And I've had some "big wins" recently. 

• Unbroken Anthology pre-launch - In January, Michael and I learned of Peter Orullian's dire situation as the result of medical debt. Since March, Shawn Speakman, Peter, and myself have been working on launching a Kickstarter to produce an anthology - something Shawn did with Unfettered back in 2021. The hope is that this Kickstarter will be amazingly successful - and while it won't launch until September 23, the pre-launch page went live yesterday and it became the #1 most popular "coming soon" project across the entire Kickstarter platform. How many projects are "coming soon"? 8, 183! It's already had 3,000+ people sign up for notificaiton, and here's hoping for many more before launch.
  
  
• Indie Movie documentary - When Adam Grady approached me to make a documentary related to Michael's and my journey, I was certain he was nuts. I also thought he would "go away" - after all we are approached with hair-brained projects all the time and they are short-lived. But Adam was persistent. I finally relented, but only if the documentary's focus would morph into the Independent Author movement. So we gathered up the likes of Andy Weir, Will Wight, Travis Baldree, ML Wang, and many others and after two years the movie premiered.  It is AMAZING.  Adam has a great deal to be proud of. And the movie has been submitted to several film festivals.
  
  
• Out of the Ashes offer - While we've done what we can to help fellow authors earn from their craft, the scope of our assistance has pretty much been in the vein of advice, classes, and an occasional plug when they launch Kickstarters. But five years ago we ran across an author with such an incredible amount of talent, that we felt she "just had to get out there." So Michael helped her with the craft side of things, and I've been working on the business stuff. Well, about a month ago we got the notice that Lorian's debut: three books in the After the Fall series, received a seven-figure advance for the audio rights.  Quite a better reception than Michael got for his debut. The audio advance for the six-books of The Riyria Revelations was a whopping $6,000.  Now because this is a joint project, Lorian will only receive $500,000, but that doesn't take into account any income from Kickstarters, ebooks, or print copies. It couldn't have happened to a more talented author, and it was our extreme pleasure to help her break onto the literary scene.
  
  
• Ether Witch books heading to the warehouse - Emilie Nikota (also known as delemhach) was originally published through Podium. Like many debut authors who are approached by publishers directly, the authors aren't given the best terms for their books. The good news, is those original contracts will expire in 7 years and Emilie will retrieve her rights and self-publish. For others (like us) those rights are gone for "life of copyright which means 70 years after the author's death). Anyway, for Emilie's next two series, The Ether Witch and Kraken Tales, I've done two things (a) negotiated an audio contract for just shy of half a million dollars and (b) provided a venue to get her books sold through the retail chain using our distribution account with Publishers Group West. A few days ago we got an announcement that The Casting Call, Book #1 in the Ether Witch series has finished printing and the paperbacks are on their way to the warehouse —just in time for the August 5th release date. Congratulations Emilie!

Please check out the links and support these amazing projects. For all but Out of the Ashes,  I have no financial stake in them, but they all have one thing in common . . . they are incredibly creative and have produced amazing works that I'm hoping for huge successes.