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Crowd fund your new novel or story this way

One of our occasional writers, Ivy Ngeow, also writes fiction. She has been published and won awards. This might smooth your way to a publishing deal, but the new way involves crowdfunding, or rather, pre-selling enough copies of the book (which is completed). It is set in Chicago, USA, and Macau near Hong Kong, China, and is set in the 80s, with Reagan the untried new president, parallels with Trump there.
Check out her entertaining video here on the Unbound site now >

Heart of Glass novel by Ivy Ngeow

Heart of Glass novel by Ivy Ngeow

The pre-sales have to reach a target, such that the publisher (in this case, Unbound, part of Penguin/Random House) can remove any risk. The book is only published when pre-sales have got to a level where they will at least make some profit even if nobody else buys the book. This is like the opposite of an advance, the writer has to do all the marketing and selling to get the book out at all. It seems to work though, as many interesting and successful books have appeared via Unbound.
Unbound have just had a massive hit with The Good Immigrant, a collection of essays about being an immigrant in the UK. And Robert Llewellyn, an actor from the SF series Red Dwarf, has had many novels out through them.
Ivy will be discussing her crowd funding techniques, using Facebook, blogging, email etc, on this site soon.
I am preparing a pitch video for my next novel now!

Check out Ivy’s new crime novel here on the Unbound site now >

Better, faster, more benefits for writing, creativity, productivity

New Story Lite v2.2 is out next week, the installer is made so I will put it online soon. I listed the benefits in the last blog, well OK, I listed the features.

NEWS: Live! To buy a Story Lite v2.2 license at sale price of 95c, go here >

Benefits are:

Easy to work with many boxes of notes and ideas because you can select and move around groups now, not just one box at a time.

This means you can make say a title box and a main text box, and drag them about, also clone them for repeats.

Neater line up of rows and columns, this will help you think since the brain works fastest with simple layouts. The snap to grid tool means you can set say 20 pixels as your grid.

Transparent text boxes and Z level, so you can make layered texts.

Instant shortcuts to zoom to boxes or view. Some of these are in the current version but there are more for power users.

Better paging system on the arrow keys, makes it easier to ‘paginate’ your layouts for presentations or slide shows.

Better web export, on a Publish button, and a link to ‘how to’ guides to get your work into Blogs, Content Management Systems (CMS) and Social Media, and anywhere else. There will be more on this topic later.
And in v2.3 (along later) the process will be automated.

You can lay text directly onto anything else, and control the layers – using the transparent text box feature, and the Z levels control. I will make an example of using this next week.

So, not long to wait.

Any ideas for new features just drop a line via Contact page.