Hello from Character Jail

Hey,

Thank you for helping us reach our goal of giving away 3650 copies of Curse Breaker Enchanted, one for every day since we lost our first fan almost 10 year ago.

We’ve given away 241 copies thank you! We’re 6.60% of the way to our goal, so please keep sharing our books on social media and if you’ve read it, please consider leaving a review on your favorite book store site.

If you haven’t read it, now’s a great time to start!

To celebrate the passing of our first fan, Melinda’s sister, Carolyn, we’ve got some big things coming up.

If you’ve been waiting for hardcover omnibuses with beautiful glossy covers and new art, then our first event is tailor made for you!

Before I get to that, I need to give you a quick update on the Ran’s in trouble situation. I know you’re wondering, so wonder no more.

This is Ran, Sarn’s son from the Curse Breaker series, writing to you from character jail. That’s where bad characters go when they don’t follow the outline. But don’t worry!

I’m not in a cell. I’m just here to visit another character who didn’t do what they were supposed to do in our upcoming book. But I can’t tell you who because that’s too big of a spoiler.

And you’re wondering why I’m not warming a cell right next to them, aren’t you?

I was wondering that too until I realized that I’m not the one who didn’t do what they were supposed to do! What a surprise, right?

I was pretty shocked when I found out. So that’s your update about the book situation. I’m sorry I can’t say more about it. Since the characters did other cool things instead of what they were supposed to do, that put a big kink in our plans for the next book. So the Scribe needs some time to deal with that and also to vent.

There might be some screaming too. Just ignore it. Melinda will calm down soon and get back to writing.

While she cools off, let’s talk about those hardcovers I mentioned. I’ll have more details and pictures next week. Right now, let’s hop into the way back portal and go back to last year when Melinda started working on these hardcovers.

I know it seems like everyone is jumping on the same bandwagon with special editions, but we’ve been working on this project for over a year now. And there were times, we thought this might not happen. So that’s why we didn’t say anything.

But it will happen, so now I can talk about it!

Why did it take so long?

Well, we needed new art created for the dust jackets and the book cover, formatting for the interior since books don’t format themselves. I don’t understand why they don’t, but my Scribe assures me that some human involvement is necessary for that.

Then the Queen of All Trees wanted to see proofs and put her stamp of approval on these hardcover books. As you can imagine, that took awhile to arrange since she’s a giant, sentient tree.

We might have also needed to reassure her that none of her child trees were sacrificed to make the books and prove that new trees were planted to replace the ones that became the books. And that was all after we found a printer. Just the research on that alone took forever, or it felt like it to this fictional character.

So yeah, a lot happened behind the scenes, and all of it had to be done around our publication schedule, so you wouldn’t notice anything was up in case we couldn’t pull this off.

Why do hardcover books now?

Because Melinda’s sister loved hardcover books. If she were still alive, we would have already done this so she could have a copy. But she passed away.

And for years there was no way we knew of to print hardcover books on demand. They were only available through print runs with high maximums that we couldn’t meet.

Fast forward to now and we have options. We can get a small number of hardcovers printed for a good price, and I can’t help feeling like fate played a hand in that.

Once we found the printer, everything fell into place like we were meant to do this. So we will be releasing them to celebrate Melinda’s sister’s birthday. Carolyn isn’t with us anymore, but we can put them out for others to enjoy as a tribute to our first fan.

What books will be available in hardcover?

Right now, we’re planning to launch only our 3-book omnibuses in hardcover with brand new artwork and other touches to make them special, and they include the following:

• Curse Breaker Books 1-3 Omnibus

• Curse Breaker Books 4-6 Omnibus

• Curse Breaker Books 7-9 Omnibus

• Robin of Larkspur Books 1-3 Omnibus

• His Angelic Keeper Books 1-3 Omnibus (If we can get the artwork sorted in time. There was an issue with the original artwork, but we’re trying to a new version done in time.)

How can you get your hands on these hardcover books?

Through Kickstarter.

I know. It seems like everyone is running a kickstarter campaign these days. But we don’t know how else to do this.

The printer we’re using doesn’t have a direct sales platform, so you can’t order from them yourself. We have to do it for you, and Kickstarter is uniquely suited for this.

Let’s back up a sec and talk about what Kickstarter is and why after researching options we decided to go with it.

For those who may not be familiar, Kickstarter is an online crowdfunding platform where the community can come together to fund creative projects like ours. It's different from traditional financing because instead of single investors or loans, the funds come from regular people like you who want to pledge their support and get rewarded for it.

How does Kickstarter work?

We set a funding goal and a deadline to meet it. You go to our prelaunch page, and click to follow our project. It’ll take you to a form where you can create a free account if you don’t have one or login using Facebook or your Apple account.

Then it’ll take you back to our project so you can click the green notify me on launch button.

The friendly green button on Kickstarter was another sign this is something we should do because my Papa’s eyes are that exact shade of green sometimes.

When our project goes live sometime in September, you’ll get an email from Kickstarter letting you know that you can look at our rewards, choose the one you like best and back the project.

We’ll go over that part next week along with what happens during the campaign and afterward.

Before we decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign, we backed over 25 campaigns by other authors to get a feel for the platform and the experience you’ll have as a backer. Along the way, we learned what we like and what we don’t like as a backer, and I’ll share that too since it factors into how we are setting ours up.

For now, I’ll leave you with this image from our campaign:

New Podcast Episodes & Videos

Listen on our podcast. Watch on YouTube:

• Fantasy, Lore, and More: Lady of Ravensmere

• Fantasy, Lore, and More: Heroes of Issalia Super Boxed Set

• Fantasy, Lore, and More: Demons & Battleskirts Volume 1

New Releases, Sales, & Other Book Stuff

The book that started it all. Help us give away 3650 copies of Curse Breaker Enchanted by Feb. 22, 2024.

The first three trilogies of the Curse Breaker series collected in one massive set. Witness Sarn fall, then rise again as the hero his son always believed him to be.

While Sarn recuperates, Ran tries to fix the problems his revelation caused until a new adventure calls him.

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