The Week in Review

Thought I'd do a quick introspective retrospective from my personal perspective...
What? It's a Sunday morning and I've not had my first coffee yet.
Anyway, it's been a week since I launched the Heroes Wanted Kickstarter (which is still running, by the way! Tell your friends! No, seriously, tell your friends, I need all the help I can get), an interesting, HOT week - somewhere in the high 20s, which is hot for me! - a week in which I have pratted about with YouTube, written words and tried to think of ways to promote the Kickstarter.

Ah, the Kickstarter. It's going...okay.  Ish.  Kind of.  As of the time of writing, it's sitting at a fairly respectable 10% funded (a HUGE thank you to all who have pledged!). Need to step up my marketing push (I apologise in advance to my twitter followers).  I've got a couple of ideas but it remains to be seen if they're worth pursuing.

When I've not been staring blankly at the wall and trying to wrap my head around the arcane world of "marketing", I've been working on the follow up to Crystal Eyes. It's going quite well, hit about 50k words (and this is the second attempt - I scrapped the first one as I didn't think it was very good), probably about two thirds of the way through. 
I'd love to be more accurate with my estimate but I never stick to the plans I make for stories. It inevitably ends up wandering off on some tangent or another.

Right, time to gird the loins (and whatever else might need girding. How does one gird, anyway?) for the week to come. Going to do some more video updates because I'm quite enjoying doing them. Is that narcissistic? Probably a bit.
Need to get some better software though, I'm using Adobe Premiere Elements 10 and it kinda sucks.

That's it for now!
Remember, if you've got any questions/suggestions, feel free to get in touch on the Twitter, on Google+ or on the Contact Page of this here website.

Later, folks! 
Allen

P.s. Here's a vid of me trying to recreate a scene from Jurassic Park using just an iPhone camera, a bag of crisps and a hungry dog.

A quick thank you

Just wanted to say a quick thank you to Sammy Harris who was kind enough to promote my Kickstarter on his website after I backed his project.

His website is here - http://www.derelictmovie.co.uk/#!home/mainPage 
And the kickstarter for his sci-fi film can be found here - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/959150710/derelict-a-short-sci-fi-that-we-all-crave

Check it out! 

Like a well-oiled machine!

My crack team of elite PR professionals have swung into action, crafting this compelling press release: 

"Written by the occasionally slightly-acclaimed author, Allen Donnelly (who’s totally not the one writing this press release and pretending to be interviewed by a 3rd party), Heroes Wanted is a light-hearted fantasy novel set in a world of dragons and magic and turnips. 

It follows the trials and tribulations of Catlyn Fordman and the other residents of the village of Heroes’ Rest. As the proprietor of the village inn, The Dragon’s Flight, Catlyn finds herself in the position of being the provider of beer and credit to the village and the adventurers passing through in pursuit of fame and fortune.

But what’s a short-tempered barkeep to do when dark and eldritch forces threaten the village and there’s no loot to tempt the heroes into helping out? Narrow her eyes, pick up her saucepan and come out swinging, that’s what!

Allen explains the origins of the tale: “The idea for the story came from the MMO (Massively Multi-player Online) games that I spend far too much time playing, when I was looking at the quests being offered by an NPC, a Non-Player Character. It’s a thing that happens in all such games but, on this particular occasion, I happened to be playing Lord of the Rings Online and I found myself in an inn that was stuck out in the middle of nowhere (the Inn of the Forsaken, if you’ve played the game – it’s as lovely as the name suggests). 

The computer-controlled innkeeper there was offering quests asking passing adventurers, players like me, to help them, but the quests and rewards were quite low level, not really worth it for any player who was even a little advanced. 

I wondered what it would be like to be that innkeeper, forever asking for help from passing heroes who barely listened to anything she said and hardly ever bothered to help. I came to the conclusion that it would suck! And suddenly Catlyn, the long-suffering, short-tempered innkeeper was born and the story spiralled out from there, the village of Heroes’ Rest and the world beyond springing up around her as if by magic!

It was perfect timing really. My previous novel was a fairly bleak, post-apocalyptic, Western-style sci-fi story called Crystal Eyes and, though I loved it, I fancied something a little more light-hearted for my next effort. Not only that, but I was lining up to write it just as NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) was about to kick off so I ended up writing the first 50,000 words as part of that!

The cycle continues, however, and it’s actually the sequel to Crystal Eyes that I’m writing right now.”

Thanks Allen, we can’t wait to read it (says the completely real interviewer)!

The Kickstarter has just been launched to help fund professional editing and printing of the book (and to provide cool swag like t-shirts and so on!) and can be found here:

The Heroes Wanted Kickstarter

If you want to try a sample, see if it tickles your fancy, the first (unedited) chapter is available to download from here along with an animated reading of the first 1000 words or so."

Here's the release out in the wild - http://www.crowdfundingpr.org/heroes-wanted-a-novel-the-kickstarter-is-alive/

And here's a pic of the PR team hard at work! 

View fullsize

She knows how to work a room

And it's GO, GO, GO!

It's alive, ALIVE!!!
That's right folks, I have now officially launched the Kickstarter campaign for Heroes Wanted!
It's exciting, faintly terrifying stuff! I've got no idea how this is going to play out - my predictions change on a minute by minute basis from "This is awesome, people are going to love it" to "Oh man, this is going to suck, they're going to ban you from the internet" and back again.
There's only one way to find out what happens, however, and that's to try...

Anyway, as I've said elsewhere, if you've got any questions then please get in touch via the contact form on the site, on Twitter or on Google+ and I will do my best to answer.

Here's a sample of what you'll find inside Heroes Wanted. 

Video announcement of launch (with special guest!) 

Kickstarter - a How To

Greetings, people of earth!
Since my Kickstarter project for Heroes Wanted is due to launch tomorrow (*flails arms around like Kermit*) I thought I'd throw together a quick blog post to explain how Kickstarter works for those unfamiliar with it.

Here's a link to the preview of the project if you want to see what I'm talking about.
Have a look round while you're there - there are some very cool projects you can become a part of. The first one I supported was the Snowgum Films production of Terry Pratchett's Troll Bridge - http://www.snowgumfilms.com/trollbridge/

Anyway, back to Kickstarter!
What happens is that I set a target that I want to reach over the course of the campaign - in the case of Heroes Wanted it will last for 30 days and I'm looking to raise at least £2000 (a little over 3000 USD at this point in time).
To do this, I've set up a series of reward tiers that I hope will entice you fine folks to pledge a certain amount.
For example: if you pledge £5 then, if the Kickstarter completes successfully, I will email you Heroes Wanted in all available eBook formats by the delivery date. 
Now the thing to remember is that at this point it is just a pledge, no money is exchanged until the end of the 30 days and you can cancel your pledge at any time during that period (though I hope you won't, obviously!).
Once the 30 days are up, if the total number of pledges totals £2000 or more then the Kickstarter will fund - it is at this point that the money is taken from your account and transferred to me (after Kickstarter and Amazon have taken their cuts). After this, I'll send out a questionnaire via the Kickstarter website asking for any relevant information and I will start to organise the reward packages.

If we are wildly successful and sail breezily past my £2000 target with time to spare then I can set stretch goals - higher targets to aim at. For example, I could say that if we hit £5000 then I would hire a professional illustrator to do fancy artwork., and then I could create new reward tiers offering that artwork as a shirt or poster.
The stretch goals are an optional thing and not reaching them has no effect on whether or not the basic project gets funded.

That's it, in a nutshell, but if you've got any questions then you can get in touch with me via the contact form on the site, on Twitter or on Google+ and I will do my best to answer.

Thanks for your time, now let's do this! GRRRRRR! 
(That was meant to be a manly growl type thing)

Allen