Greetings and gratitude to everyone who gave generously to the Dragonswarm KickStarter campaign last December! It's been a while since you heard from me, but I'm here today to let you know there's a new campaign live now for the final book in the trilogy, The Dragonprince's Heir.

And this time we're doing so much more than just asking for funds to produce the book. This time we're asking you to help make this book an example to the world, and a legacy to the arts.

We're going to donate The Dragonprince's Heir--along with the other books in this bestselling trilogy--into the public domain. From day one, this book could belong to the world.

It's an ambitious goal, so we're going to need all the help we can get. Donate a couple bucks. Spread the word. Help us make this happen.

I believe in you.

Sincerely,
Aaron Pogue

When we first added the print rewards for this project and chose "January 2012" as the delivery date, we knew it would be late January. We had no idea it would be this late!

We ran into some delivery delays with our print company, and didn't receive the shipment of books to sign until early this week. Four huge boxes of paperbacks showed up on my doorstep, and I cleared space on the table to do a lot of signing.

Then we cracked open the boxes, and found the books unusable. Some of them had been misprinted (with badly oversaturated colors on the cover), and many of them had shipping damage on the corners.

We contacted our printing company to request a replacement order and they were accommodating, but printing and shipping such a bulk order takes time. Once it arrives the new books will still need to be signed, repackaged, and shipped to you.

There's no way we'll make our January date at this point. I sincerely apologize to everyone who's been waiting, and I promise I'll get your books to you as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

Sincerely,
Aaron Pogue

Halfway through its first week, The Dragonswarm is selling just over 10 copies per hour!

That's hugely successful. At Amazon it's currently ranked 19th in the top 100 Fantasy books (and 2nd in Hot New Releases). Its overall rank is bouncing between 250 and 300, which means that out of the millions of titles available on Kindle, The Dragonswarm is currently the 300th most popular.

And it's barely even started.

Thanks for all the great reviews! Thanks for spreading the word. And thanks for your contributions!

I've just sent out the first round of rewards. Everyone signed up for a digital book (the $5 and $10 reward tiers) who had answered the questionnaire should now have a personalized copy of the book or books in an inbox somewhere.

This was my first time trying that particular trick, so it's quite possible I messed it up. If any of you have any problems with your rewards, please let me know and we'll get it sorted out.

Have a great weekend and a very merry Christmas! I'll be back with another status update early next week.

Sincerely,
Aaron Pogue

I'm still waiting until tomorrow to make the official announcement everywhere, but for those of you who helped fund this release, I figured you deserved early notice:

• Amazon
• B&N
• Goodreads

I'm planning to contact everyone who contributed tomorrow to get the necessary contact information to ship your rewards. And I do fully intend to get the digital products shipped before Christmas. I've heard from at least one backer who wanted to use his reward as a present.

Honestly, I meant to address the rewards a lot sooner, but even with your support it's been a frantic process getting this book published. But we were able to make some major improvements to our e-book formatting, and I've got an illustrated map inside the front cover! Definitely worth all the chaos.

I'll keep you posted on how the book performs. It's already outselling Taming Fire in the two hours it's been live, and I haven't even officially announced it yet. Tomorrow should be a very exciting day.

I've gotten several emails from people who didn't find this campaign until after it ended. To my great surprise, even after we funded the project, several of them have contacted me to ask if they can still contribute to the cause.

And the answer is: Absolutely! I'm the author of this project, but I'm also the Head Publisher at Consortium Books and the President of the parent company, Consortium, Inc. (who you'll see is listed as the owner of this project).

More Where this Came From

Consortium Books is a tiny publishing house, but we've got some incredible talent and even more ambition. Our goal is to publish a feature novel every month in 2012. 3-6 of those novels will be mine (including the final book in the Dragonprince trilogy, in June), but all the others are by authors I've coached or studied with directly, and whose books I really believe in.

Our plan is to run a 30-day KickStarter campaign like this one for each book. In other words, we'll have some campaign running all the time. We don't expect any of our contributors to pitch in for every single one, but there will always be an opportunity to support the cause.

And I promise you, I'll be just as personally grateful for your contributions to any of those other campaigns as I will be to the ones for my books. If you want to support me (and help me quit my day job), contributing to Joshua Unruh's campaign absolutely does that.

Our Next Campaign

So! Please allow me to introduce Joshua Unruh! He's a talented novelist with a vast exposure to adventure stories in every genre, and an extraordinarily eclectic catalog of works-in-progress. His first published work is going to be a young-adult spy-fi adventure called

    TEEN Agents in The Plundered Parent Protocol.

It's funny, it's exciting, and the 13-year-old heroines are incredibly cool characters. Check it out.

(If you really wanted to contribute to the Dragonswarm directly, you can make a contribution to that project and send me a message through KickStarter to let me know. I'll even let you pick a reward from the Dragonswarm set. We can get that worked out.)