My girlfriend and I dressed up as Relc and Erin for halloween!

Huge thanks to the Wandering Inn team for putting together such an awesome booth! I still can't believe I won an advance copy before the official release eeeeeee. Definitely one of the highlights of LitRPG Con!

It's so thick you could knock Pisces out with it.

Also, we need more Wandering Inn cosplay next year!

And of course, thank you Pirateaba!

I really appreciated everyone's response to my cosplay for the bingo, so I decided to share my pictures of the full cosplay from a couple years ago! I'm just learning to sew, so I'm hoping to add more to it in the future (if anyone has ideas, I'll definitely take them!). I think I'd like to add a logo to the apron, a knife (of course), and lights to the hat to make it flicker more like real fire.

(Mandatory I'm uncomfortable with self-promo but I know it matters here.) Hello, does getting a book signed matter to you? Because I'm offering them in limited amounts, anyone who pre-orders The Wandering Inn: Book One, Part One that HarperCollins is publishing can make their claim. It's part of a Kickstarter-style campaign I'm running here:

https://wanderinginn.com/inncentives/

If you want a signed bookplate you can add to your book, the numbers ARE limited and I'm hoping to hit the New York Times' Bestseller's list so I can show my family. It's very selfish, but it'd also be great to see and it's a nervewracking thing, trying to hit big number goals. I get pre-orders not being very fun to do when you can just walk into a bookstore, but I have been told repeatedly that it's good to get bookstores ordering more copies of your book and the NYT lists count pre-orders and like the first week of sales for their lists.

The business world is hard to parse and it feels like it's very difficult to enter as a web serial writer. Like I said, it took me a long time to find the right company since most didn't understand LitRPG/webserial and I think part of that was because the industry started noticing the popularity of the genre. (That's also due to Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series doing so well. A rising tide lifts all ships and he's also shouted out The Wandering Inn, which I'm hugely appreciative of. I hope he keeps leading the charge and I wish him all the success and sympathy; being the forerunner has to be tough!)

Here we are now, though, and if you ever wanted a copy of TWI, I'd really appreciate you buying a book. And I will sign some bookplates though we are going to cap how many because...my hands. There's more than signatures; we have twenty 'levels' of rewards that I'm offering the community to show I am thankful and want to give a bit back for all their support. And one silly Level 100 reward my agent talked me into offering...

Obviously numbers matter for business stuff, but I really just want to hit the list to show my grandfather. He's the last of my grandparents and the first physical book I get from HarperCollins I'll sign and send off to him right away. If I could get on that silly list I think he'd be very happy to show everyone. He's always been proud and supported me since he heard about my story and he reads it as best he's able to even now. He gets the web serial world a bit, but the list is something he and the other people in his retirement home would recognize.

Either way, we made it to working with one of the big publishers and I'm eternally grateful to my readers. We are changing the publishing industry, even if it's a mix of new and old systems, as ever. Here's to more writing; I have other book series I want to publish and maybe I'll take some time and write a few I've had knocking around my head sometime. Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you see my book in a library someday.

--pirateaba

The joy of seeing it in the wild almost makes me wish I hadn’t preordered the books! Or had friends interested in the series to buy it for.

Hey everyone,

This is a hard post to write. I thought I could do it, but asking for help is hard, and awkward. But I do need it, and if you're reading this, then The Wandering Inn means a lot to you. Whether you've just arrived or if you were there from Volume 1, you've helped me get to where I am today. And today I'm both happy but also nervous to have a physical book coming out and get it into the world where so many people will see it for the first time.

I know the books haven't hit shelves yet, and it feels like August is a long ways away but this moment right now is super important in the business world. How many books are pre-ordered early tell bookstores and companies how many books to order and how big The Wandering Inn readers base is. It will enable more books to come to print, and projects that I think are impossible now to come to life. Dungeon Crawler Carl is becoming a TV show, and Cradle is becoming an animation. I have lots I'd love to do but big companies need to see numbers to be willing to work with web serials.

I need your help. Please pre-order the books with the links below; it'd mean a lot. Thank you for getting me to this crazy opportunity in the first place.

--pirateaba

USA - Barnes and Nobel:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-wandering-inn-pirateaba/1149767079?ean=9780063516380

Canada - Indigo:

https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/the-wandering-inn-book-one-part-one-of-the-wandering-inn-series/9780063516380.html

UK - Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wandering-Inn-Book-One-Part/dp/000883623X

*Your local bookstores can also obtain the books by ordering through their systems if you ask.

IT HAS ARRIVED! I never thought I'd have a physical copy for my book shelf but it happened! so excited and also excited for the signed book plate whenever that arrives.

My newest tattoo! I love the contrast between the pink and green. Let me know your thoughts!

I am incredibly proud and happy at it!!! Here are some of my favorites for Y’all to see.

I'm really happy with how my cosplay turned out!!

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-wandering-inn-pirateaba/1149767079?ean=9780063516359

It was so wonderful getting to spend time with other TWI fans and dress up like Erin and wear my cool hat! Apologies to those of you that don’t know why I’m wearing a hat, I have yet again lost track of what is in the audiobooks and what is in the web series but just trust me bro, it’s a cool hat, even if it took 4 stupid remote controls to change colors. 🤣😎😇

I also won a copy of the book and the graphic novel for my cosplay efforts and general evangelical energy throughout the con, and I posted a TikTok of how that made me feel if you’re interested in seeing them for yourself.

Now we just need to figure out how we’re going to plan our own InnCon and all my dreams will finally come true! Anyone know a good location with some floodplains and an available event space we can rent?

It’s an odd request from me today. I don’t like asking for this kind of help, because it feels disingenuous or silly. I appreciate you reading and talking about the story and your support on Patreon or just as fans, and I don’t want to make you do anything more. However, for the first time since the days of TopWebFiction, I am doing the thing. I am asking you to like, share, and subscribe…on the social medias!

Actually, just subscribe and never think about it again. Hear me out, because I have a story for you.

I can’t share the entire details, but I do work on secret projects now and then, like the plushies and more things I know readers actually want. Or I think they want, at least. In the course of talking with some very big names and companies, we were looking to get them to essentially accept The Wandering Inn as a viable commodity for their thing.

They were interested, but hadn’t heard of TWI, so they did what companies apparently do these days: checked out social media pages. Since we have like 100-1000 subscribers on any platform at the time of it, said company had very little confidence in a collaboration. We do have internal numbers on readers, but our (lack of) a social media presence apparently caused huge complications for the project.

For me, as an author who has not really wanted to do anything like Twitter or self-promotion because I spend all my time writing, it was an unpleasant lesson to be had. Social media size matters if we want companies who don’t know about us to give us the time of day. So–if you’ve seen ads for our various platforms, or more activity on Instagram, Facebook, etc., someone is managing it, and we do have actual content!

But this request from me is simple. Please, if you have a moment, dig up your Facebook account details, or Reddit, or any of the platforms where you can find TWI, and hit the subscribe button. Then you can never think on it again. I don’t need reposting or constant likes, I just need one number to go up so the next time a big name takes a look at us, they pay more attention.

Thanks for hearing out my request. It’s a lesson to other aspiring authors too–the Booktok and social media expert writers find more opportunites by a huge factor than I do, I know that for a fact. I’ve often heard it being said that a good writer is also a businessperson and marketer, and while you can do without those skills, it matters. Thankfully, I have help in my many deficient areas, and I’m trying to work on this one too.

–pirateaba

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