Alison Croggon

March Update

FLESHERS is now an actual book, with an awesome cover especially made for Pozible supporters by Oleisha Proksa. Thank you so much to all our supporters! After a day of concentrated mailing and triple checking we got everything right, the rewards are in the post.

Ebook links and and a download for Ben Keene's awesome album composed for FLESHERS should now be in supporters' inboxes. If you haven't seen the email, check your spam!

We're so pleased this was able to happen. And if you missed the Special Edition, look out for the commercial release in June, with an amazing design that this campaign made possible. THANK YOU.

We're a bit tired now....

Update

As promised...drumroll....a sneak peek of first cover concepts for the FLESHERS special edition. We hope you think they're as awesome as we do!

The Story

I’m a flesher through and through. I do all the flesher things: fall in love, cry, laugh, rage to the trance mobs. All the things that back in Newport City they envy us for, all the authentic things that they don’t know how to do any more because their dna is so clean and squeaky. 

I’ve got all the feelings.

And feelings are trouble. I know that too.

Concept art: Morro, Flora, Dez, Bo and Bel, by Oleisha Proksa

Dez is a flesher. She scrapes a living with her brother Bo and her mother Bel in the banns outside Newport City, the only habitable place left on a planet devastated by environmental catastrophe.

All fleshers are different, but Dez is more different than most. She's a living quantum computer, able to hack into any network. For years her family has kept Dez's abilities secret, but when she accidentally kills a cop during a routine raid everything begins to unravel. Now she's broken into Newport City OpSec and discovered there's going to be a cull. Millions of people - most of the fleshers - will be exterminated.

The only people who can help are a shadowy group called the Alchems and a bent cop called Brian Mac. But Dez hates Morro, the glamorous Alchem who has designs on her girlfriend, and Brian Mac is a screw up. And what chance do any of them have against the full force of OpSec?

But nothing is what it seems, as Dez and her friends are plunged into the most desperate struggle of their lives...

You can download a sneak peek of FLESHERS here (pdf), if you want a taste of the story.

Video voice acting: Talia Raso

Concept art: Brian Mac by AJ Proksa

Update

We made our target in five days!!!  We're all a bit stunned here in Fleshers HQ. And so grateful to everyone who has supported our project. Fleshers is go!

We're moving on to stretch goals now. If we make it to $4500, we'll be able to pay our designers more, which we'd like to do as they're making two different designs, one for the special edition and one for the June 2018 release. And we'll also completely cover the money we've spent so far on Fleshers: to wit, payment for InDesign (so we can make beautiful pages), a sensitivity reader, and other miscellaneous expenses. 

We'll get more books out to more people, which is not a small part of this campaign. And every little bit donated adds to writing time for the sequel. Pinkers: Revolution, which we want to bring out in late 2018. 

Who we are

We are Alison Croggon and Daniel Keene, and last year we co-wrote a 350 page dystopian adventure called FLESHERS, the first book in a projected series. We wanted to write a passionate book that responds to the world in which we now live, a book that celebrates love, survival and struggle against the odds in a brutal, authoritarian world. And we think that's what we've done. 

We discovered that we LOVE writing collaboratively. Writing FLESHERS was the most fun we've had writing anything in years! We're both experienced, award winning writers: Alison is the author of the epic fantasy series The Books of Pellinor, which in the early 2000s sold more than half a million copies in the US and the UK. Her most recent Pellinor book, THE BONE QUEEN, was a 2016 Aurealis Awards finalist. She's also a poet, librettist and critic. Daniel is a playwright and has won seven Premier's Literary Awards and a bunch of other prizes. And he's very famous in France, so famous they made him a Knight! (Officially, a Chevalier de Ordre des Arts et des Lettres). 

Oleisha Proksa is a young designer who will be doing our covers and co-illustrating with her brother AJ. This is a previous book cover of Oelsiha's, for Alison Croggon's Pellinor short story The Island.

The Island: book cover by Oleisha Proksa

Crowdfunding is a means of resourcing a creative project, finding supporters who want it to happen in the world and are prepared to sponsor it. So here we are! We've never done anything like this before. This is our first novel together, our first science fiction book and our first crowdfunding campaign. Life is an adventure into the unknown, right? 

Concept art: Newport City by Oleisha Proksa

We're seeking your support to get FLESHERS into print and pixels. We're planning to release the novel for sale in June 2018, and this Pozible is to cover publication expenses, the top priority being to properly pay our talented young designers, Oleisha and AJ Proksa, to make a stunning book. You can see some of their concept art  on this page. And we also want to get FLESHERS into the hands of readers, because that's what writers want most of all. 

To acknowledge your support, we're offering you an exclusive edition of FLESHERS especially designed for this campaign, in ebook, paperback and hardback. It will be published by Newport Street Books, our indie publishing imprint, in March 2018, three months in advance of general release. We want this special edition to be as beautiful as we can make it. Each print book will be signed and the hardback will be stamped and numbered. And this edition will be available ONLY to those who support this campaign.

Concept art: AI drones and Newport City soldiers, AJ Proksa

We're also offering signed postcards of FLESHERS artwork and an exclusive digital EP of music written for FLESHERS by Ben Keene, some of which you can hear in the video. And at the upper end of things, there's a chance to get one-to-one mentoring from Alison Croggon, Daniel Keene or both of us.

If you think of a reward you would like to see but isn't there, let us know! 

Our timeline

Through November/December this year we'll complete a final edit and rewrite. By January 2018, we'll finish the final copyedit and finalise the cover design and interiors. By mid-February 2018 final proofs will be compiled and sent to the printer. We'll receive the special edition books at the beginning of March and send out rewards to our wonderful supporters. And then onwards to public release in June.

Make your pledge now and our undying gratitude will arrive in March 2018! 

We are excited about our book, and we want to give it to the world in the best possible form. If we make our target, our $3000 budget will look like this:

1. Priority One will be to pay our brilliant designers and illustrators Oleisha and AJ Proksa to create beautiful covers and images, some of which will be exclusively for the books sent to the supporters of this campaign..

2. Priority Two will be printing and e-formatting exclusive editions of our book and postage for sending them out to our wonderful supporters. The actual cost is hard to estimate, as it depends how many people want the books and which kind of books they want! But we've worked it out so that for most rewards, the cost is between a half to a third of the pledges. 

3. The remainder will be used to promote the book when it finally hits the shelves in June 2018. 

5% of the total will go to Pozible for hosting us, and another 3% or so on PayPal/credit card fees.

If we make more than we expect

If we go past our goal and make it to $4500, it will pay for the miscellaneous expenses we've incurred already, such as design software and so on. And if we're incredibly lucky and make more than than that, it will help to finance writing the sequel to FLESHERS, which is well into the planning stage. We are planning to bring Book 2 out at the end of 2018. It will be called PINKERS: Revolution. And it will be awesome.

First, you have to write the book. We've done that bit already, and we think we have a great story to tell you. But that's only the beginning.

The major challenge is to make an awesome object, in both pixels and print. We're professional writers, and we've done a little self publishing already. (You can see previous books at Newport Street Books, including a cover for The Island, one of Alison's fantasy short stories, by Oleisha Proksa). We know how much work it takes to bring a book to fruition. We want it to read well, to look wonderful, we even want it to smell amazing, though that might be difficult for the ebook. 

That means time, attention to detail, professional advice and a lot of hard work. We'll do our absolute best to ensure that FLESHERS is the highest quality book we can make. 

The next challenge will be delivering rewards to our supporters in the promised timeframe. We are confident of our publishing timeline, and plan to get the books delivered at the beginning of March. The real challenge will be setting up an assembly line, Excel sheet in hand, to make sure we do it all on time and get it right!