Thanks so much for being quick and getting your surveys filled out! I've just got in copies of Lucianus and Aliens in New Florida and I hope to start sending them out soon. Because of that, I've just hit the button to Lock orders. After that's complete, I'll charge cards and start shipping books out! However, there are 8 people who still need to fill out their surveys!
Remember, we've got two more campaigns going on this year, and the first one starts September 10!
Mary Robinette Kowal will be recording,Lesbians in Space: The Sapphics Strike Back! If you backed the first one, I know you're still waiting on your audiobook of Lesbians in Space: Where No Man Has Gone Before, but I promise it's coming soon! Mary Robinette had a busy travel schedule in June, which delayed things a little, but I expect the final any day now.
CLICK HERE to follow now to make sure you get alerted when it starts!
Dead in the Water - book 2 of Athena Giles' Children of Sea and Sky fantasy series, starting with Waves Take Your Bones!
Tide Tale - book 3 of Kristina W. Kelly's Tales of Trelvania. Continue the wildly popular cozy fantasy series, including Tavern Tale and Tea Tale!
Anything But Ordinary - book 2 in Heather Tracy's These Dreams, with a new standalone story (but with some of the same characters) as her first book, Only a Chapter!
The Venus Vendetta, by Robin C.M. Duncan.Come back to the Quirk & Moth near sci-fi detective series, including The Mandroid Murders, The Carborundum Conundrum, and The Rigel Redemption, with Book 4!
Bond of Wildflowers by Connor Lane. Enter a cozy YA fantasy where all is not as it seems between the fae world and ours!
Purgatory Rift - book 3 of the Call of the Void series, by A.Z. Rozkillis, starting with Space Station X and Fractal Termiunus. A group of survivors is stuck in a seemingly endless loop of horrors just on the other side of the rift, and must plot a way to escape. Return to more lesbian comedy horror!
Battle Tested - book 2 of E.J. Isaacs' The Unforgiving Stars series. If you like Star Trek and Babylon 5, you'll love this series! Book 3 will be coming too. Stay tuned!
CLICK HERE to follow the page for author interviews before it starts!
I hope your summer is treating you well. I just got a message from my editor -- she hit the halfway mark today! This means that we're on track to get the book back in mid-August like I thought. So, your surveys will be going out in August, and my aim for the e-books to be delivered is September 18th.
So, the current timeline is as follows --
I'll be sending the first few surveys out by August 15th.
All of the surveys will be sent out by August 21st.
Cards will be locked September 1.
E-books will be delivered between September 18th and September 21st. This is also when the formatting should be ready for physical copies and I'll be sending them off to my printers.
Goal for physical copies to be sent out is October 15th. This, of course, is subject to change based on delays and printer schedules, but ideally I'll be ahead of these dates.
Thank you for sticking with me, folks! I hope to have another update soon!
Thanks everyone who joined for our release events! I had so much fun, and I hope you did as well.
With local pickups out of the way, I can finally move on to shipping! I've already sent out a few today, so some of you might have already received your tracking numbers. If you have any questions about your order, feel free to reach out.
Expect fulfillment to take a little time. I ship everything by hand, and I'm waiting on restocks of a couple items that should be arriving later this week. That being said, I do plan on having everything sent out by the end of August. If there are any delays, I'll let you know in an update. BackerKit will email you with a tracking number once your order is complete.
Hand-bound editions may take a more time as I'm still assembling them.
Once again, thank you so much for supporting my first crowdfunding campaign, and happy reading!
Thank you so much for your patience as I get these items ordered and ready to go. All items for Wave 1 backers have been ordered and are currently on their way to the US.
With luck, everything will get here in early August, and you all will have books in your hands soon!
For those of you who have not yet filled out your surveys, you all will officially be a part of Wave 2. I will be ordering final items for Wave 2 at the beginning of September, so please fill out your surveys by then to get your items as quickly as possible.
Thanks so much to everyone who attended the release party last week. It was a fantastic turn out! If you missed the event, don't worry. You can claim your local pickup tomorrow, July 18th, at our Silent Book Club at Haven Coffee and Books in Aurora, 10 a.m. — 2. p.m. This will be a chill event, with themed coffee drinks and reading sprints, so come hang out!
If you couldn't make either date, but still want local pickup, please reach out so I can schedule a time to meet with you.
With our locals out of the way, I can move onto shipping which means starting tomorrow, I'll be locking down that survey information. If you need to make any changes to your order, now is the time to do so! Also, if you're one of the stragglers who hasn't filled out their survey, make sure you get that done, or I can't ship you your book!
Thanks again everyone who supported the campaign, and happy reading!
Things are proceeding at a good pace here at the Common Bonds Headquarters (a very real place, I promise). We have completed a first round of editorial notes for everyone, and I've familiarized myself with the backend of BackerKit to proceed with surveys and digital goodies distribution.
Digital Rewards Because these are new tools, we'll proceed with a little bit of care and not hit the shiny distribute button on everything at once. I will first send two things, the Behind the Scenes Zine and Kaeralgan the Vicious and the Sky Mobulas, and if that goes well, the rest will follow.
Please note that the three following digital rewards will only be ready this fall, and will be sent along as they become ready:
Common Bonds 3 (obviously)
Undying Loyalty (Nerezia 9)
The Fox Now Wears His Skin
Surveys Similarly to Digital Rewards, the surveys will first go out as a smoke test, to about 5% of you, and we'll resolve any issues there before sending them out en masse. These surveys will ask you to reconfirm any add ons you had, give you a last change to add more, and ask for your addresses. You will still be able to change your address down the line, if needed. We'll give you a heads up before that locks.
That's about it from us for now. Keep an eye on those inboxes (and spam folders) this coming week so you can be sure not to miss anything.
This is not the first post-campaign update we wanted to make, but here we are.
It has come to our attention that an author we have contracted to publish has been suspected of using generative AI in their work. As is clear in our submission and publication guidelines, we do not allow for stories that have deployed generative AI in any part of their development.
This is never an easy challenge to face, but we are committed to ensuring that our backers’ money is going only to human-made work but also that we are not disqualifying human-made work without doing our own due diligence.
We firmly believe that an author-first approach requires publishers to make their own evaluation, case-by-case, based in human interactions and human judgement. Only then can we ourselves ensure that cultural differences, language barriers, and other elements that disproportionately affect marginalized writers are properly accounted for. Our goal with Common Bonds is to elevate aro stories and voices, and we simply can’t do that if we aren’t first considering how to best protect those who entrust their work to us. It would be a failure to our commitment to marginalized authors to not specifically acknowledge and account for the way fear around ai can incite witch hunts that disproportionally affect Black, neurodivergent, and Global South-based writers, especially.
We are already figuring out next steps and how to proceed, and we ask that our community gives us time to approach this with the care that is needed to ensure the least harm. Thanks so much for all your support, and we’ll return to you with a clear and transparent decision in the future.
Common Bonds Team
There will be news (more fun news) regarding the distribution of digital rewards soon, but we hope you understand that this as well as editing work for the anthology has taken priority. See you soon.
