Support “The Monster” Trilogy at Patreon

Posted on 05/12/2017 by Shurik the Creator under Updates

Dear Amazing Readers and Supporters,

I hope your days are full of MEGA exciting stories and adventures!

I also hope that the novel “The Monster: Blade of Darkness”, the first part of “The Monster” trilogy, has given you the opportunity to experience such exciting adventures in your mind.

Nowadays I keep receiving messages from you, dear Readers and Supporters, about the next book of “The Monster” trilogy: When will it be written? When will it be published? And when will you be able to get your hands on it and continue the adventures together with Jessie, Jack, Azul, and Blade of Darkness?

This encourages me to keep writing and developing the story for you to enjoy and learn from.

However, writing novels takes a lot of commitment of time and effort from my side. In order to be able to allocate this time and effort and focus on creating the next books of “The Monster” trilogy, as well as continue doing this together with a collaborative community of you, dear Readers and Supporters, I have just launched the Patreon page of “The Monster” trilogy.

So, with this post I invite you to visit the page at https://www.patreon.com/themonster and check out my video and story of creating the SciFi trilogy “The Monster” there. And if you like certain benefits that you will get for supporting the trilogy do choose them. I will be grateful to you for any support you can offer for making this big and bold dream come true.

With great respect and gratitude,

Alexander

Merry Christmas and Happy Stories in the New Year!

Posted on 12/24/2016 by Shurik the Creator under Greetings

Dear Amazing Readers and Supporters,

I hope you are enjoying the preparations for celebrating Christmas and New Year. I also hope that the year 2016 was a very productive and successful one. It was so for me and my writing and book-publishing progress, an achievement that became possible due to your kind support, valuable contribution, constructive feedback, and, of course, appreciation of my works. And here I would like to express my gratitude to you for all this!

In 2016 my science-fiction novel “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” reached many more of Amazing Readers in different parts of the world. The books travelled to different places in my home country Moldova, then to Ukraine, Hungary, and even Myanmar. You can see it on the Pinterest page of “The Monster”. Moreover, as part of the serendii stand in the project StadtLesen, the English version of “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” made a tour around Austria and Germany, where it was exhibited in specially arranged public spaces for anyone to read it. For this I thank its publisher, serendii, and my Austrian friend and writer, Wolfgang Stricker.

the-monster-merry-christmas-stadtlesen

Also in 2016 a very important achievement happened: the “family” of linguistic diversity of the books “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” was enriched by one more language: Ukrainian. So, nowadays you can find the novel available for reading worldwide in three languages: Russian (original), English, and Ukrainian. This was achieved due to significant contributions of the three Amazing Readers from Ukraine, who are now co-authors of the Ukrainian version of “The Monster: Blade of Darkness”: Aleksandra Polivanaya, Alexandra Pakhurina, and Lada Merkulova. So, thank you for that, dear Ladies and friends!

the-monster-merry-christmas-in-ukrainian

Finally, the year 2016 saw quite good progress in writing my current science-fiction romantic novel “Simply Love”, the prequel to “The Monster: Blade of Darkness”. I managed to write ten more chapters of its second draft version. In 2017 you can expect me to finish the final draft in Russian, proof-read it, and translate it into English. And, who knows, maybe you will see “Simply Love” already published by the end of 2017.

the-monster-merry-christmas-simply-love

All in all, 2016 was a very good year for me as a writer largely due to your interest in my works, support offered to me, your feedback shared with me, and, of course, your belief in me and the messages I share with the world through my books. Thank you very much, dear Amazing Readers and Supporters!

I wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy continuation of writing your wonderful life stories in the New Year!

the-monster-merry-christmas-greetings-eng

With great respect and gratitude,

Alexander

“The Monster: Blade of Darkness” in Ukrainian

Posted on 05/18/2016 by Shurik the Creator under Updates

Dear Amazing People,

There has been a long period of time when I hadn’t written anything on this blog. There are two reasons for that. The first one has already been mentioned in the recent posts: the writing of my next novel entitled “Simply Love”. The second one is that together with some of my amazing friends and readers from Ukraine, Aleksandra, Alexandra, and Lada, I have been busy preparing a new edition of the Sci-Fi novel “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” to be available in the beautiful and melodic Ukrainian language.

The Monster in Ukrainian

Recently I came up with a saying: “My reader is my CEO”. It means that I rely on the readers of my books to decide what they want to see and read from my side. Therefore, when Aleksandra and Lada expressed willingness to help me bring the first part of “The Monster” trilogy to their home country by translating into their native language, I gladly agreed. Since then these amazing Ladies have managed to translate the entire novel into Ukrainian, while I have found possibilities for it to be published and available for orders worldwide. Later another wonderful person, Alexandra, joined our endeavour and contributed with reviewing and editing the translated text. And nowadays the book “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” is almost ready to be released.

Co-authors

In order to cover the costs of publishing the first set of books and to gather pre-orders for them, we have launched the crowdfunding campaign “The Monster: Blade of Darkness in Ukrainian”. On its page you can read more about the campaign, its purpose, aims, and benefits for you, and then choose the amount of support you prefer to offer and the respective perk(-s) you will receive. These perks include but not limited to:

+ Gratitude message with you name shared on “The Monster” accounts in Facebook, Twitter, and VKontakte;

+ “The Monster” special edition postcard sent to your postal address;

+ Your name stated in the Gratitude list of supporters in every book;

+ E-book and paperback versions of “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” in Ukrainian with signatures of all co-authors sent to your e-mail and postal address;

+ Exclusive invitation to the official launch event of “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” in Ukrainian with your presentation as the main supporter of this dream coming true.

So, we invite you to go to the page of the campaign “The Monster: Blade of Darkness in Ukrainian”, choose the benefits you would like to receive, and pre-order your own copy of the novel “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” in the beautiful Ukrainian language. And then please share the campaign with your friends and contacts in Ukraine for them also to be able to pre-order their copies of the book.

We, Alexander, Aleksandra, Alexandra, and Lada, are grateful to you in advance!

With great respect and gratitude,

Alexander

How to Publish a Book in the Digital Age: Part IV

Posted on 06/06/2015 by Shurik the Creator under Lessons

Dear Amazing People,

You have written your very own book, you have published it, and you have organized the book launch event. Now what? If you expect the sales of your book to skyrocket immediately from its presentation, you might be rather overoptimistic… well, unless your book was written specifically according to the modern literary trends, is tailored to the modern readers’ caprices, and is designed to be sold fast. Then, yes, it might quickly become a bestseller and a crowd of fans might be knocking on your door for autographs.

However, if your book is a reflection of your inner world, contains your thoughts and ideas, and is designed to communicate your unique message to the world rather than adapt to it, then there is much more work to do to grow your community of readers. “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” falls in this category of books, therefore I am actively using various means, both on-line and off-line, to keep in touch with its readers and scale up their global community. And in this blog post I will share some of the tips and tricks on how to do it from my experience.

Lesson #4: Permanently stay in touch with your community of readers.

The Digital Age we live in nowadays offers a multitude of tools to keep in touch with people worldwide. And you can use them to interact with your amazing readers, engage new ones into your community, and grow it.

For a start, you can create a blog or a full website with the blog integrated in it for your book. In this way you will be able to inform your readers about your events and progress in writing other masterpieces. WordPress and Blogger offer a lot of quite good and free tools to build an appealing blog / website. For instance, this website and blog you are reading were done in WordPress, while my poetry blog “The Thoughts” was prepared in Blogger. Alternatively, if you have some money to spend, you can order a professionally designed website for your book.

But do not limit yourself to your own website. I advise you to write guest posts and articles on other literature-focused blogs and websites. In my case, I mostly post some of my articles also on the blog of serendii publishing, the agency in Austria that published and now distributes the English version of my book “The Monster: Blade of Darkness”. Book Blogs is another on-line portal, where I share my literary news, and which you can also use for staying in touch not only with readers, but also with other writers.

Talking about virtual communities of readers and writers, I really suggest you to join them and be active here, as they can become the Cornucopia for your own readers community. Goodreads is one of the largest and well-known ones. You can even find your book there and invite readers to rate it, give you valuable feedback, and suggest others to read it. For example, here you can see how my book “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” with several ratings and reviews looks on Goodreads.

Also be very active on social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest are some of the many social networking platforms that you can use to attract readers and constantly communicate with them. On Facebook and Twitter you can create a page / account of your book and share the updates, like I do it here and here. On Instagram and Pinterest you can share photos of your book and its readers worldwide, just like me here.

And why not sending your amazing readers a nice newsletter, where you express your gratitude for them reading your book, kindly ask for valuable feedback on it, and inform them about the latest news and events related to your literary activity. For example, I try to do it every month and on special occasions, but you can choose to send such newsletter more often. And I use MailChimp as a pretty convenient and free tool for that.

Last but not least, do not limit your engagement with the readers only to the virtual world. You can organize off-line gatherings within your community, attend various literary events, donate copies of your book to public libraries, and so on. I confess that I have not been very good at that, but I learn my lesson and improve. As I remember that readers are people, who, like all of us, seek attention and care. And they will be very happy to communicate with you if you are proactive in your communication with them.

Well, that is basically all I have learnt from my book publishing experience and that I can share with you. Hopefully you have enjoyed this series of blog posts and have found something useful for you to use in your own literary activity. If you have any question or request for me to write about something else from my book publishing experience, please use the Contact section to send me a message.

I wish you a MEGA large community of amazing readers of your book worldwide!

With great respect and gratitude,

Alexander

Note: This is a repost of the article on serendii publishing website.

Happy International Poetry Day!

Posted on 03/21/2015 by Shurik the Creator under Greetings

Dear Amazing People,

Today is the World Poetry Day. So, on this occasion I wish you to never forget about that young and perhaps shy poet / poetess hiding within you, and from time to time to let him / her out to amaze and inspire the world with the power of a poem! And I also wish that inspiration finds you a wonderful person to spend time with, and that it carries you through your life on its large beautiful wings!

Obviously, on the World Poetry Day people share poems with each other. So, as a gift to you please allow me to share the poem “I Love You!” that was written some time ago and was hidden in my personal poetry journal until today, when it has been brought before your eyes. I hope that you like it and that you find your own tender feelings described in it. And I also hope that one day (maybe today?) you will share your own poem(-s) with the world, or at least with me. I am looking forward to that!

Now enjoy the day and the flight on the wings of inspiration!

With great respect and gratitude,

Alexander

How to Publish a Book in the Digital Age: Part I

Posted on 03/04/2015 by Shurik the Creator under Lessons

Dear Amazing People,

Have you ever thought of writing and publishing your own book?

Would you like to experience that unique moment when you see people around you reading your book and getting excited and inspired from it?

I know that at least some of you would reply to these questions with a definite “Yes!”, as there are people among you, who were inspired by the release of the book “The Monster: Blade of Darkness”. This fact makes me feel very happy, as I would love to read your literary works one day. And especially for such amazing people like you I decided to share some tips on how to write and publish a book in the modern digital age. Perhaps they will help you make your dream of publishing a book come true, as it has happened with me and my novel “The Monster: Blade of Darkness”.

Nowadays the process of writing and publishing a book is undoubtedly different than it was just some years ago. I cannot say whether it is more difficult or easy, as some stages of the process can be done easily due to modern internet technologies, while others are more challenging to execute. The challenges are related mostly to the fact that, from one side not many people read books nowadays, and from the other side the competition on the international book market is quite big with new titles appearing every month worldwide.

Well, to make things clear, I will not be able to give advice on solving all the challenges that you might face on your journey towards a released book. I will just share with you some lessons I had learnt while working on the book “The Monster: Blade of Darkness”. And I will do it step by step throughout a series of blog posts. So, here is the first one.

Lesson #1: Share Your Dream!

This is the lesson I had learnt only when I came to writing the final chapter of my novel. And I am certain that if I hadn’t learnt it and hadn’t acted accordingly, there would be no book “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” being sold in on-line bookstores worldwide. Because it was due to me talking about my dream and sharing the idea of releasing a book that I’d got connected to Wolfgang Stricker, the founder of serendii publishing, and who kindly agreed to publish and distribute the English version of the book “The Monster: Blade of Darkness”. Also revealing my desire and intention to write and release this book with my dear amazing friends allowed me to gather a community of supporters, who then helped me collect the necessary financial resources through a crowdfunding campaign. I will write about this campaign in the next blog post of the series “How to Publish a Book in the Digital Age”.

For now my piece of advice to you is:

Whether you are just thinking about a book, have started writing one, or already finishing its concluding chapter, do share about it with your friends and relatives. Spread the word about your dream. The digital age offers a multitude of tools to do it, like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc. Write about your vision of your own book on your personal blog. For example, in the blog post “Wish You MEGA Great Love!” I mentioned about my upcoming work “Simply Love”, although it is still far from being completed. Join special reading communities, like Goodreads, Book Blogs, etc. Let people know what you are doing and what you want to offer to them in the end. There will likely be a large number of people who will laugh at you and will try to discourage you from pursuing your dream. But there will definitely be some, who will appreciate your dream and will try to help you. Invite them to do it. And for their help you can (and should, I would say) mention them in a special gratitude message in the book and/or on its website, like I did in the case of “The Monster: Blade of Darkness”. Ultimately these amazing people will also become your most devoted readers and promoters.

This is it for now. I hope you have found something useful for you in this short article. In the next one I will share with you how to get initial funds and first readers for your book through a crowdfunding campaign.

Best wishes in moving forward with your dream!

With great respect and gratitude,

Alexander

Note: This is a repost of the article on serendii publishing website.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Posted on 12/25/2014 by Shurik the Creator under Greetings

Dear Amazing Supporters and Readers,

Firstly, allow me to express my gratitude for your support and appreciation of my first large novel “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” and for sharing this dream with me. I am happy and honored that this dream is in your hands and you enjoy it! This means a lot to me!

And secondly, I wish you a MEGA Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year! May all your dreams also come true next year, like it happened to me this year! And I wish you to experience inspiration, success, and love each day!

See you in 2015!

With great respect and gratitude,

Alexander

The Monster in 2015

Posted on 12/21/2014 by Shurik the Creator under Updates

Dear Amazing People,

The New Year is approaching fast. Soon we will enter the year 2015 full of new inspiration, creations, challenges, and successes. Great results that are consequences of our actions this year await us ahead.

This is true for me and my novel “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” that has been published this year and has already raised an international community of amazing readers. They have given me very good and inspiring feedback, which motivates me to start the second book of “The Monster” trilogy faster. And it is also great to know that some of the readers were so inspired by my novel that they started working on releasing their own literary creations.

The year 2015 will bring new interesting results. Before initiating the work on the second book, “The Monster: Armageddon’s Blade”, I intend to write and publish a relatively short side novel entitled “Simply Love”. The novel will be included in the book with the same title along with a collection of my love-and-romance poem. The reason to do that is not only to try to explain the intricacies of love relationships in the modern world, but also to introduce several key characters to be featured in the upcoming novel “The Monster: Armageddon’s Blade”, as well as their life stories, and thus expand “The Monster Universe”.

Besides that, the book lovers in Ukraine can expect a special gift in 2015 in the form of the novel “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” in Ukrainian language. Two of my amazing friends from Ukraine, Lada Merkulova and Aleksandra Polivanaya, have kindly volunteered to bring it to the Ukrainian-speaking readers and have already started translating the novel. Thus the Ukrainian version will then supplement the Russian and English books already on sale and should become available by the end of 2015.

And that is not all! There will be much more exciting news related to the novel “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” coming throughout next year. So, stay tuned and enjoy the holiday season!

And I wish you a MEGA wonderful, inspiring, and happy New Year!

With great respect and gratitude,

Alexander

The Most Valuable Thing for a Writer

Posted on 10/18/2014 by Shurik the Creator under Updates

Dear Amazing People,

What do you think is the most important and valuable thing for a writer?

Yes, that is right! It is, dear readers, your appreciation and opinion about the writer’s work. It is your feedback that gives the writer the stimulus and motivation to write more, as well as the ideas and suggestions for improvement to be considered in his/her writing.

This is also true for me. I love readers’ feedback about my poems, short stories, and novels. It is like a fuel for my writing engine: the more feedback I receive, the faster and better it works.

My novel “The Monster: Blade of Darkness” has already been read by a good number of amazing people worldwide. That is why I started contacting them and asking for their opinion on the novel. All feedback that came from them was quite interesting, positive, and useful for me in terms of planning the style and plot of the other novels of “The Monster” trilogy. And in order to show the feedback received, I set up the section Testimonials on this website. There you are able to see the readers, who have already finished reading the book “The Monster: Blade of Darkness”, and their opinion regarding it.

Furthermore, I invite YOU to share your feedback about the book. For that please use the Contact section of the website. I will be much grateful for your opinion and suggestions, dear reader.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

With great respect and gratitude,

Alexander