Seems there was a bit of a controversy with the vote tallying; you can read my write-up of it, as well as my general thoughts on the whole experience.

Anyway, a big thank-you to everyone who took the time to vote for us and kept us fairly steadily in the top ten for both weeks. Bookhabit might not value your support, but we certainly do.

Next up: Merchandise!

Remember that we need to be in the top ten in order to progress to the next round, so if you haven’t voted yet, now’s the time to do so!

The above link will take you to the eBook retailer site, Mobipocket. The download from there uses DRM and costs money (albeit the nominal fee of $1), so if that’s not your bag baby, you may also pick up the free version.

And while we’re here; the Bookhabit Unpublished Competition still has a little over a week left to run. Chainbreaker held the top slot for a little over 24 hours, which was brilliant, though we’ve since slipped down to a respectable third. If you haven’t voted yet, you’ve got until May 25th to do so.

A whopping sixty books — Chainbreaker included — made it through to Round 2, and Bookhabit is looking for the top ten of these in order to progress to the final judging phase. So how do you help? Well, log into your Bookhabit account (you know, the one you made during the last round) and visit the ranking page. Find Chainbreaker in the list, and click the blue arrow.

And that’s it; that’s all we need. (Note: You might have to refresh the page after clicking, since the site’s scripts seem to be a bit wonky. As long as the entry for Chainbreaker appears in the right-hand column, you’re done.)

Round 2 is open until the May 25, so — as they say — vote early, vote often, vote for Chainbreaker.

There are two more competition rounds before the prize, both of which are judged rather than based on popular appeal. Nope, as it turns out. Jesse informs me that Round 2 is also a popularity contest. It runs between the 12th and 25th May, and you can bet we’ll be nagging you more when the time comes. So, fingers crossed…

And while we’re at it, Chainbreaker is also available as a free download at Lulu.com! Because all publicity is good publicity, right?

Bookhabit charges a nominal fee for downloading ‘full’ books, but since we’re giving Chainbreaker away for free here anyway, we’ve waived that and the full book is available by clicking “Download first chapter (FREE)”. We’re sneaky like that. Of course, if you want to support two struggling wannabe authors by buying the whole thing for a measly $2.50, we won’t stop you. You know, just in case.

Why Bookhabit, you ask? Well, they have this competition, see. The prize is $5,000 and — more importantly — exposure. There is a little over one week of voting left and it sure would be nice to get to Round Two. Something we need your help on. All you have to do is pop over to the site and download and/or rate Chainbreaker for us. We get 5 points per download and one point per star per rating. Five minutes of your day, max, I swear.

Don’t make me get Jesse out here with the emotional blackmail!

There’s not much there at the moment — I need to go through and prettify it up a bit later — but we’re open and accepting fans so… what’re you waiting for?

So, both Jesse and I are extremely pleased by the fact that since releasing Chainbreaker we’ve had a respectable 165 uniquely identifiable downloads. That’s very cool! 105 of those have been referred in from our news post at deviantART (go fav it if you’ve got a moment, eh?), so major kudos for the support from that community.

I’d also like to thank all the people who’ve provided us with feedback thus far. Opening yourself up for criticism over something you’ve worked for so long on is always gut-churning, so it’s gratifying that all the comments we’ve gotten back thus far have been mostly positive. Thus far we’ve got a couple of things on the cards for review, including the pacing and structure of the story’s beginning. We’ve even had a request for a sequel, so we are — of course — more than happy to report that there is one, it’s called Dead on Arrival, and it’s about two thirds written.

Finally this week, it’d be very remiss of me not to mention the new concept art that’s snuck its way onto the site; from Jesse there’s a brand spanking new pic of Miriah while from yours truly it’s Loki. These were originally done for the World Ends With You Contest at deviantART, and you can check out (and fav, of course) the originals here and here respectively.

That’s it for now, so until next time; keep reading!

This is, I supposed, what you’d call a beta draft of the novel and here at UN.com we’re going to be running a bit of a social experiment. See, Chainbreaker needs you! In the same way that software needs beta testers to snuff out all the bugs, we want you (yes, you) to help us work out the kinks in our story.

So here’s the deal.

1. First off, download Chainbreaker.
2. Read it!
3. Tell us what you thought. Negative or positive, it doesn’t matter. All we ask is you make a post in your weblog or journal with some feedback. That’s all.

Our favourite critics go in the running to win some hyper-limited edition first press run Really Real Life copies of the book (care of everyone’s favourite vanity press company, Lulu). That’s like two free books for the price of sharing your opinions with the world. Which y’all like doing anyway, right?

Right.

So what are you waiting for? Get reading!