Inside the Rewards: What Backing Fatal Turn Of The Tide Gets You
I spent longer on the reward tiers for this Kickstarter than I did on some entire chapters, which tells you something about my priorities, or possibly my anxieties. I wanted them to feel like a genuine thank you rather than a loyalty card you stamp until you get a free coffee. Whether I've managed that is for you to judge, but here's what's actually on offer, and what backing it means in practice.
A Thank You and a Name in the Book
The first tier is the simplest one, and I'd argue it's the one I mean most sincerely. A personal thank you from me, and your name in the acknowledgements of the ebook. Acknowledgements pages are a strange little corner of publishing. Nobody reads them for entertainment, and yet every author treats them like a solemn duty, because they're the one place you get to say, in writing, that a book didn't happen in a vacuum. This one certainly hasn't. If you're in there, it's because you helped make Book Three exist in a form readers could actually hold, and I'd like that on the record.
Reading Fatal Turn of the Tide Before Anyone Else
The next tier adds an ebook of Fatal Turn of the Tide itself, a full week before it goes on general sale. I won't pretend this is a small thing to me. Early readers are the ones who catch the sentence that doesn't quite land, or tell me Paula's said something twice without realising, and their reactions in that first week are usually the most honest I get, before reviews start arriving with half an eye on star ratings. Getting the book into your hands before it's officially out feels like the right way to say that your support bought something real.
Meeting Paula From the Beginning
The tier above that includes all three Paula Langford ebooks, again a week ahead of Fatal Turn's launch. So if you haven't met Paula yet, or if it's been a while since Checked Out at the Imperial or Murder Most Dramatic, this is the version where you get the whole run in one go, in time to read them in order before Book Three lands. There's something I like about that shape. Most readers come to a series one book at a time, waiting between instalments the way the rest of us wait for a kettle to boil. This tier compresses all of that into a single week, which feels almost indecently generous of me, though I suppose you're the one paying for it.
Becoming Part of the Story
The top tier is the one that makes me slightly nervous to type out loud, because it means your name will appear as a character in a future book. Not a thank you tucked at the back, but an actual presence on the page, in a story I haven't written yet. I've thought about this rewriting it as a smaller promise several times, and each time I've decided that if I'm asking people to fund this tour, the biggest reward should actually cost me something too. So it will. Details on how that works, and roughly which book it lands in, will follow once the campaign closes and I know exactly who I'm writing in.
Where This Leaves Us
Each tier includes everything below it, so nobody's choosing between the acknowledgements and the ebooks. It's simply a question of how far you'd like to go, from a quiet thank you to a starring role in whatever Paula gets tangled up in next. If any of that appeals, the campaign page has the full details and the actual pledge amounts, which I've deliberately kept out of this post because numbers belong on a Kickstarter page and nowhere else.
And if a reward tier isn't for you right now, that's entirely fine too. Reading this far counts for something, in my book if nowhere else.