Published! ALL FOR ONE by Sophia Beaumont

We could not be more pleased to announce that the 2017 ShoreIndie Runner Up's book has been released into the world! All For One by Sophia Beaumont went live on Amazon this month, and Sophia took time out of her busy launch schedule to do a brief interview with us about her book and her experience with the ShoreIndie Contest. Read on to learn about this gender-bent retelling of The Three Musketeers, what Sophia got out of the ShoreIndie Contest, and what advice this self-publishing author has for those who are considering the path.

SI: Congratulations on the publication of your novel All For One! What inspired this book? 
SB: I love reading classic literature, and one of my all time favorites is The Three Musketeers. I love the comedy and the setting and the characters, and I just wanted to do something with that. But so many classics are rife with sexism, racism—every form of bigotry imaginable. If I was going to work with an old story, I wanted give it new life through a more modern lens.

My mom also happens to be from Montreal, so when I was playing around one day, brainstorming, combining the two just seemed natural. Adding elements of the American Civil War, steampunk, women’s rights, immigration issues—it all just came together very naturally.

Published!: WHAT WE KNOW NOW by Mo Parisian

We are positively thrilled to welcome another ShoreIndie Round 1 winner's book into the world! What We Know Now by Mo Parisian went live on Amazon on November 17th, 2017, and Mo was kind enough to do a brief interview with us about her book and her experience with the ShoreIndie Contest. Read on to learn why Mo decided to self-publish What We Know Now, what it took to get it publish-ready, and Mo's advice to emerging indies.

SI: Congratulations on the publication of your novel, What We Know Now! What inspired this book?

MJP: Thank you! I am so excited to finally be able to share this book with everyone. The idea for What We Know Now started in Frankfort, a small beach town in northern Michigan. We were vacationing over Labor Day weekend and checking out some of the lighthouses. There is a row of beautiful beach homes located on the beach in Frankfort, and one in particular caught my eye. I knew immediately this was the setting for my book, and it was just a matter of figuring out who lived in that house and what the conflict would be! Obviously, it isn’t that easy, but the setting never changed for me. I can still see it so clearly.

SI: Tell us a little about why you decided to self-publish this novel.

Published!: MALFUNCTION by J.E. Purazzi

Today on the ShoreIndie blog we're celebrating the publication of one of the books that was a 2017 Round 1 Winner, Malfunction (The Malfunction Trilogy, Book 1) by J.E. Purazzi, which went live on Amazon on Sunday, October 8th. J.E. was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule to do a brief interview with us about her book and her experience with the ShoreIndie Contest. Read on to learn about the inspirations for Malfunction, what it took to get it publish-ready, J.E.'s advice to emerging indies, and more.

ShoreIndie (SI): Congratulations on the publication of your novel Malfunction! Will you tell us a little about the inspiration for the trilogy?

J.E. Purazzi (JEP): Sure! The original idea was just going to be a short story for Wattpad, something to try to gain an audience for my fantasy project before I really knew good marketing practices. My first glimmer of the idea was focused on the virtual reality and was about a kid (a blend of Menrva and Cowl back then) in a subterranean city, escaping through Virtual Reality only to find out that the game they were playing was real. As I worked on the concept, hammering out the plot holes and applying existing science, I ended up sticking with the one image of the climax in the second book and wrote the first draft of Malfunction in about a month.

One of the ideas that carried through all the drafts was that of human beings being reduced to objects in order to provide safety and pleasure to others, a concept that I think is really relevant to the issues of modern-day slavery and human trafficking.