2024 Anniversary Update

November marks the anniversary of both my first book published on Amazon, and my first actually successful book (Heretic Spellblade). So I try to make a post each year to sum up how things are going. There’ll also be a separate Messenger update with more details and topics.

If you do have any questions you want answered, pop them in a comment.

An Odd Year

It’s difficult to describe 2024 as anything other than “odd.” Or, really, a mixed bag.

Financially, I’ve bounced back from 2023 and the lows of Neural Wraith bombing (plus Amazon punishing me algorithmically. This is despite the fact I’ve only released 2 books in 2024. Audiobooks have levelled off in terms of growth, as Mob merely did decent in audio, but Patreon is doing well. I’m not exactly seeing gigantic growth, however, and a lot of this year has been carried by the length of the Spellblade series as I’ve finished it (if you exclude Dec 23, 75% of my eBook income this year comes from Spellblade).

Finishing Heretic Spellblade is also a big achievement, for multiple reasons. I’ve never finished any series or, really, any of the big epic series I’ve started even when I was a hobby writer (there’s much less incentive to put in the hard yards to get something like this done for free). Completing my own epic fantasy series is a literal dream come true, of the sort I would dream about as a child and then later tell myself was a pipe dream. Also, it shuts up the people who would complain I never finish things, but they’ll just move onto new complaints.

Mob Sorcery has been taking over the “main series” label that Spellblade once held, and while it sure as hell isn’t close to capturing its raw income or sales, it’s fun and (relatively) easy to write, while also drawing in plenty of people. I do plan on finishing everything else, of course.

But the successes come with caveats.

The big one is the huge slowdown in releases. The fact I haven’t been financially crippled by shutting down for the first half of the year to work on Spellblade is extremely fortunate, and Patreon played a huge role, but it was still exhausting. Spellblades 7 & 8 are huge – at 430k words combined, they are around 3 books of my normal length, and the writing effort they required was vastly greater than my other series. I also wrote the vast majority of them in around 3 months, thanks to the massive problems I ran into with Spellblade 7’s quality between November and March (it was rebooted twice, once publicly, and received a complete plot rewrite in May that also meant Spellblade 8 got an extensive plot rewrite).

Burnout is the other factor. In large part to how Spellblade was written, as well as the complexity, I utterly exhausted myself by the time I released Spellblade 8. I had spent weeks doing little more than writing and editing by that point, and was at the end of a 3 month marathon. The last time I worked hours like this was in 2015, and it marked the start of a difficult phase of my professional career as I didn’t recover from the burnout smoothly back then. Older and wiser, I’ve tried to give myself the space to breathe.

Ultimately, 2024 should be an extremely happy year for me. And I can tell myself that. But humans are emotive beings that are very good at ignoring everything the numbers tell us and convincing ourselves that we’re actually in a shittier situation than we truly are. My problems this year are self-inflicted, rather than something inflicted by Amazon or popularity.

So I’ll continue keeping on. I’ll still worry about sales and reception, especially as I’d argue my peak as an author is behind me (and wasn’t very high), but this is still the best job I’ve had. 2024 was both a reminder that I can (hopefully) worry less about getting caught in a death spiral, as I feared in early 2023, but also that even something I love can still feel like a job if I push myself too hard.

Staying the Path

Last year I spoke a fair bit about the possibility of changing genres. That’s probably not happening any time soon, if at all.

I don’t have a huge interest in pushing myself to jump genres, at least not with Mob Sorcery doing fine. It’s purely inertia, which is a bad thing, but if I can write stuff I love while still pushing myself to add in interesting ideas that I haven’t written before then I will hopefully be happy. I’m never happy doing the same thing over and over (turning the wheel, so to speak), so I try to make every book and series explore something new for me.

My main focus is finishing my existing series. Both Demon’s Throne and Neural Wraith fell by the wayside as I focused on Heretic Spellblade, and that was probably not the best decision. I want to avoid letting Mob lose attention again as well. So I’ll be balancing some plates next year.

And, ultimately, the other big reason I don’t have much interest in moving to litrpg or progfantasy is that it might not be a great financial move for me. It’s not some sure thing that will guarantee me a pile of cash, and given the effort involved in starting anew and reducing my release speed in harem, I’d only do it if I really wanted to write something non-harem. Which I don’t.

I mean, I could probably make a lot of money if I had some magic way to produce non-harem books without slowing my current releases. But I’m here to write books and make money while doing it, not the other way around. That’s an important distinction to me.

Mental Health and Community

One of the best things I’ve done this year is step back from the broader harem community almost entirely. I barely pay attention to new releases, unless it’s by an author I actually read or the recommendation catches my eye. The genre’s arguably healthier this year, despite the deluge of cookie cutter authors of questionable provenance, with some new authors that are actually pretty good and not cookie cutter.

However, my broader issues with the community over the past few years have never really gone away, so I’ve stopped paying attention to it. It’s tiring to see the same bad faith arguments and weird behaviors repeated over and over. So I stick to my Discord and Patreon.

I unfortunately didn’t do a great job of curating the Discord and establishing it (especially with… well, let’s just say the bad faith behavior from the broader harem community that I expected and that caused me to delay making a Discord for ages), and 99% of activity there is in the Patreon-exclusive channels by the same handful of people. It is what it is.

I'd also say that paying less attention to nonsense I can't affect is a healthier approach for me in general, and it'll be something I try to take in 2024 for stuff other than writing.

I’ve also reduced the amount of effort I put into my public posts, because they haven’t really felt worth it. Facebook et al barely register and serve as little more than noticeboards for those who choose to use them over other ways of finding out about my releases. The endless badgering I received about “book when?” this year was annoying as hell.

Next Year

My next year is pretty simple, but the execution will be the hard part.

I’ll return to both Demon’s Throne and Neural Wraith, with the intention to finish Neural Wraith by the end of 2025.

At the same time, I want to keep up a consistent flow of Mob Sorcery chapters here on Patreon. The idea will be to intersperse my other books with Mob chapters, so that I can work on other books and then release Mob Sorcery books between them.

That’s the hardest part of the plan. It’s already started to come unstuck because Mob Sorcery 3 has taken too damn long to write.

I’m not putting any books to a schedule, and I’m not even sure if I’ll update it at all. I always end up pushing books back and then get endlessly badgered by fifty different people. This is especially the case because I’m trying something ambitious.

I don’t plan on extending Demon’s Throne or Neural Wraith beyond their planned lengths (6 for DT, 5 for NW). Honestly, I’ve been considering shortening Demon’s Throne to 5 books, but they’d probably end up being too long. The odds of a continuation of Demon’s Throne (where Rys would focus on the broader world instead of the archipelago) are also slim, given the series will almost certainly sell poorly after such a long break.

Mob Sorcery is tentatively planned for 7 books, but that depends on whether it falls off with Books 3 and 4. It could turn into a very long series quite easily.

While I have ideas for new series, and one in particularly, it’s highly unlikely I’ll start one next year. So don’t worry about that.

Again, if you have any questions you want to ask me, pop them in a comment. There’ll be a Messenger post later this month that covers a number of topics in-depth, including my thoughts on each book I’ve released.