Pre-April Update

Probably a good idea to post an update before I leave for a month. Both to cover various thoughts and to provide a final news update for patrons.

This post will be a little more rambly than usual.

What Happens in April

I’ll be on holiday/vacation for the month, and will return to finish off Spellblade 7/8. This means any posts I make will be scheduled and I likely won’t reply to comments. I’ll still be on Discord, but expect to have reduced activity (as sometimes I’ll have shit to do or might even be driving).

The state of April will be:

· No update posts

· Spellblade 7 chapters scheduled every 2 days. I might run out near the end of the month, depending on how many I finalize before leaving.

· No commentary (but that’s been scarce as hen’s teeth anyway)

May/June will be entirely focused on Spellblades 7/8. Once they’re done, I’ll worry about next steps.

Thoughts About Payment Pause

I mentioned at the start of the month I’d pause payments. This was because I expected to basically go quiet for April, and then surge with chapters in May.

Instead, I’ll have chapters posting more consistently than I have for… a while.

In the past, this wasn’t an issue. I could give everyone a free month to make up for being inactive in the past. This helps with personal accountability and people tend to cancel/rejoin less.

That doesn’t work anymore. The big issue is that pausing payments prevents anyone from joining. So if I’m posting chapters (which is when people tend to join for some reason), somebody who wants Spellblade early can’t join. Patreon pretty clearly wants to discourage pausing payments.

At the same time, the Patreon is big enough now that there’s basically no change to anyone’s behavior. If you’re waiting for more Mob, then a single month’s pause isn’t enough. And if you just want Spellblade, you’ll join and instantly cancel to avoid getting charged more than you want (as you can just rejoin). A lot of people are here purely to support me, I suspect, and don’t particularly care about the pause. Any pause is purely to avoid charging people for something (I feel) they didn’t get.

In this case, I’m probably going to keep payment active and instead wait until I think I won’t post chapters for a month later down the line to do the pause. Hard to say if this will be immediately after Spellblade 8, given I sometimes write Mob to wind down.

Spellblade Release Date

Hard to say for sure. I’m committed to completing both before I release Spellblade 7, however, in order to repeat history.

Part of the issue are all the moving parts and tying up all the threads. Even rereading the books, there are things I miss or forget even days later as keeping a million words of lore and characterization can be hard. Sometimes they’re just hard to include. A simple non-spoilery example is Otto talking about how it’s important for the Diet to vote for war, but the Diet caused the war against Trafaumh from before the books started.

Similarly, there are characters and plot threads I’m bringing back. This takes time, because I need to find them in the books, then also find a way to loop them into the plot without breaking stuff or ruining pacing. Sometimes doing this leads into new ideas by itself.

The end result is that the overarching plot for the final two books is huge and messy. The books are also going to be massive. I estimated two HS6s in size at first. Now I’m worried Spellblade 7 will eclipse Spellblade 5 in size as I keep shuffling plot points around while refusing to cut stuff as I only get one shot at ending the series.

Honestly, this is probably pretty bad business-wise. Especially with the, uh, growing chorus of folks who want Mob or a return to DT or NW. But I’d rather end the series on my own terms and I can. We’ll see if I regret it.

New vs Old Audience

Something I notice when my series come up in public discussion is the divide between readers who found me through Mob or Neural Wraith, versus the (typically) more dyed-in-the-wool readers who have been reading Spellblade for a while.

My writing in Mob and Neural Wraith is substantially different to Spellblade. I even notice this while writing Spellblade, as it’s so loaded with plot, events, and characters that there’s always something happening, whereas Mob and NW have quite slow moments and sometimes long sequences focused just on characters or setting. Spellblade rarely stops to smell the roses. Or if it does, it’s because something is about to explode.

The other aspect is, without a doubt, how rough it is to get into Spellblade if you’ve read my newest stuff. Spellblades 1 & 2 are… not my favorites. I dislike rereading them, myself. There are a bunch of harem tropes that I now avoid in them, including the weird leering I associate with a specific brand of author in the genre. I have seen some people who bounced off the first two admit the series improves drastically when they make it to Book 3 or 4.

I’ll be curious what the ultimate verdict of the series ends up being when it’s all out there (hopefully with a satisfying ending). There’ll be vastly more good books than bad ones by then. More in line with somebody recommending the Dresden Files (i.e. the first two books suck but establish important things).

Series Length

I’ve noticed a shift in the attitude toward the length of series in harem, even as discontent brews in the broader litrpg and progfantasy communities about it.

For pretty much the entirety of my time as an author, harem has had an attitude that the only good series is a short one. A lot of “just write trilogies smh” type of stuff, where it was pointless to even argue as it reached such a silly level of groupthink. The dislike primarily stemmed from the gargantuan ghostwritten series that often hit 20 books in length.

It reached the point where a lot of authors started focusing on short series themselves, often promising the whole thing had been written etc. Not Arand-style, where it’s trilogies tying into a Marvel-style multiverse, but a bunch of standalone series.

And, well, in my opinion, a lot of those shorter series are pretty fucking bad. Book 1 is basically a hook, Book 2 rushes the harem side, and Book 3 has a rushed ending. Harem members don’t get character arcs (at best, they get a character line) or fleshed out, the plot rarely rises above tropes so obvious you can almost read the TVTropes description inside the book, and they’re more forgettable than the super long ghostwritten series people complained about.

Also, unless you’re spamming them out with a very specific model, they make less money, so they’re a bad idea for an authentic author. Readthrough on these series tends to be awful, which is why they’re often wrapped up in an omnibus super fast.

Harem does have a preference for new. After a slow start, Mob has become oddly popular and appears to be my best audio release in quite a while. But a long series has a draw of its own. Spellblade 6 had my worst release month figures last year (fairly close to Mob 1 IIRC, but Mob 1 beat it when its sales stabilized close to Spellblade 6’s release date). But a lot of people picked up the rest of the series, meaning I could probably milk the series for a while even as fatigue sets in.

And, yeah, Spellblade fatigue is very real and obvious. The audiobook figures for 6 have dropped massively compared to Book 5 earlier in the year. But, again, with 5 more books in the series there’s less to worry about. I’m ending the series because I feel it will be the best ending it can have.

At the same time, I’m noticing authors who previously went for shorter stuff now beginning to extend their series. It’s funny that I chose to end Spellblade at the same time there might be some sort of shift.

New Commentary

I’ve asked various questions about commentary posts for Messengers as I struggle to resume them.

Which leads me to mostly admit that I’m probably burned out of them. Part of my interest in making them is talking about the reasons I write certain things or to comment on the broader harem or selfpub sphere. This is reasonably common elsewhere.

But, well, selfpub is pretty hostile to anything except toxic positivity. Hence all the “this is greatest community ever, buy my 2nd release this week, guys!” stuff. This also results in some… highly questionable behavior whenever something goes wrong. Whether it be inorganic attempts to get rid of sex scenes by a clique of authors or dogpiling somebody because they’ve had numerous failures even with books that are otherwise well-received (because it reflects poorly on the genre).

There’s also the cargo-cult-like behavior surrounding how books must be written/marketed. Why bother trying to offer advice or feedback when most prospective authors are just going to get given the equivalent of “read Cradle” as advice? I think it reached peak absurdity when somebody listed all the advice given by authors and one of them flipped his shit, even though half the list probably came from him.

AI is the other topic I’ve chosen to just… not talk about. Some are just tired of the topic in general. Others get really upset, because of how they’ve become invested in it. It’s remained a topic without nuance. I wanted to talk about local LLMs, but given the extremely strong effort to attack anybody even hinting that some authors are using AI (spoilers: they are), it just didn’t seem worth it. Some would view it as fueling a witch-hunt (which I don’t want) instead of pointing out that we’re at the point where you can use a consumer PC to churn out a novel that only needs editing for consistency. AI's already in selfpub fiction and indie authors, no matter how badly people deny it for whatever agenda they want to push.

In the end, the current usage of AI falls into the same black hole as a lot of shady shit in selfpub. There’s no real benefit to talking about the shady side of things. I've expressed this opinion before: the people who want to use AI to make money never cared about writing good stories, as they’re here for the cash, and shittalking them won’t do anything. In the end, all I can do is avoid those who I think are grifting, much like I don't touch the ghostwriter farms.

This is all a rambly way to talk about the sort of commentary I’ve lost interest in. I have a ton of half-finished commentary pieces on various things: the AI piece; talking about when series should end; the Amazon algorithm; commenting on common gripes people make about writing (e.g. PoV or “he smirked”); and even a post about why I think author brand is increasingly important as Amazon gets increasingly flooded with more and more books that appear good, but are soulless cashgrabs.

What I do want to try when I return from Europe is to talk about the lore of Spellblade and other series. Hopefully that will get me going, although I sometimes run into the mental block where it’s too similar to worldbuilding and I dislike writing that stuff down.

Stability

Let's end on a largely positive note, given all the people probably getting mad that I said anything about AI at all.

Last year was rocky in a bunch of ways. I don't really care to repeat all that, given I've talked about it in past posts.

But I'll reiterate that things are fine and stable now. Even with the lengthy break between books (which might happen from time to time to support higher quality books).

My big concern last year was that I was falling into a death spiral. Writing well-received content that sees falling sales release after release, and active disinterest from the algorithm. Even if I'm content without constantly seeing rising sales etc, this was the opposite, and took place as the genre began to get massively flooded (and it's getting flooded even more now, although at least one of those sources is obvious now).

To me, that read like an obvious sign to leave. I nearly did, after NW3. When Mob 1 had a soft release, I genuinely regretted not moving on and publishing in a different genre earlier. Harem as a genre feels fundamentally different than it did a few years back, and I've noticed a lot of people gravitate toward progfantasy, especially now it's trying to move past its "eww cooties" phase and include romance.

But things did stop worsening, despite my fears. A lot of that is due to audiobooks being stabler, but also Patreon growing a lot. It's a lot easier to ride out big bumps in sales with a more stable income source backing it. I'd never have convinced myself to put around 6 months between releases without Patreon (and I'm still worried, as Amazon can get pissy over breaks).

This year largely reflects where I want to be. Stable, ignoring the latest get-rich-quick schemes elsewhere in selfpub, and writing what I enjoy at a pace that lets it be good. Hopefully it works out, but I'm a little less worried about a death spiral reemerging.

- - - - -

Anyway, that’s it. I had a final section talking about harem, but it’s basically “yeah, I only really read a few authors as the genre is too flooded with crap for me to find diamonds in the rough anymore.” I’m just doing my own thing now, without really caring about that. It’s a rough time for a new author trying to break out, though.

As said above, Spellblade 7 chapters should continue for a while. If you need to ask me something, it’s best to either email me or @ me on Discord. The Patreon app sucks, so there’s a very high chance I’ll miss DMs here.

Oh, and I should have an official Tarako cover preview in the next few days. I’m just waiting on the alt version to be finished.

Otherwise, I’ll see you all in May with my next unscheduled update.