Schedule Update - Patreon Edition

I've been getting an increasing number of questions about when various books will come out, which is my own fault for shifting around release dates after trying and failing to commit to some. 2023 started off rough for me, and that's meant a lot of stuff I planned to have done hasn't happened. Plus I spent a fair bit of time questioning where I'd go in terms of genre (and I'm still thinking about that in regards to 2024).

But I'm not here to repeat that stuff.

I'm probably going to provide some sort of schedule update in my next public post, and I feel it's better if I also give you guys a more detailed update on where each series is at.

So let's go through each series. There's a tl;dr at the end.

Lowlife Enforcer

This series has occupied more of my time than I expected it to, mostly because I got distracted by IRL stuff and then some nasty writer's block. Those problems have more to do with my own writing process, though.

I planned this to be a sort of "Patreon-first" serial and it should stay that way. I'll post chapters for it until Spellblade chapters are ready to post sometime in July, although there'll be a week's break at the end of "Book 1." The plan is to release Book 1 at the same time I put up the pre-order for Spellblade 6 (likely early-mid August at this rate). So there should be three books in as many months.

I kind of want this to become a longer series, but there just doesn't seem to be any staying power in the haremlit genre anymore compared to when it was common to see massive series (whereas now everyone just bitches about anything over 3 books). Progfantasy and litrpg are still putting out gargantuan series and there are frequently people who want their series to be in the millions of words. For now, this series will fill in gaps between my other series and will likely end when they do.

Heretic Spellblade

Books 6 and 7 come after Lowlife Enforcer. I'm writing them as a single big book that will be cut in half. After the issues with Neural Wraith 3, I don't plan to put up any pre-orders unless the book is basically done, so while that guarantees 6 and 7 come out a month apart, it means there might be a lengthy delay.

Right now, Heretic is sort of puttering along in terms of success. Spellblade 5 definitely underperformed, but is part of a bigger series. My guess is that it's just too complicated for a lot of the haremlit audience,

This series gets the most recommendations, aside from Neural Wraith to people interested in something less typical. Regardless of how Books 6 and 7 do, I figure I'll see this series through to its proper conclusion as it's become important to me.

So expect Books 8 and 9 sometime next year to close out the series. It'll be a chonker of a series by the end of it, closing in on 1.5 million words.

Demon's Throne

A series that's been on the backburner and is often the less-mentioned of my series (excluding the black sheep, Empire). I'll work on this after Spellblade.

The reason this got ignored for so long as complicated. Demon's Throne is quite special to me, as it's based on an older story I wrote under an online penname, and this was an attempt to fix a lot of problems that occurred back then. So I care a lot about the world and characters.

Book 1 did really well by my standards, despite releasing at a time when Amazon had tweaked the algorithm to fuck with new series. Not to mention that some people appeared to be upset that I was novelizing an older story (a hilariously dated opinion with all the Royal Road books appearing on Amazon). My guess is that appeared more like a normal harem series to many people, despite the relatively slow pace.

Books 2 and 3 got more pushback from that audience, and the recent audio rerelease has kind of cemented my opinion on who exactly is unhappy with the direction I went in. I feel there was an expectation from them that Rys would be out there blowing shit up and taking women, because he kind of did that in Book 1, instead of becoming the scheming, corrupting overlord he is. At the same time, I was also unhappy with parts of Book 3, particularly the battles and how I managed Rys's power unsealing. You're seeing my learnings from that in how I'm handling magic in Lowlife Enforcer, with more clearly defined magic and progression.

So I got unhappy, and some of the criticism was targeted at aspects I was particularly happy with, too, such as Mina (who is one of my favorite characters, period). I needed to rework how I was approaching the rest of the series while waiting for my grumpiness to go away.

Oh, and that whole audiobook fiasco with the terrible narration.

The good news is that I'm turning my mind to Demon's Throne more and more lately. I've come up with a variety of ideas for how to properly handle the second half of the series. More importantly, my drive to continue it has been rekindled due to both Steph Savannah's fantastic narration and the fact the audiobooks were received extremely well (even if there was a strong falloff for Book 3).

Given my writing pace, I don't know if this will make it into 2023. Hopefully. My intention is to write two books with each series I work on at a time, however, to minimize time lost when bouncing between series.

Neural Wraith

The most complicated series to talk about. It's the opposite of Demon's Throne in a few ways. The initial release did amazingly well, due to a groundswell of community support and recommendations. It's also really hard to tease out the reasons for its problems, as it has an insanely positive review-to-sales ratio. Talking about them becomes more complicated because literally every time I do, somebody feels the need to basically say "you're wrong" so I've basically stopped, other than to say that,  yes, it's now drastically underperforming my fantasy series.

Before I talk about how I'll continue it, I'll just recap the facts.

Book 1 did really well. Books 2 and 3 less so, with extremely spiky sales. The releases of the sequels saw almost relatively few readers pick up Book 1 and especially not my other books. Amazon appears to be recommending the series to existing readers, then largely giving up, and those new readers that do show up are uninterested in my fantasy stuff. On top of this, the audio is also my worst performing on Audible so far (edit: except Empire).

To be frank, the only conclusi on I can reach is that the general harem audience is fundamentally uninterested in the series. Given the stuff that's broadly popular in the genre, as well as the fact that almost every cyberpunk litrpg I'm seeing on Royal Road is a "cyberpunk in aesthetic only" story, I suspect it's a fundamental issue.

Since I brought the issue up, several people asked whether this is an issue with the series being in harem, or why I don't push it elsewhere. This is another thorny issue, with two main aspects.

The first main aspect is that I hate the marketing side. There are some authors who excel at the business and marketing, to the point where their books succeed in spite of their quality (or they just pay others to write them). Whereas I find it tiring and distracting, when I just want to write. Especially as I'm not good at it.

The second aspect is the deep hostility to either self-published stuff or anything identified as harem. To some extent, Neural Wraith could only succeed in haremlit because of what it contains. Sci-fi detective stuff isn't a thing (there's a reason a lot of people end up comparing my stories to much older works). Cyberpunk is a pretty dead genre due to a mixture of the casual literary elitism among its remaining "fans" and the fact most people think it just refers to neon lights and big corporations ("we live in a cyberpunk world" memes).

And while there's a lot of manufactured hostility to harem in adjacent genres, Neural Wraith doesn't even fit into them. It's not litrpg or progfantasy. Hell, in my opinion, those genres are almost antithetical to anything trying to capture the real feel of cyberpunk stuff. The escapist power fantasy inherent to them works against them.

Ultimately, I feel Neural Wraith is back in passion project territory. I occasionally come up with ideas for the next couple of books, but I'm avoiding working on them until I get my fantasy stuff back on track. It's hard to say when I'll work on this.

Ideally, it will come after Demon's Throne. But that's getting into 2024 at that rate.

Empire Reforged

The black sheep. This is a series I've promised to finish a few times, but keep putting off.

The reason is simple: time. Money also plays a factor, but that's mostly due to time.

I take a while to write my books, and that involves opportunity cost. Writing the third Empire Reforged book means I can't write another Neural Wraith or Spellblade. Given this book will come out, make next to nothing, probably have a bunch of people annoy me about why I haven't used AI covers for it, and then disappear into my backcatalog forever, it's become a low priority.

Especially right now. If I was in a better position, I'd put aside the time to work on it. But it's difficult to justify setting aside a month or two to get on top of the series when I need to focus on books that people actually want to read.

So I really can't provide a proper update on Empire. The audiobooks also did terribly. Nobody listened to the second one after the first, which more or less confirmed my opinions of the series.

- - - - -

Anyway, that's all my series. At this point, I'm just plodding along while writing.

The order right now is: Lowlife -> Heretic 6/7 -> Demon 4 -> Neural 4. I want to build up an actual backlog before I publish anything, too. Given Amazon sales are already down a ton, I feel it's smarter to build up more instead of try to keep up on a hamster wheel that I can't keep pace on. This should also mean more regular Patreon chapters.