June Patreon Update

I gave a bit of thought about what I'd talk about this month. I wanted this to be a largely positive post originally, as I'm focused on writing and largely ignoring everything else, but Amazon has conspired against me.

Anyway, news first:

• Neural Wraith 3's audio release date should be in August. Podium's given me a heads up on the release date and is getting ready for it.
• Lowlife Enforcer should continue getting chapters into July. The first 30-35 chapters or so will be getting turned into Book 1 later this year (as you seem to like it enough), but there'll be more chapters on Patreon. You can expect me to start posting more for it after Spellblade 6/7 is done. The name will change and I expect to announce that once I sort out a cover. Publication date is uncertain.
• The other news is unchanged from the public update.

Anyway, I wanted to follow up from my past (grimmer) posts.

It should go without saying that things haven't gone well for me this year. While Neural Wraith gets a lot of love from the community, the sequels have sold horrendously compared to Spellblade and Demon's Throne. The review numbers are misleading here, as Neural Wraith 3 takes the crown as my worst release since the Emperor series now (although nowhere near as bad as them). It's endlessly frustrating to see some people (often the same group) more or less imply I'm lying or can't read my own Amazon sales.

With that said, I do think this will be something of a new normal and I'm just moving on and ignoring the dickheads. I enjoy being able to write things that I genuinely enjoy, instead of focusing purely on what will sell the most or having to cut out significant elements that would transform the story.

The good news is that I have been overwhelmed by the positive support. Especially here, and by the number of new signups. The response has helped me stick to it despite a rough start to the year.

My focus for the rest of the year will be on ensuring a steady supply of chapters for Patreon and putting out books as they're ready. If things work out, I might hopefully have something good to talk about later this year.

Some of you might have noticed a drop in commentary/rambling posts. Part of that is because I've found it hard to write those without being negative or bitter, and I'm trying to avoid that for now. I feel the current author environment is a really awful one, both because of my falling earnings and the general acrimony over all things AI (which feels like the new crypto in terms of how annoying the topic is whenever it comes up and its complete lack of nuance).

I will try to find the time to do some sort of post about Lowlife Enforcer to talk about the cool things in it, though.

That Amazon Change

So, I had this post queued with a fairly calm take on how I'd wait and see to avoid doomposting. Then several other authors more or less started talking about the explicit harem apocalypse overnight, so okay. Here we are.

Amazon made a recent change on the author backend asks authors is their books contains "adult content" and suggests any explicit scenes (i.e. sex) counts. Ticking this box suppresses the book in search results across amazon and in paid ads. This basically nukes sales.

Notably, Amazon hasn't requested that authors go back and update old books (it didn't even notify authors of this change), which is quite weird if it's intended to separate all explicit books from family-friendly ones. Not that Amazon likes to communicate rule changes around adult content, because it operates on a "don't ask, don't tell" policy for it in general. But this change came bundled with an update to categories, and I don't expect all those litrpg and progfantasy authors to stop shitting up cyberpunk, so whether Amazon will heavily enforce the change is questionable. Some authors might have a hundred books or more affected.

If any author doesn't check the box... nothing happens. If there's an AI checking the book's content for too many appearances of the word "cock" or "thrusting" then it doesn't appear to trigger on harem books (yet).

Ticking the box is basically not happening for anyone. Authors who have done it have reported that the sales hit is basically career-ending (which is what being suppressed in search results does)..

That leaves three possibilities:

• Don't check the box (i.e. mislead/lie to Amazon) and sell books like normal. If Amazon does eventually enforce this policy, this risks getting banned. They also might just put the books in the dungeon at a later date. Nobody knows what actions they might take. Amazon is "shoot first, ask questions never".
• Remove explicit sex scenes (going "fate-to-black") and publish as normal. This will anger regular readers who won't understand what's happening and probably damage the harem genre as a whole if done en masse.
• Leave the genre because the money is gone.

So, I'm obviously not taking option 3, just to make that clear. I do expect you'll see that happen, though.

My understanding is that a lot of authors are going to go down the second route and start publishing FtB or clean harem, or else ditch the genre entirely for litrpg and progfantasy. I'm not going to speak for them, but I imagine other authors are talking about it on various discords and Facebook groups/pages etc. My guess is that a lot of authors will phoenix into new pen names to avoid criticism from readers who want sex scenes.

Right now, I think Bruce Sentar is the only author I've seen (publicly) suggest he'll ignore the checkbox and continue as normal. I'm in the same camp, but the issue is that everyone else is off to FtB world. That makes me wary, mostly because it makes it easier for Amazon to play whack-a-mole.

I have more time before I publish another book, so I have mixed feelings. If I removed the explicit sex scenes, I'd probably still get backlash and lose readers even though lots of people suggest they don't matter in my books. The general damage to harem would also hurt me, much as I think shifts in the genre have affected me. There's a reason almost every author writes explicit books.

I'm less convinced Amazon intended this change to hide all smutty books from the average reader. There are quite a few people who believe the checkbox is intended for erotica, given the language is identical to that used for paperback books, and the advice for that has always been to ignore it unless your book is erotica.

The main reason I'm unconvinced is romance. This isn't a change targeted at harem, it affects all explicit books. And romance is the biggest genre in Kindle Unlimited, and most of that is explicit/steamy. If over half of KU's steamy romance authors vanish overnight, that will hurt KU. Amazon isn't in the business of losing money.

Also, again, Amazon hasn't implemented an AI to automatically dungeon old books or informed authors of the change. There's been some suggestion that Google or Apple are about to kick them off their app stores, but if that was a real possibility, Amazon would be doing a hell of a lot more.

Anyway, this was a long post about an issue that I'm sure a bunch of you may not have even heard of.

The short version is that I'm not taking any rash action right now. Again, I have time.

If harem goes FtB, I'll leave sex scenes on Patreon only. This only solidifies my plan to shift more to Patreon, as Amazon is increasingly unreliable.

Otherwise, nothing will change. It just depends on whether Amazon is actually enforcing the policy or if enough people are scared of it.

Anyway, hopefully you continue to enjoy the chapter updates. The next news post should be the public update for July (likely at the end of June), unless something big happens. 2023 is a year, I guess.