May Public/Patreon Update

This update covers both the public post I made to FB and some extra Patreon stuff. So let's dive on in.

Public update:

• First, Demon’s Throne 3 is out. Go read it if you haven’t already. A huge thanks to everyone who reviewed it or shared it with others.
• I’m slowly working on Heretic Spellblades 5 and 6. These are being planned and written together, and will be released a month apart. Spellblade 5 early chapters should appear on Patreon toward the end of the month, but there’ll likely be a longer timeframe for these books due to writing two together. That does mean you won’t need to wait as long for Book 6, however.
• My next book will be for a new series. This is a cyberpunk harem series being posted on Patreon right now, and is a ton of fun to write after writing so much fantasy. It’s coming together fairly quickly, so it should come out around the end of the month. No pre-order, however, as it’s a new series.
• The Empire Reforged series finally got new covers. I will finish this series later in the year to close it out, as I have a new cover for the third book now.
• No audiobook updates.

Patreon stuff:

As said in the public update, there'll be a bunch of chapter updates this month. I held off on too much during April, as the entire reason I made it free was because there weren't going to be many updates.

Cipher chapters will graduate to the $5 tier. I'm reasonably confident in it now. There is the caveat that there might be some changes before publication, but that's always there. I will probably maintain a slight lead for Messengers, as I've been making lots of little changes after I post each batch so far.

Spellblade 5 chapters will start in May, but that's mostly because I've had a clear idea of what the opening chapters should be since I finished Spellblade 4. I'll likely make a Spellblade planning post later in the month, once Cipher is effectively done.

(Very) Tentatively, my expected release date of Spellblade 5 is end of July, and Spellblade 6 is end of August. I feel this is manageable, as these are basically one big book split into two, but we'll see. I expect they'll be around 300k-330k words combined.

Looking back at April, it was... something. The free month ended up being a disaster because Patreon fucked up, and the general fallout from that means I only expect to do a free month again if I'm basically not posting at all.

Demon's Throne 3 recovered from my fairly miserable launch projections. At the time I made the previous update, my projections were that it might be my worst launch since Spellblade 2. That's how bad the first few days were, once the launch day sheen wore off.

Fortunately, it's held up better than I projected and is much closer to what I originally expected. It's no Spellblade 4, but that was a slightly more special release. Spellblade fans can finally take heart that their favorite series finally outsold a Demon's Throne release (this is a joke).

So, again, a huge thanks to everyone who left reviews/ratings and who shared or recommended it. It's always hard to tell what causes books to perform as they do, and it'll be a few months before I can actually examine a few niggling doubts buried in the sales stats, but things are a little more sanguine now.

Finally, sorry to those who aren't interested in Cipher. But pumping out a non-fantasy novel while planning the Spellblades is doing wonders for my creativity and mental health.