Quality

This is a bit of a rambly post, but I feel it covers some thoughts about how I approach writing and the books, as well as the current state of things.

One of the constant pressures in self-publishing is the contest between quality and quantity. A lot of advice is given, from many corners, to publish as often as possible. This is, technically, good advice. The downside is that it's difficult to maintain quality when you're pumping out books at a rapid pace. I stopped reading online serial fiction years ago because I got sick of endless filler being pumped out to meet the need of regular chapters. Books, I feel, should be better paced, especially if I'm charging money for them.

The pressures themselves take two forms: one from readers, the other from Amazon. There's a third pressure, but I largely shut it out, and I'll briefly cover this later.

Whenever I publish a book, there are two guaranteed reactions I get: readers asking when the next book is out, and readers complaining that this book took too long to come out. The pace of release in harem is rapid. There are a lot of authors releasing monthly, and many releasing weekly. Let's not get into how they manage this, because I don't care and it doesn't matter to my personal circumstances. The fact is that readers are conditioned to expect books fast.

Amazon feeds that cycle. Every week after release, I see it give a book a little push, to see if less people are interested. Sometimes it recovers and maintains sales. But often it falls. The algorithm itself changes all the time and there are external inputs, but in general for books reliant on Amazon, books fall off every month after release, and an author is basically exiled from the algorithm if they don't release anything for 3 months.

You can see then, why authors push for monthly releases. I've tried it myself, and keep trying. My problem isn't that I can't write a book in a month, it's that it sucks. I won't say that my books are super high quality or anything, but I can definitely feel the shittiness that comes when I churn out creatively bankrupt chapters day after day.

Writing 120k-150k words over a few weeks, and then proofing it, isn't that hard. But add in a myriad of character arcs, plot threads, actual structure, and coherent pacing and things become more difficult. I could write simpler books, or simply solve a bunch of outstanding questions in a haphazard way, but, again, quality drops.

This is where I've found myself with Demon's Throne. The shift to Patreon has resulted in me posting chapters here earlier than I usually reveal anything to anyone, and most of them are far from ready. Right now, I'm changing the entire plot structure, as the original one didn't work. There is a need to rearrange chapters in Act 1, and to potentially add one or two chapters in. The original Ch13 (which was a PoV shift to Mave) has been rewritten and is now Ch14.

Focusing on writing my books is largely what I always wanted out of becoming an author. It's how I've structured everything, and why you don't really see me around anywhere.

In my professional career, my greatest frustrations were all the bullshit work that surrounded the real work. At my absolute lowest point, I ended up as an IT project manager, and felt that my entire job was literally bullshit work. Now that I am my own boss, I try to minimize that nonsense, because I want to write stories, not faff about on social media.

As a self-publisher, I do have to handle some of the bullshit. I am, as the name suggests, a publisher. But Amazon handles a lot of it for me, at the cost of releasing books often enough and playing by its rules. It's a generous enough situation that I can't really complain about it, at least for now. Audiobooks are another matter, as Audible has a graveyard of otherwise successful books that never make back costs for every successful audiobook and is such an awful platform that it has spawned a cottage industry of middleman publishers. But that's neither here nor there.

This is also one of several reasons that I largely avoid social media as an author and minimize my posting on the one place I do regular (reddit). It's a distraction, and the sort of thing that is prone to creating useless drama and nonsense (I am aware that it exists, even I stay away from it). If people want to talk about my books, they can do it without me staring over them like the Eye of Sauron.

This brings us neatly back to Patreon. Posting has slowed down here. That is, again, because I am focusing on quality. Primarily, I don't want Patreon to damage the books, as those are my actual product. I started this as an experiment, and with multiple misgivings.

I don't feel there's much point in talking about those misgivings, bar one: early chatpers on Patreon don't entirely gel with my method of writing. I write, tinker, and sometimes stop and consider what might be wrong. Sometimes my best ideas only come to me with time - there is no such thing as "thinking harder". Building up a backlog doesn't always work, as sometimes I am changing things drastically as I go. There is no "first draft" and "second draft" process.

The second aspect is that the lack of engagement, which is very noticeable this month, can be worse than useless when I'm posting WIP stuff. I've taken that as an opportunity to step away from Patreon and focus on the book, and that's been for the better. It means you get less consistent chapters, but it means I'm less likely to post something I just tinkered with, and get annoyed because it feels like nobody cares. As a perennial lurker myself, I know that nobody owes anyone a comment. It's mostly a mentality thing.

Anyway, as I said, this is largely a ramble through some recent thoughts I've had. None of this is a cry for "take as much time as you need" or similar. This is my full-time job now, and I see the income and other aspects that all of you don't, and will manage that as a professional. Instead, this is mostly an attempt to provide some insight into how I try to manage the writing process for my books, particularly as I've gained more experience, and how Patreon has impacted that a little.

You won't see much change, other than what you've already seen. Chapters will come out as I feel they're ready and at a pace that should match the book's release. I'd say that the experimental phase of the Patreon is over, and that I'll likely keep things fairly steady state. I do feel there is some merit in having it, but like everything else self-publishing, I don't want it to get in the way of writing quality books.