Upcoming Plans/Venting

Hey guys, time to touch base. I’m starting the outline for WWYK4 today. Should take me 2-4 days  depending on mood and stuff. I planned on starting sooner but yesterday I did a bunch of errands and saw Barbie which was phenomenally funny, and the day before that I was kinda in a post release trance. In general my mood has been pretty swingy these last couple of days and I wasn’t even sure I would start today, before I actually got myself to about an hour ago. Already 500 words into the outline so it’s going smooth so far.

This next bit is gonna be a very long rambling rant I‘ve needed to do for a while now, so just a heads up.

The launch for 3 hasn’t been too hot, and it did kind of affect my mood. My plan is still to pump out a lot of WWYK because even if it’s not doing gangbusters, it will still be a solid recurring revenue thing if each one brings in a little bit of money every day. And it is doing that, so it’s hard for me to be too upset when it’s mission accomplished… but I’m under a lot of stress lately. This last few months in general, really.

Me and my girlfriend just had expense after expense crop up at a rate we’ve never seen in our 7 year relationship. Car stuff, dog health stuff, house stuff, just non stop and I’m not making anywhere near enough money to help with it all. It’s making me question what I’m doing and how I’m doing it, I guess. I‘m at a mental crossroads where I don’t really know what I want to do with myself.

Part of me wants to partially go back to the old Webnovel way of doing things and make a really marketable story in a popular niche and then to avoid what happened with RotGM I’d plan most of it out in advance and stick to that. I’d do chapters like how I am with WWYK, one take and then a quick editing pass. I would then publish them publicly in small chapters like 1.5-2k words each but plan on rewriting them for volume releases to still make them eligible for Kindle Unlimited. Even if it just means doubling the word count for each chapter and restructuring each sentence so that Amazon doesn’t pick it up with their sensors. But I can’t really stop doing Kindle stuff in the meantime.

Maybe this would be feasible if I could bring myself to work on WWYK and another thing in tandem. For a while it looked like it was possible to do that when I was trying to do Breeding Madness and Witches Going Live, but both of those fell through because of money issues. I tried to play at being a big author who can afford paid writing partners and it exploded in my face when all those expenses  and life events started cropping up.

There’s also a more negative part of me that feels like everything I try to do is always biting off more than I can chew. I’ve never seen a story through completion for one reason of another and I only seem to be most excited when working on really big scale things like Coye and RotGM at the start of that one. I want to be some kind of epic long running writer and I don’t know if I ever can be, because no one project has ever made me enough to keep it running. Coye made me the most money and was generally the most fulfilling and I would love to keep doing it, but I was looking at my lifetime earnings yesterday and each book only made so much. Like, the first two made over $2000  over the year they’d been out, and each one after that dwindled until as of the time of this writing, vol 6 has only made $1400. The dwindling is natural, that’s not what I’m upset about. Reader retention is something that wanes with every book series in existence, but it’s how low everything is in general.

I feel disappointed that I’m turning 30 in December and I’m still not ‘successful’ and that whenever an emergency comes up I have to rely on the kindness of other. I’m not a petty person, but when I look through threads on harem Reddit for people recommending books to see if I can recommend my own, it stings a bit that I don’t ever see anyone bringing up my name. Part of this is my fault. Coye was me writing a lot of my fetishes that are not palatable/marketable to the average haremlit consumer. I was happy with the work, but I can’t convince people to get into it if they can’t get past the femdom, the size difference, and the feminine protagonist. WWYK is doing okay like I said but a lot of people aren’t interested in any work that isn’t fantasy somehow, even if I’m enjoying myself and plan on continuing to pump it out for the foreseeable future.

I don’t want to sound egotistical, but a big part of my discontent is that I’m really proud of Coye and WWYK. Not as much RotGM since that was my training wheels, but it obviously still is an important part of my history. On top of the money, I would like more recognition as well. I think a lot of what I accomplished in Coye is really great and it pains me that I put that in a story with such little market appeal. I wonder if it would’ve had that problem had it been a webnovel first.

All of this just makes me want to make something a bit safer in a more established genre like I was saying a second ago, and to hook people by making a cruder version of it for free. I have some vague ideas for what kind of story this would be but I don’t want to make comments on it right now. If I do end up going down this road, I‘d need months of research and development time to study more of the genre I’m interested in exploring. I also don’t want to imply just because it would be ‘safer’ and in a ‘more established genre’ doesn’t mean I would dumb my stuff down intentionally or rely solely on tropes. I would still do it my way. I’m quirky. I like weird things. This comes across in all my stories and I doubt it would change much.

This isn’t one of those times where I’m asking for thoughts but am intending on doing what I want regardless of feedback, I’m genuinely at a point where idk what I’m going to do next besides more WWYK because it’s fast and easy money, even if it’s not much.

The big thing holding me back is I don’t want to start up a big project, because I’ve failed in every one I’ve ever done. I had reasons for stopping MHFAP, I had reasons for stopping RotGM, and I had reasons for stopping Coye(which I remain adamant on wanting to return to), but it’s like I’ve got this aura of consistency hanging over my head. I don’t want to start something big only to maybe fail again. The only way I can see myself overcoming this is to plan out several books worth of material all at once with an ending in sight but room to continue past that ending as this specific genre is well known for. That way I can at least say it has an ending. I don’t know. It’s a very tall order and not something I can just drop everything to work on figuring out.

As you can imagine, I have a lot of thinking to do and would appreciate your thoughts below if you made it this far.