Announcement about my stories, Patreon, and things happening in 2025

Hey everyone. I've got a few things to share.

Firstly. When Madman Apocalypse wraps up Book 2 very soon, I will be taking a break for about a month. That means there'll be at least one month where I probably won't be posting much on here aside from new chapters of the unreleased Loopshard and F-tier Assassin stories.

Secondly. I have signed deals for both Isekai Exorcist and Madman Apocalypse. This happened a while back, but I didn't want to share it before I had more concrete information on the deals.
- I have signed the first three books (ch. 1-181) of Isekai Exorcist with Aethon. I don't have an exact date of release for Book 1 on Amazon, but it should be sometime in Q2 of 2025. It will be released in ebook, print, and audiobook formats.
- I signed an audiobook deal with Tantor for the first three books of Madman Apocalypse and I'll be self-publishing the ebook/print. The launch date of Book 1 will be May 1st. I can already reveal that the narrator will be the amazing Eric Michael Summerer who narrated The Perfect Run and many other great books. You can keep an eye on this page for more info as the release date approaches.

Because of signing two stories in the same year and acquiring what I believe are pretty solid advances, I've been able to feel like I'm a full-time author this year. Granted, I've got no idea what 2025 holds or how the releases will go, but I'll at least do my best to make them successful.

Since I've been editing Madman Book 1 lately, I've been really busy and have had a hard keeping up with the regular chapter releases on Patreon. It's been super stressful to be quite honest, but I've still managed to stick to 3 chapters per week on Madman. However, as I wrote above, I will be taking a month-long break after finishing Book 2, which will happen this month. It's both to continue focusing on editing, but it's also to avoid burning out or getting too overwhelmed by stress which definitely happened earlier in the year when I was putting out 6+ chapters per week across Exorcist and Madman.

Due to how busy I've been, I've also not been able to immediately continue Isekai Exorcist. I haven't abandoned the story, but my priorities have just shifted for the moment. I wrote on it for a year straight without breaks and I just know that kind of non-stop writing doesn't work well for me. I'm genuinely not a very fast writer but I've been pushing myself way beyond my limits because I thought for sure that if I didn't seize the opportunity and go all in on the books that took off, then people would drop me without a second chance. My sense of responsibility towards my readers and especially those who support me financially also just made me believe I couldn't afford to take a single break. I legitimately wasn't lying when I said that my break two weeks ago was the first I'd taken in over a year.

Anyway, that'll change going forward. I will be focusing on writing one book at a time per whatever series I'm doing and making sure to take proper breaks in-between. This does mean that supporting me on Patreon might feel frustrating and I apologise in advance for that. I'm already aware that my style of writing several different stories and constantly shifting to something new is not very effective for long-term Patreon support. This is also why I stopped offering the annual deals, because I could imagine some people signing up for them and then being upset when I stopped writing new chapters for the story they subbed for.

Lastly. I've been using Patreon since March of 2023 and I've genuinely disliked it from the outset. It is the most widely-adopted membership-based creator support site, but it is also the most hostile creator experience imaginable. Today is a great example of that, as they once again altered a fundamental structure to how the site works and added even more clicks per post, which will add more time to an already bothersome process of posting chapters. Three weeks ago they blew up the font size without any way of changing it back and also screwed with the sentence and paragraph spacing, breaking any sort of formatting. Basically, it sucks putting stuff on here and trying to make it look nice.

As you can no doubt tell, I really don't like Patreon. Patreon isn't made for writers and it's obvious. Further, the mods/devs do not give a shit about the creators who use their platform, nor do they care about the consumers' experience, which I'm sure many of you have felt. They also take an absurd ~15% cut of any money you contribute to a creator, while providing none of the features that creators and consumers desire.

As a result of my intense dislike of this site, I am considering transitioning to Ko-Fi instead. After my break following the conclusion of Madman Book 2, I will probably start cross-posting both here and there. If I like it enough, I might transition altogether.


Phew, that was quite a lot and it got kind of ranty towards the end there...

As you can tell, there's a lot going on, and I felt that it was only fair to keep y'all appraised. I cannot describe how much I appreciate all of you and the support you've shown me.

Even if you decide to unsubscribe after reading this, I hope you know that my discord server is always open to you. I've never wanted to be a "take the money and run" kind of creator and it honestly does make me super uncomfortable to even receive monetary support through something like Patreon, so I hope that you have felt your contributions to me were worthwhile. Because of my complicated feelings about this, I'm also planning to lower the cost of my "here's everything" tier by half starting in 2025, although because of how Patreon is set up that means I'll have to make a new tier.

I really truly want to make a living off of writing and, with the deals I've signed, that dream at least became a reality in 2024. My hope is that my stories can do well on Amazon in 2025 and that I can keep on writing like this forever. I obviously won't abandon RoyalRoad, but the way I write just clearly makes Patreon unviable as a steady source of income, since you're rewarded more for writing one story that never ends, than several distinct ones that do. And if you want to make a living by sticking to RoyalRoad and never doing Amazon publications, then you need Patreon.

Ah shit, I'm rambling again...

TL;DR:
- Break after Madman Book 2 wraps in December.
- Publishing Book 1 in Q2 next year for both Madman and Exorcist.
- Considering trying out Ko-Fi as a replacement for Patreon.
- Making new $5 tier identical to Ascendant tier in Jan 2025 when I return from break.


If you read this far, thank you for indulging my rambling.

— Dosei (土星) —