A Break From Dungeon Devotee

TL;DR at the end

Hey everyone,

This post is long overdue and probably no great surprise to any of you.  Missed deadline after missed deadline month in and month out isn't how I wanted this story to go.  In truth, I've always been horrible at splitting focus between multiple projects.  I'd hoped the monthly nature of Dungeon Devotee would alleviate that difficulty, but it really hasn't.

Instead, for the past year, I've found myself dedicating a full week out of every month to a side project.  That Dungeon Devotee doesn't make much money was no surprise--it was never intended to.  From the outset its purpose was to keep in touch with my serial readership and patrons while I wrote A Child of Moon and Sun entirely offline.  Instead, I wrote The Stargazer's War here on patreon.

That left Dungeon Devotee with one job and only one job: get people to read The Stargazer's War.

In the first week after To Flail Against Infinity hit amazon, that Dungeon Devotee readerbase I'd spent so long building converted into about fifty sales.  It was going so poorly, I was ready, at the time, to write off The Stargazer's War as a loss and pivot to focusing on Dungeon Devotee with the intent to go back on my promise and put it on KU.

Then Ravensdagger plugged The Stargazer's War on reddit.  Positive word of mouth spread.  Review posts started popping up fairly regularly.  The story climbed the Amazon rankings to peak way higher than anything I've ever written, not because I'd spent a year building a serial following, but because of a single reddit post.

It is, of course, hard to really track this stuff, and while I'm absolutely certain some number of people only gave The Stargazer's War a try because they'd enjoyed Dungeon Devotee, all the data I have shows those people deeply in the minority.

My motivation to work on Dungeon Devotee has been flagging for some time.  Seeing now how few people it brought to my main project and how successful that project has been in spite of it leads me to an obvious decision.

It's time to take a break from Dungeon Devotee.

My current plan, riding the high of its popularity, is to dedicate the next four months solely to The Stargazer's War book two.  The $10 tier will slowly lose its advance chapters until it has no more Dungeon Devotee chapters than the $5 tier.  Y'all will have Stargazer's War chapters instead, but I haven't yet figured out how exactly to structure the tiers for that.

Once The Stargazer's War 2 is finished--ideally some time in August--I intend to come back to focusing on Dungeon Devotee exclusively long enough to finish off its book 2.

I know this isn't the update you wanted to hear, and I'm sorry for that.  I want to thank you all for being here, for supporting my work, and for being far and away the most patient readers in the genre.  The Stargazer's War 2 kicks off this weekend.

-Nixia

TL;DR: I'm taking a break from Dungeon Devotee to focus on The Stargazer's War.  I'm sorry.