Thoughts on Pen Names and Other Stories (Patreon)

Hi folks,

Planning ahead, I’ve been debating how to handle the earlier stories I released under this pen name.

Once I get more of The Eighth Warden books edited and published, I want to do a marketing push. However, it’ll hurt that marketing if I still have my older stories up on Amazon, both because of their amateur covers and because of their (semi-) erotica content.

I don’t want to maintain a second pen name for just those stories. Right now, they bring in less than five dollars a month, and it would cost me more than that to run a second pen name.

My plan is to just take those stories off of Amazon entirely. I’ll leave them up for another month or two, so if you still want to buy them, you can.

If you want a copy of Silver Street Strip Club (or its spin-off, Being a Naughty Stepsister), I’d recommend getting it now. The ‘complete series’ collection is a better deal than buying the individual books. Or if you have a Kindle Unlimited account, you can read them for free.

After I remove them from Amazon, there’ll be a lockout period where I’m not allowed to publish them anywhere else, due to the exclusivity deal with Kindle Unlimited. Once that exclusivity period is over, I’ll look into other options for making those stories available. As long as they’re not on Amazon, they shouldn’t hurt the marketing for The Eighth Warden too much.

It’s not a perfect solution, because Goodreads doesn’t allow authors to remove old stories, so they’ll all be linked to this pen name on Goodreads. For now, I’ve decided to keep using the name Ivy Veritas for The Eighth Warden. I considered changing it because of the Goodreads issue, but it would cost quite a bit to switch the series to a new pen name, and it’s unlikely I’d see much of a return on that investment. It’s easier to just keep the story as it is.

What about the future?

I’ll continue posting early releases of The Eighth Warden here for patrons, and later releasing them on the free sites, and then finally on Amazon. I believe Book 6 will be the final book in the series, but we’ll see—there’s a lot to cover, and I’m still working on the outline.

Once the story is complete and there are no more updates being posted, the number of readers on the free sites will drop dramatically. At that point, it may make sense to remove the series from those sites so I can release it on Kindle Unlimited and bring it to a whole new group of readers. I think I can keep it up on Patreon, but I’m not sure. At that point I’d remind you all to download a full copy of the story to make sure you always have access to it.

After that, I’m not sure what will happen. If Amazon sales take off, there are other stories I could tell in The Eighth Warden universe. In that scenario, I would talk to you guys about whether you’d like to stick with the Patreon model for a new series set in the same world.

Or maybe it’ll be time to switch gears by then. I’ve got a bunch of other stories I’d like to write, but those would likely fall under a different pen name because I’d like to try submitting them to an agent or publisher. I probably won’t be able to use the Patreon model for those stories, but I’ll let you know what I’m doing and what the new pen name is (once I decide on it).

There are so many stories I want to write, and so little time, but we’ll figure it out.

Current Status: Still working on the Book 5 epilogue. I had to re-work some character motivations as I think about how it ties into Book 6, but I’m getting closer.

—Ivy