Patreon Newsletter 3-1-2023 (Patreon)

That’s Dragon 7 for everyone. Glad you guys enjoyed the ending. Obviously, we are off to Hell for book 8. Zach is becoming something more in terms of the faerie and finally grasping magic, even if it is only to make Norton punch himself through a portal.

I feel like there’s a lot of ground to cover to finish up Dragon, but I’ll keep chugging. 

I probably need to go back to the yacht scene in the latest dragon and give him a little more forward thought, even if everything goes wrong. Because Zach is a bit of a meat head there.

Sorry I didn’t follow through on bikini art for the girls. AI art was frustrating me with really heavy biases when trying to get specific characters. That and AI art is moving so fast, it’s hard to keep up with the latest.

Dungeon 102 is up next. I’m about halfway through it, Ken is developing nicely and so is his harem. Working on making Ken smarter compared to most of my MCs.

The struggle with discovery writing is it can be difficult to make the MC seem smart, because they are always in the moment. If I’m not thinking far ahead, it’s hard to make the characters do so.

Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with my stories so far. After Dungeon I’m probably going to push SSV 5 to the end of that series. I started it with a plan for a trilogy, book 1 did almost too well and I let myself play in the story a little more than I planned. But I think it’s time that one wrapped up.

A lot of people guess why I decide to end a series, really it’s just trying to gauge my fans as a whole. I’m in a very privileged position to not have to worry about my numbers too much. With all of the books that I have in my backlist, my business is very stable. So here’s a little of what I look at with my series.

From a data standpoint, the most interesting number for me is if each new book in series grows the series as a whole, stays steady or the series is dropping, what I interpret as a sign of my audience interest in the series as a whole. When you put out a new book in series you attract new readers, people to pick it back up and of course people to read the latest. So, I try and measure that all together and answer the question: Are people still interested in the series?

From that data, everything screams that Dragon’s Justice is my best series. Though, it seems I fucked up a little on DJ4. I interpret that as when I added the Dragonettes if I’m honest. Even then, on book 6, over 50% of my readers are still reading.

That’s another big number for me. I dropped below 50% on book 4 of Mana and there again on book 3 of SSV. Interestingly the 50% drop has held really well on Mana over time even though all 6 books have been out for a while. To me that means I screwed up book 3, there’s a big cliff from 3 to 4.

I use these data points to try and determine if my audience as a whole is interested in me wrapping up the series and starting again or if they want me to continue the series.

I wish I could just write the perfect series, but it is all a learning process for me and this data helps me understand when I’m doing the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ things. I'm listening to it for my next series.

Looking out at my schedule, I’ll keep up the rotation and have 1 or 2 new series this fall. There’s a stand alone that I’ve been dabbling with as an exercise to try and feel out some different romance structures. I might publish that, but it’s not harem because I’m just focusing on a romance plot from a male POV.

I’m a tad worried that I need to rebuild some of my story pacing tools that I use to keep my discovery writing on track. With my new learnings and to keep my work from becoming repetitive there's some work to be done there. So that’s a side project as well. One that I can’t really apply mid series, but I hope to apply it to the new ones this fall.

I also joined an author book club this year to work on my writing with other successful authors across multiple genres. It’s fun and lots of really great perspectives from them that is helping me look at my writing on several levels. I need to keep improving.

The manga is going well, I just got into chapter 5 with the artist. The black and white cover art is done, but I need to get it colored by one of my cover artists. It is slow going, I’m hoping to move forward with it in a more public way soon. Sorry I haven’t been sharing it here. I wanted to go back and do some edits to things and get Miles some more consistency.

Otherwise, life is well, boring, but that isn’t a bad thing. I have my first vacation since the little one planned. Five days, so I have to get myself ahead so I don’t have to worry during it.

Thanks all for reading my ramblings and enjoying my stories.