NOVEL NEXT Announcement of Stub and what that means
I feel a little awkward doing this, but I also think that it could be necessary, so I'm going on this whole schpiel. If you don't want to read, that's fine. Preorder now! It'll be great, and it's got something like 2000 extra words of content (almost a chapter) throughout, as well as being heavily and professionally edited. link code: https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0FVMRF3DR
Hey! Glad to see you. This feels a little apt with regards to having it come up here after chapter 100. I'm still taking the weekend off, so don't get your hopes up too high. After all, I need to finish the edits for Book 2, haha. Weird to be ahead on that when it's not public yet, but that's probably not going to be the case for book 3. I'll probably only get going on edits for that at end of year/beginning of next year. Plus I'm waiting on cover...
Anyways.
It's been a while since I did one of these little blog posts, but today's probably the most important one for me. I'll give a little explanation about why I'm doing this the way that I am, because I think it'll make it more clear.
I'm stubbing PW on the 28th. I finally have the date down, which is cool. I wouldn't be making this whole hullabaloo if that was it, though. At the end of last year, I was told that my position was being made redundant, and that I'd have a part time job through April of this year. At that time, Successor of Kukulkan didn't exist, and Ashlani's Reincarnation was nearly done with book 3. My wife and I decided that I'd take those few months of part time work to see if anyone wanted to acquire my books, so that's what we did. I started and published SoK end of last year and beginning of this year, which has done alright. It was picked up by MangoMedia, which I'm immensely grateful for. AR was picked up by MoonQuill, and then the audio rights were sold to Tantor. I was offered a good sum for those audio rights, and my wife and I saw that this is a possibility for me to make more money than I have in other places, so, when I ceased working part time, I began writing full time. That was the birth of Pinnacle Warrior, which is, far and away, my most successful series so far. It's also a ton of fun to write, which is great. But, more importantly, I was able to option just the audio rights to Podium, which will be beginning production on book 1 soon.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
All these things together have come to getting me a pretty good year. With Patreon and audio advances, I'm making some money, enough to continue trying this full time authorship thing. However, there's a lovely complication to this.
My wife is pregnant with our second. And, as much as I love writing, it comes with no benefits and my advances will only cover so much. They have covered me until now, but if I want to be a full time author while we get used to two children, I'll need to be able to pick up the slack. The number one way I can do this is making sales on Amazon. It would mean the world to me if you would preorder Pinnacle Warrior on Amazon at the link I provide. More preorders and sales and ratings mean more discoverability, which means more sales, and the virtuous cycle continues.
Frankly, if Pinnacle Warrior flops on Amazon the way that Successor of Kukulkan has, then I will no longer be able to write full time. That will mean that I'll go from lots of consistent chapters (sorry AR and SoK, you've been half of my planned production for you of late) to less than a quarter of what I'm able to do now. If you want to continue reading my work, the number one way you can ensure I can keep writing that is by preordering PW and rating when it comes out in just under three weeks. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you don't even need to read it, if you download, it helps boost it in the algorithm.