So…
February was not a great month. I’ve had some setbacks.
On the upside, I published Demoness IV! Also, I really like how it came out, which is rare for me, but I feel is getting a little bit more common nowadays. I hope it means that I’m getting better at writing, but it could just mean I’m becoming delusional.
The other bit of good news is that Parasexual 3 is done writing, and is in the editing stages. Provided all goes well, it will be up within the next two weeks. Basically, as soon as I can.
And that’s about all the good news I have.
Here’s the bad news. I’m very realistically going to have to put the writing of Demoness V on hold for awhile. In the two weeks that have passed since Demoness IV came out…it has not sold well. Like, at all. I was genuinely hoping that a lot more people would buy it and it would kind of revitalize my income, but that just has not happened. And as much as I loved writing Demoness IV, and as much as I’m actually REALLY looking forward to writing Demoness V…I can’t. Demoness IV took me almost four months to write, and was just over 100,000 words, making it the single longest thing I’ve ever written. It was just shy of being longer than fucking The Misty Vixen Starter Pack.
That just is NOT sustainable.
Honestly, it sent me into a despair-filled pit of depression and misery for a few days. Feeling like a complete failure and wondering if you actually do suck at writing after you’ve been writing for years is really hard to take. And admittedly, I still feel like a failure right now.
If people like MSE can pump out a generic, assembly-line piece every other week and make hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I work my ass off writing a novel in the same field and can’t even make more than a tiny, tiny fraction of that, then what does it say about me and my abilities?
But whatever, that’s not the point.
The point is, I realized that I was going to have to work on something a bit more relevant and something that I could produce more rapidly.
For a long time, I’ve tried to strike a balance between writing what I want to write, and writing what sells. Unfortunately, I think I’ve been leaning too hard into writing what I want to write recently, and Demoness now definitely counts as what I want to write, not what sells, even if I feel like it’s the best stuff I’ve ever produced. Apparently it isn’t, given the sales.
So instead I’m going to shift focus largely to Haven. It’s post-apocalyptic, it’s got zombies and monsters, action and some horror, and is going to feature a harem type scenario. I’m going to lean a little bit harder into the commercial aspects of it this time around.
The good news here is that once I actually got started planning Haven, a ton of ideas came spilling out and I’ve got this whole world and storyline set up. It’s largely about what I guess people would call ‘base-building’, in that it’s a small group of people struggling to survive and establishing a place to live in a dangerous world. Which really appeals to me, for whatever reason.
So, I’m really hoping this one will revitalize my career. January was decent, but February was brutal. My sales dropped by fucking half and that’s scaring the shit out of me. I’d love to just not fucking give a shit about bills and money but that’s not the reality we live in. I’m not some rich piece of shit who gets unlimited cash from their rich parents. I grew up poor, and stayed that way for a long time. For sure I’m doing better now than before, but my real fear is losing it. The idea of going back to that is…horrifying. Which I realize probably sounds pathetic and I should be just happy with where I’m at now, and I guess I would be, but yet again, I’d like to STAY where I’m at now.
I’m going to work hard on Haven and try to have it out by the beginning of April. On the one hand, that feels really ambitious, but on the other hand, I might be able to pull it off. Parasexual 3 went faster than I thought it would, and the Haven books aren’t going to be super long, maybe about as long as the Parasexual books have been so far. The whole point is to be able to write them and get them out quickly.
So…basically, wish me luck. Hopefully I’m just freaking out over nothing, and this is just a lull in my sales, and not the death knell of my career.
Oh yes, one more thing, Amazon basically forced me to take Valkyries off of the Kindle. I legit have no idea why. You can read about the whole sorry mess here. But the short of it is that I’ll have to put Valkyries up on other websites.