So I’ve got a lot to talk about with this one. But first, let’s talk about the stuff that got released last month!
Links for people who don’t like clicking on images:
A WARM PLACE 5
HAVEN 8
RAW VI
RAW VIII
RAW COLLECTED III
OUR OWN WAY
Before we get into the meat of the matter, I’ll do a quick summary of my present situation in terms of what I’m working on and intend to work on soon.
RAW: Just to clarify, this is done! The only thing left to come out is The Complete Series, which will be sometime in 2024, likely early 2024. It may contain a new short story, but I am not sure yet. We’ll see how I feel when I actually get there. If anyone is curious why I am waiting this time around, the answer is, as with all annoying things: $. I have learned the hard way that publishing a complete edition of a finished series too soon can kill sales of individual titles. And I rely on those individual titles.
OUR OWN WAY: My primary focus right now. I am hard at work writing Our Own Way 2. I’ve got cover art for 2, 3, & 4 now and they look great. I’m intending to begin posting early access chapters next Monday, (August 7th), probably two per day, Monday - Friday, depending on my mental health. Regardless, I will attempt to get at least one out every weekday. I’m aiming for a late August - early September release date.
UNDERGROUND POST-APOCALYPTIC HAREM: I’ll explain more below, but I’m working on a new trilogy and it is going to be published by Royal Guard! Chapters will come to Patreon, otherwise the situation is still developing.
LARA X. LUST: I’ve been working on a little mini-series with Lara X. Lust and it should begin posting sometime this month. It’s basically Sci-Fi/Horror. It isn’t an extensive project like Desperate Times, it’s simpler and smaller, kind of just a fun experiment. I’ll let you know more when it comes out.
OTHER: Everything else is basically on the back burner as I focus on these other projects.
Okay, that’s everything. Now, let’s discuss the present situation and the future.
From even before the beginning of my career some nearly nine years ago now, I was told one of the golden rules of writing was: It is a marathon, not a sprint. For a long time, I mostly took this to mean that it was going to take time to build a career. And that is extremely true. But now I’m thinking more on the rest of that particular reality, something that a lot of people, I think, don’t consider: For most writers, you don’t ever really reach a point where you get successful and then that’s it, you are just successful until you die. You can be successful and still lose it all, and not necessarily through any fault of your own. You can be successful, but you still need to be putting in consistent effort to maintain that success, and you need to watch out for yourself and, more specifically, your future.
Amazon has always been unstable. A lot of this is due to the inherently unstable nature of any creative market, but a lot of it is also the fact that Amazon has absolute power. They can completely fuck people over, even on accident, and not suffer in the slightest, the same way you crush an ant without even realizing it. Every year or so, they make tweaks to their website that screw with things for authors, and every few years or so, it seems like they make some vast, sweeping decision that upsets damn near everyone and we all have to just get used to the new normal.
I’m not really going to go into the specifics of the latest problem with Amazon because I legitimately don’t know how safe it is to talk about, but suffice to say: It is still causing problems.
More than that, though, I’m fairly certain (this is as close as you can get to certain most of the time with Amazon, because they don’t tell us shit), that they made some kind of tweak to the algorithm in January of this year that made it harder to earn for indies. This is not the first time this has happened. In truth, what I see happening with Amazon publishing is actually an almost perfect mirror of what’s happening with the economic classes in the US: the middle class is being destroyed. It’s becoming harder and harder to get noticed and earn, and the people at the top are, increasingly, those who have giant publishers behind them, those who are already extremely well established, or those who get extremely lucky.
And everyone else can fuck off as far as Amazon is concerned.
I’ve been working for almost nine straight years, publishing dozens and dozens of novels, collections, and shorts. I usually average between half a million and a million plus words written and published per year. Consider that there are authors out there who can get by with publishing one book per year. That is perhaps 100,000 words per year for them. For me, four books a year would be a drastic failure. (I’d like to emphasize, for ME, I know there are authors within this genre that average this and I’m not implying, in any way, that they are failures, although I know that at least a few of them wish they could produce more). My point in all this is that I’m lucky to be where I am, but I also put in a lot of work to get here, and to stay here.
But Amazon is making that harder.
From where I’m at in the present, everything is basically fine. I am earning enough and my only complaint is that I can’t help people in my life as much as I’d like to. But I fear the future. I fear losing the ability to publish, I fear the rising cost of fucking everything, and I fear for the world in general because things just keep getting worse.
Consequently, this has caused me to reassess everything, including some stuff I thought I was done fucking around with. I’ll outline these decisions below. That being said, practically speaking, if all you are interested in is reading new books from me, then very little, if anything, will actually change from your perspective. This is really just for the people who are more deeply interested in my career and decisions related to that.
ROYAL GUARD PUBLISHING: For those of you who are not aware, Royal Guard is the publisher behind my audiobooks. So far, my experience with them has been exceedingly good. I learned sometime recently that they are expanding into publishing eBooks as well as audiobooks, and I have opted to sign with them to publish a new series. Remember that underground post-apocalyptic trilogy I mentioned some time ago that I said I found a better use for? That’s where it’s going. I’m still going to be posting it to my Patreon in early access, but basically, Royal Guard will be handling the publishing side of things, which I am extremely grateful for. From the reader side of things there really shouldn’t be much difference.
MY BACKLOG: For the love of God, I thought I was done with this one once I packaged up those Collections. But this whole thing with Amazon has caused me to, as I said, reconsider everything, and an idea I’ve entertained every now and then was to put all my stories back up like how they were before, with updated formatting and, in some cases, cover art, and maybe add a little here or there. Now it looks like I’ll be doing that. Which means that some stories are going to get some additional content. I’ll talk about the specifics below, but suffice to say: Collections are coming down starting this month and individual titles are going back up. They will still be in the KU. In short, my reasoning for this is: I would rather have 50 poorly-earning streams of revenue than 4, (the Collections did not sell well), and I also think people care less about me having more or less straight up erotica up alongside my haremlit than I thought they might.
EROTIC HAREMLIT: As I mentioned earlier, it’s occurred to me that I’ve been whittling down the number of my sex scenes over the past few years, and that is unfortunately only going to continue as the political climate of Amazon gets even more dicey. Consequently, I would like to have a series every now and then that is just horny as fuck, with lots of sex scenes. This will 99.9% cost me money, in short because working on a title that will earn less instead of on a title that will earn more means I am sacrificing earnings. Which I am willing to do some of the time, because not everything is about $. That being said, one idea I’ve had that may help mitigate the earnings problem is charging 5.99$ instead of 4.99$. An extra dollar might not seem like much, and in truth it really isn’t, but that extra dollar can add up. That being said, I’m not ready to talk about my first extra horny harem yet since I’ve got so much other stuff on my plate.
PAPERBACKS: Not much changing here except the pricing. I dropped all the prices of my paperbacks a few years ago because I figured ‘why not?’. Well, Amazon made some changes and now paperbacks cost more to produce, meaning that some of them were actually earning 0.00$ with each sale. I decided to go through and update them all with the most recent cover art and the newer formatting, as well as add in the bonus shorts that I’d since written, and also set a new minimum baseline price of 9.99$. This means that in general I’ll be earning between 1-2$ per sale instead of averaging 25 cents per sale. Some titles will be priced higher because price is determined by length. Our Own Way, for example, had to be 11.99$ because it’s my longest haremlit title ever. I will also be opting out of completed series paperbacks in the future, with the exception of the occasional short trilogy, because they are a huge pain in the ass to put together and I’m forced to charge so much more for them without actually making any additional money from the upcharge. Shorts will be included in the individual paperbacks.
INCEST EROTICA/HAREMLIT: I’ve been talking about it forever, and it’s still uncertain how long it’ll be before I actually get to it, but I’ve decided to publish my incest erotica/haremlit under another pen-name on Smashwords. That being said, Kindle-friendly versions and read-on-site versions of the titles will still be available for free. Basically, it’s a ‘support me if you want to’ kind of thing, where you can read it for free, or you can pay for it. Given the difficulty in monetizing incest erotica, I figure it’s not worth the hassle to try and hide it behind a paywall. I will, at the very least, be getting some more stuff up and available before 2024. And I do intend to write at least one serious haremlit true incest series with the same level of attention/detail as my other series. And that’s true incest, none of this ‘step’ bullshit.
PATREON, KO-FI, ETC.: I’m still uncertain about this, but I’ll probably be leaning at least a little harder into these types of things. I’ve never been very good with stuff like this, but now that I’m looking towards a more uncertain future, I’ll ruminate on it some more.
I think that’s everything. It might not be because I’ve been having insomnia issues.
Now, let’s talk about my fucking backlog. Again.
First thing’s first: The Collections are coming down.
SCI-FI UNIVERSE VOL 01: 08.24.2023
FANTASY UNIVESE: 10.01.2023
PARANORMAL UNIVERSE: 09.24.2023
SCI-FI UNIVERSE VOL. 02: 08.12.2023
Why such an incoherent deactivation schedule? Basically, that’s when each falls out of the KU.
Now, let’s discuss what’s on the menu. There’s a lot to talk about. I would also like to say that this is all in a state of flux. I’m still trying to figure everything out, and I may make a different decision once I actually get to a given project.
SCI-FI SHARED UNIVERSE
Hellcats: Hellcats 1 - 3 are going back up with few changes. That being said, in the course of writing bonus content, I’ve ended up with nearly a novel’s worth of stuff that takes place after Hellcats 3. So I’m going to try and assemble it into Hellcats 4, with new content being written to make it flow more smoothly. That may be impossible, however, so we shall see. Ideally, I’ll get Hellcats 4 published and then the most recent short, The Life, will serve as a bonus epilogue for The Complete Series.
Alien Harem: No changes here.
Valkyries: This one, unfortunately, isn’t even going up on Amazon. I’ve decided it’s just not happening. It’s too risky. Something about the trilogy sets Amazon off, so I’m keeping it elsewhere. It is still canon though.
Desire: In the course of updating Desire, I realized that I did something dumb by making the bonus content take place between the chapters in the final novel. So I’m just going to make it part of the novel and, for The Complete Series, I’ll be writing a new bonus epilogue short.
Like A Fine Wine: The only thing that’s changing here is that The Complete Series will now contain the Epilogue novella I wrote as bonus content. The Epilogue novella will be paired with Like A Fine Wine 4 for the paperback.
Exploration: I’ll be uploading the two bonus shorts I wrote with the novella since there’s nowhere else to put them.
Amazonian’s Love: I’ll be uploading the bonus content with the novel.
Blind Date: No changes here.
Like A Sex Toy: Still trying to figure out what I’m going to do with this one. I don’t want to bring back the Starter Pack, because it longer is accurate. I might put together a new collection with additional content and just call it Misty Vixen Collected or something.
FANTASY UNIVERSE
Wanderlust: Like Hellcats, Wanderlust has amassed a lot of bonus content taking place after the end, so I’ll be attempting to write Wanderlust V.
Lust & Adventure: This is the one I’ll be doing the most with. At a certain point, I became discontent with the ending of the trilogy. I’m going to take a shot at writing Lust & Adventure IV. Given it has the least amount of content taking place after its natural conclusion, it’ll require the most extensive work.
My Undead Lover: I’ll be posting the bonus content with the novella.
Royal Lust: Same here, bonus content with the novel.
Large & Lovely: No changes.
Snakeskin: No changes.
Adventurous: Bonus content to be rolled into the novel.
Lay of the Land: See Like A Sex Toy.
POST-APOCALYPTIC UNIVERSE
Sex & Survival: This one will be going up very soon, as I never actually did anything with it. If it wasn’t such a busy time, I’d consider writing that fourth novel I’ve always thought about, but alas this is not the case. So, basically, no changes.
The Pale Redhead: I’m probably going to keep this down since I intend to do a rewrite. The original version willl probably end up as a freebie download from my website.
A New World: See Like A Sex Toy.
PARANORMAL UNIVERSE
Paranormal Passions: Bonus content to be added to The Complete Trilogy, otherwise, no changes beyond formatting.
Roommates With Benefits: See Like A Sex Toy.
Pink: No changes.
Parasexual: The big one of this universe. I believe I am going to give this the Hellcats/Wanderlust treatment and just make a full Parasexual 6. I’m also going to try and get updated covers.
These will not be ‘new releases’, I’ll just be updating the originals. The reason for this is because re-releasing something as a new release is a potentially dicey situation with Amazon, because I can’t fully tell what they consider appropriate. I imagine most of the people reading this probably won’t care about my backlog, so feel free to ignore this. Nothing about this affects any of my haremlit, past, present, or future.
I think that’s everything.
If you have questions, feel free to ask however you feel most comfortable. Leave a comment or e-mail me at mistyvixen@outlook.com or send me a Reddit message or whatever.