The Haley Experiment (Patreon)

One of the requests in my patron survey was ‘more of that business stuff’, so here’s a brief digression about my foray into LitRPG, a genre with minimal crossover with my existing audience. For those of who you haven’t read Haley (or heard of LitRPG), the genre is basically “game elements are applied to the story, or playing a game is an essential plot point.” Think of things like the recent Jumanji movie, or Ready Player One, and you’ll have a sense of it.

The audience for LitRPG has many parallels to romance, in that it’s primarily single-sex (men in this case) and composed of voracious readers who tear through books at a ridiculous rate. They love serials, are forgiving of poor writing as long as the theme or niche works for them, and they’re very price-conscious. Most LitRPGs get their start as free serials (with accompanying Patreons for readers who want advance chapters) before moving to Amazon’s free lending library, Kindle Unlimited. And while audio is a huge market for LitRPG (see: mostly male readers), print and straight ebook sales aren’t.

Basically, if you want to succeed, you have to be in the Kindle Unlimited program, which makes your book available for free to subscribers… and prevents you from publishing it anywhere but Amazon.

For obvious reasons, writers have a love-hate relationship with KU and its exclusivity requirements, but there’s no question that many make so much more money through Amazon that when they publish wide (the term for releasing to multiple retailers) they lose money. The financials militate against busting Amazon’s monopoly, and many writers choose to make hay while the sun shines. They figure—not without reason—that if Amazon dumps them after a few years of making $10,000+ a month, they’ll have socked away a lot of money against the lean period when they’re rebuilding their audience on some other platform.

For a long time, I was a principled objector to KU, for the good reason that my experience with Spots the Space Marine burned me hard on putting all my eggs in Amazon’s basket. But I could afford to be blasé before inflation hit. I thought my royalties plummeting was a problem specific to me until I started listening to podcasts by writers who make several times more money than I do… usually. And the topics are all ‘what do we do with our incomes falling off a cliff, no one is spending money.’

I love LitRPG and have been reading it since 2016. It never occurred to me to write it, because the kinds of stories that are popular in the genre aren’t all that interesting to me to write, no matter how fun they are to read. Bonus issue: it felt like a male genre, and I didn’t really want to butt my way into the clubhouse. But I needed a new audience and a new source of revenue to bolster my sagging income, and LitRPG looked more hospitable than other genres.

Deciding to write a LitRPG story wasn’t easy, though. LitRPG readers like long stories and quick release schedules: experimenting with it wouldn’t be like a tradpub endeavor, where I could write a standalone Book 1 and see how it did before committing to writing a sequel. A short test would have a nearly 100% chance of failing, which meant I would have to set aside my bread-and-butter (Peltedverse Eldritch) books to invest fully in the experiment.

But y’all… the royalty cratering is real. Not all writers are reporting it, of course, but enough of them are that I know I’m not likely to be saved by waiting it out. And when you’re in that position, you can do more of the same or you can try something new in the hopes that it will lead you out of the hole. So I decided to run a six-month LitRPG serial experiment to see what would happen. My goal wasn’t to reach my existing readers (unless they were crossover readers in both SF/F and LitRPG already), but to access a new pool of people through KU. Even so, I knew I was taking a huge risk, because my story idea was thematically different enough from most LitRPG that it might not work, and it was still shorter than average, because I’m not as fast as the extremely successful LitRPG writers who do the write-and-release cycle.

But I figured I had nothing to lose, so I went with it.

As of now, I am 4.5 months into my 6 month experiment, and Haley sales are half of my income. This is an extraordinary statement when you consider that I have a backlist of over fifty novels, and they are not contributing materially to any current sales despite being out there for people to buy. It’s obvious that when you release a new book, sales of that new book will spike—what’s not sensible is that those sales will spike, and the rest of your sales remain depressed. Almost nothing in my catalog is moving, so to see the Haley books doing this well is both encouraging and disheartening because of what it implies about the health of my existing oeuvre.

Looking at the numbers, it’s hard to judge how many of the sales are going to my existing readers versus new ones—the real test will be once I’ve finished writing the Haley series and have stopped advertising it in my newsletters/patron platforms, which is where my existing SF/F fans are clustered. But the KU page reads alone were almost 10% of my November Amazon income. If you put all four of the published Haley stories together, they’re just about as long as some of my shorter novels… which means that for the effort I would have normally put into a single novel, I’m getting a ridiculous return. With every Haley release, the numbers jump up, and I’m curious to see what they’ll be like when February rolls around.

Based solely on ‘did I get paid’ standards, writing these stories was a good idea. I don’t know enough to say whether we’ve risen to the level of ‘I got paid so much more that it no longer makes economic sense to write my other books’, but we’ll see.

Does this mean I’ll abandon my Peltedverse books? No. But it might mean I have to de-prioritize their production. And I say ‘have to’ because I mean it. When I quit my day job it was with the understanding that I would be contributing materially to my family’s welfare. I can take a hit, to a certain extent, to fulfill my artistic needs… but when my income level drops below a certain threshold, I need to get it over that threshold again before I can justify doing things that don’t earn as well.

I also don’t want to linger over it, but I took a financial hit for standing by my political and religious convictions a couple of years ago, and my income hasn’t recovered from it. I don’t love that we live in an era where people cut one another out of their lives over something as transient as politics when what matters is the human heart beating under them, but this is the world we live in… and science fiction/fantasy is particularly vicious when it comes to canceling people who aren’t perfectly mentally hygienic. We’ve gone from a genre where I could walk across a party’s main room and meet a Communist, two libertarians, a socialist, a conservative, and an anarchist to a genre where everyone shuts up or says the same things, and we are poorer for it. At least, I am.

Inevitably some of you will wonder how you can save your favorite stories from the backburner, so I’ll tell you that word of mouth is overwhelmingly the way books become popular enough to survive. Here are the things that help:

• Write a review on a retailer or Goodreads. It can be one line long. ‘loved this, can’t wait for the next’.
• Mention the book wherever you talk about books online. Reddit threads, comment sections, social media, forums, blogs, whatever.
• Mention the book wherever you talk about books in person: to friends, at conventions, at games, at book clubs, etc.
• Ask libraries to buy copies of the ebooks.

When I conclude the Haley experiment I’ll have some hard numbers for you. In the meantime, I am sorry that I can’t share the ebooks across every retailer, but grateful that something I’m writing is growing my income, rather than presiding over its shrinkage.