November 25 Update (Patreon)

Most important bit first: I've overcome all inertial issues with TLS and had a great week of work! Now that I'm past the early struggling, I have momentum and things are going well. With any luck, next week I will have a positive report about how close I am to completion.

One of the votes next update is... a lot. I knew it would be a complex one, but I decided to try to make it react more to past decisions in the synod and it got out of hand. Not sure how it will feel to play, but... have fun diagramming it. Fortunately, some of the other votes will be much simpler and the player won't be directly involved with all of them.

Meanwhile, my novel had a crazy first week, which I should perhaps introduce with this image:

That's a subcategory of a subcategory, but still! I got a little "#1" badge and a bunch of people directed toward my book. After a slow couple days, I managed to hit #1 and maintain that rank for four solid days. After that, I lost it for a bit, then strangely managed to get it one more day. The book's sales seem to be declining for good now, though, so we'll see where they stabilize.

Most of this seems to have been organic traffic from people I don't know, but huge thanks to those of you who purchased or reviewed the book. ^-^ As I'll get into later, the potential algorithm problems are past, so anyone who wants to help out can now.

Anyway, this is better than I expected for a brand new effort, but it's nothing extraordinary. Here's the best I ever managed compared to all books on Amazon and the bigger categories:

Getting into the Top 100 list in any subcategory is not just an ego thing: a decent number of readers browse the top listings in their chosen genres when looking for new books to read. A big part of Amazon authors' strategy is to spike sales to get onto lists, then enjoy the sales from the increased visibility. My spike was modest compared to many, but I'm happy that I got it without any special sales or other manipulation.

I wasn't sure if my take on the genre would go too far from the traditional formula for the LitRPG audience, but I'm glad that mostly doesn't seem to be the case. Based on market research I probably could have done better with a different book, but I'm happier to have done decently with a book I believed in.

Review score means nearly nothing, but I'm doing okay so far:

My connections in the algorithms seem firm, so reviews are now open to anyone. If you read the book and feel it deserves a review, I'd be very grateful if you left one! It'd be nice to have a solid review base for whenever I next get a spike in traffic.

If you're a long time backer who is due a free copy and  didn't receive a link for some reason, just message me. If you're waiting for a better price, in theory I can do a $0.99 sale eventually, probably in connection with the launch of another book. But that won't happen until I have TLS 0.40.0 wrapped up, as that's my top priority.

See you next week!