Regarding the Future of Kitty Treetz (Patreon)

Well, this one's disappointing.

The Black Friday Sale just ended on itch, and I had made a deal with myself. If Treetz could sell, literally at all, I would not write this post. The discount was deep; both books for less than half what I ask for either individually under normal circumstances, or either for under a dollar. I really went for it. I tried to appeal.

It did not work, and neither have my last several efforts; while the first book met my most ambitious sales goal of ten copies sold, the second only sold a single solitary one, and further still so did the epub conversion of the first book once it had been listed (after much fighting) across several more conventional storefronts. The EPUB in particular really stung, not only because of the fight involved to get it listed at all, but because I'd undertaken the conversion process myself to ensure a quality product, and weeks of effort were paid off with a hearty check for one dollar and ninety-six cents.

Even the recent poll sent out to backers to gauge interest in my myriad of endeavors saw Kitty Treetz being a dawdling stray lamb amidst the herd. Clearly, something about these isn't working.

The illustrations I thought would give the stories a competitive edge wound up crippling its ability to reach an audience on any conventional storefront (in fact, they had to be removed to be listed at all, and are the main reason I was stuck in email chains trying to get my account unlocked in the first place; happy to help Draft2Digital find holes in their terms of service and write new rules, I suppose!). The length I thought would be bang for the buck instead seems to have rendered them outright unreadable to most people, who seem to just want to go into them for a quick wank, thus rendering all of the scene-setting and attempts to set the mood to be a bit of a waste I suppose seeing as nobody not in the mood is cracking the spine on one of these in the first place. Given the lack of feedback, it's either that or the writing is just shit and nobody wants to say so, but seeing as Thralls is faring markedly better in the same poll, I suspect it's at least partly the former. I don't know.

Regardless, Treetz have failed. I'm not abandoning the project entirely - I enjoy writing them, and the next one is well underway - but I am dropping the rote quarterly schedule I was trying to follow in an attempt to make a periodical that attracts an audience. We'll see if some changes I'm making to the formatting going forward help people get into the stories, or if absconding from the scheduling aids their quality and appeal, but for now, as an intended source of income and steady output, I need to admit that the project is not meeting its goals and thus should be of much, much lower priority than it was for its inaugural months. The attention in simply better spent elsewhere.

I get the sense this won't really upset anyone else the way it does me, but there it is. Recent life events have left me scrambling, and a large part of my effort has been trying to find anything that works to drive people onto here or other revenue sources amidst an economy that has people a bit too strapped for food money to be easily convinced to throw change at a panhandling smut peddler. I'm trying my best, but it's rather discouraging.

We'll see where it goes from here.

- Sera