Lessons from Launch (Patreon)

So, this week I'm launching my new story, Broken System, as many of you already know. On the one hand, it's been a great success. It got more followers in a week than Letter of the Law got within a year. On the other hand, though, it has disappointed my expectations.

This is a graph of the number of followers for the first ten days of the story. It's fine. It was good enough to get on rising stars over on Royal Road, but it will not be enough to get to the top. Any story that can do that gets a lot of attention, but none of my stories have ever been able to break that glass ceiling; ironically Tenebroum and Death After Death were never even on the list, and they turned out just fine. 

I'll try a couple other things to move the needle of course (like swapping the cover), but as it stands, I think it will end up being about as read/followed as Death After Death. That may change when we get to the higher-powered story lines later on of course (Lord knows no one read Tenebroum when it first came out either,) but we will just have to see.

So, what did I learn?

• Don't be controversial - This is hard one for me. I will need to keep learning it, because I like dark, complicated stories as you, my dear readers know, but I expect that the inclusion of 'mind control magic' for the bad guys, even in a way where nothing gross happens, and that does not limit the main character's agency was a big factor here.
• Cover Art - I went for eye catching in a bid to stand out. I don't know that it worked for me.
• Shoutouts - They are less effective than they've been in the past. Even self-shouts from my own stories have done very little. I think that as they've become more common on RR, they get tuned out easier by the readers.
• Audience Portability - As I have heard a couple times here, most readers are really only interested in one story. So, this is another reason why I should focus my time on getting Tenebroum and Death After Death up to twice a week.

At the end of the day whether a story succeeds or fails doesn't make a huge impact on my writing plan. Once I've written a dozen chapters and gotten positive feedback from my Patrons/Beta readers, I will write a story until It's done.

Theoretically by sometime early next year I would like to be releasing 7 chapters/week instead of the 4 I am now. That will be two chapters each of Tenebroum, Death After Death, and Broken System until they are completed, but the last one is a toss-up. Will it be a Golemancer sequel? A third day of Tenebroum? Something entirely new?

I don't know yet. I won't decide until I've gotten a small mountain of editing for existing projects done, but I am certainly open to feedback. What would you like to see in that last spot?