Two Quick Updates (Patreon)

Alright, so first the bad news: this week I got one of my books pirated for the first time. Well, not the first time. I have found copies of it on pirate web novel/translation sites before. This time, though, someone scraped Tenebroum right off of RR and posted it to Amazon as "The Darkening of Souls : A LitRpg Dungeon Progression Fantasy" to try to soak up KU money. 

So that's fun. It has since been removed and resolved, but it's still obnoxious. My publisher actually had books from two different authors of theirs stolen on the same day that way, so they are not particularly happy.  AI writing is becoming a cancer in the web novel world in so many different ways. 

Fortunately, the second piece of news I have to share is better. 

As most of you know, Broken System Book 1 launched last week. It did better than expected thanks in large part to you. Thank you for your support in helping me take my first step to a wider audience and perhaps even a shot at turning this hobby into a career. 

I mean, I approach these things with pretty low expectations, so anything would have been better than expected. The launch exceeded the publisher's expectations, though, which means the series will be getting an audiobook, making it my first story to justify that expense. 

I thought Tenebroum would be the first book to get audio, but this is a welcome surprise.

Does that mean I'm rich now? Hah, hardly. I have heard of several authors that have been scouted on RR and gotten $10,000 advances per book from Podium. Sadly, I am not in that league. One day, maybe. 

I'd give you the numbers if I was allowed to, but speaking in broad strokes, I got a very small (I used the word token) advance on this book, and will eventually receive decent royalties, but I don't expect that to happen for months. With the costs of audio it could be longer than that. 

With an audiobook though, those might eventually amount to something, which would be cool. I'm a neophyte to all of that, but most authors with those sorts of deals say that the majority of their writing income comes from audible and kindle unlimited. So, it's a hopeful development. 

I've actually been working on a number of cool things I haven't had a chance to share with you guys because these two things made for a very busy week. I've got pictures of cool swag (my sticker project continues to move forward) and a video game to play but I've been waylaid by launches and pirates. I'll try to show the rest of that off soon. 

All this launch stuff is also delaying a project I started that I was hoping to preview for all of you. It's an antihero alchemist thing, and you should get a 10ish chapter preview of that before the end of the month.