Weekly Update #2 (Patreon)

Blegh.

So, last week was basically a perfect storm of things to make me have to kill myself over the weekend working. I was writing for 20 hours straight Friday-Saturday and ended up going through 5 pots of coffee to stay awake. I think I can still feel the caffeine.

Here's the past week's work sheet: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18FNt9aW6MlM4uOcvBGAmQCkkZXl8ixcE/view

To explain a bit, earlier on in the week, a bunch of personal drama started happening in real life. It doesn't involve me directly, but it involves people I care about, so I had to help them out and make sure everything was okay which drained a bunch out of me and persisted nearly all week. So, instead of write, I decided to just focus on editing to get it out of the way with. The only writing I was doing during week were the bonus chapters for TTE, and I still have one more left that I have to write for today.

Anyways, between personal drama, having to write bonus chapters every day, and focusing on editing instead of writing, I ended up reaching this past weekend with a lot of writing that needed to be done.

Never letting that happen again.

Aside from that, TTE has reached a bunch of goals this week. It has jumped from about 300 followers to over 700 thanks to Trending, and it is still sticking in the second spot on the front page. It also is currently ranked 8th for weekly popularity, has one of the top reviews still, and has been posted on RRL's Facebook and Twitter. It's kind of funny looking at RRL's front page since TTE is basically spammed all over it more than any other story right now.

The tournament arc is going to begin soon which will be a taste of the first actual "arc" that isn't just slice of life. Afterwards, the first serious arc will begin which I'm really hyped for. It's still going to be slice of life and rather lighthearted overall, but believe it or not, there will be serious plot arcs.

As for ASV, it is entering its final stages and will likely be wrapped up within the next few weeks. I will be doing an analysis of it after I'm done to go over its issues, what I liked, the story and how I had originally envisioned it, etc.

Onto the Patreon changes!

Aside from editing some of the rewards to just be less wordy, there are two important changes:

1. For the $5 reward tier, you will see that you will now be kept 7 chapters ahead of what is freely/publicly available rather than getting a batch of chapters uploaded every week. I wanted to try out the latter, but nobody liked it, so I've gotta adapt! By adapt, I mean do what everybody else does. Don't try fixin' what ain't broke and all that. Aside from that, I plan on the daily uploads being posted early in the day (before ASV updates) starting tomorrow.

2. For the $15 reward tier, I have removed me posting a link alongside the special thanks on every chapter to whatever the subs to that tier want. My reason for this is because, after thinking about it and having somebody else talk to me about it, I realized that somebody could want me to link to something that I don't want my work nor pen name associated with. Sure, I could just review everything thoroughly to make sure that I am not associating my work with anything nor anybody negative, but that would be a lot more work and potential drama. 

A Question!

Alright, if you could give me your opinion regarding this, I would appreciate it.

Within the next two weeks, I want to start posting uploads that are 14 chapters ahead of public releases for the $10 tier. However, given that I am already uploading 2 chapters a day for the $5 tier and that might end up being three chapters in the future, I don't want to spam people.

One solution is to first upload everything to the $10 tier and then, when $10 content would be a week old (thus 7 chapters ahead of free posts), lower its price point to only be $5. This would be the least spammy solution, but then I'm worried about $5 Patrons not realizing that they have new chapters available for them because I'm pretty sure that you won't get a normal notification if something is edited to be available to you rather than notifying you like it normally would. It would still pop up on your dashboard, but it would probably be below all other new stuff posted.

The other solution, which is the easiest and probably most effective but also the spammiest, is to just upload daily for both $5 and $10. This means that every day there would be at least two $5 uploads and two $10 uploads. Now, $5 patrons wouldn't have to worry about spam, but the $10 and above ones would.

There is also the concern that adding the ability to be 14 chapters ahead would split the community a little bit depending on how popular this all gets. Being 7 chapters ahead isn't too much, but being 14 chapters is being at least two weeks ahead. Then, if somebody is a $10+ patron and has to end it for some reason, they would have to wait two weeks for the story to get to a point where they're reading fresh content.

Anyways, that's all for now. I would love to hear your opinions on this, thank you for reading, and thank you for your continued support!