‘Scuse the noise while I fire up the chainsaw and remove the cobwebs from this blog.
Right, where were we? Ah, yes, The Great Serialization Experiment. The first Grave Oversight arc is completed. As is, it’s around 80,000 words, which is a fair length for a tight urban fantasy novel and exactly what I hoped it would be when I started. I’m not going to send you to the serialized version at this point because it’s silly for you to pay more than you would for the ebook that will soon be available while I (with the imminent expiration of the “50x actual earnings” launch bonus) receive less money than I would if you bought the less expensive ebook. At this stage, we both win if you don’t find your way to the serial.
I won’t go into the innumerable problems baked into That Platform, but the relationship certainly hasn’t been beneficial to me personally in terms of either short- or long-term goals. The reports show how many people are “following” the story, and that number is wildly inconsistent with the number of people actually reading it. Either the Evil Overlord isn’t reporting reads accurately (always a possibility) or these nonreading followers are wait-until-it’s-finished readers, which defeats the purpose of the serial format. There’s a post on the official support forum in which someone outright requests the option to pay all at once and read all at once. If you’re thinking that sounds an awful lot like an amazing piece of existing technology called “a book,” you are correct!
An awesome thing about books is that there’s not a real-time tally detailing how many people aren’t quite interested enough to read them undermining the author’s motivation to continue writing them.
Since I failed to gain a serial audience (which was the primary point of the experiment because I did the math and knew the payment structure was ungood before I waded in) and all-at-once books are vastly better suited to my “realize in Chapter 20 I should have set up something in Chapter 2” creative process anyway, the remainder of the Grave Oversight trilogy will be exclusively in whole-book form. Rather than leave the serial version up unfinished, I put in the request for it to be removed, so that phase of the story’s journey will be consigned to the memory bin approximately 2 months from now.
Book One needs a light edit (I wouldn’t have put it out in public in embarrassing condition, but why waste an opportunity to fix my little regrets), a little cover tweaking (done!), a book-worthy description, and formatting for ebook distribution. I hesitate to give a release date because my personal situation is precarious and prone to plan-wrecking disasters that will make a liar of me, but I can say the window of possibility doesn’t open before January 29, 2022, since the final serial episode has to be at least 30 days old before I make the story available elsewhere in book form.
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