June Updates + Break After Book 5

TLDR: We’re back! Book five posting continues mostly normally. After book five is done, I’m going on a temporary hiatus. Billing is paused.

Hi all! 

First want to say sorry for going AWOL for the last week. I appreciate those who reached out and want to assure everyone I’m perfectly fine and nothing major has happened. I mostly just bit off a bit more than I could chew this month, non-writing wise. Got a bit overwhelmed and did not take care of my body well (food/sleep/exercise/etc-wise), and combined with struggling with the current story arc more than usual, I had some minor burn-out and needed a week to reset. Fully back to normal now, and I have a beautifully clear schedule for a while to get some writing done.

As I missed a good three posts, I decided to pause the billing cycle, which I believe should effectively give everyone a free month at whatever tier they’re currently subscribed to. I’ll also probably post a bit faster than twice a week for a bit, which will make up for the three we’re behind.

Now! Some other bigger news, partly good, partly bad. After looking at the book-four sales numbers and mulling it over a lot, I’ve decided to take a longer break after I finish book five.

This is for a few reasons, but as is usually the case, the biggest one is a money thing.

I’m pretty happy with the reception of book four, and the sales numbers aren’t bad, but they’re a bit below where’d I’d need to be to live off of. It’s also looking like the bulk of the sales are coming from existing readers picking up the latest copy as opposed to new readers finding the series and starting from book one, which means that, from what I can tell, I don’t expect the sales to jump up significantly after releasing book five or future books in the series. Short of very drastically increasing my writing pace, I’ll eventually need a different plan to pay the bills.

That mostly means I’d have to do one of

• Bite the bullet, accept I’m going to lose some money for a while, and just try to wrap up the series really fast so I can move on to something else

• Go back to having a full-time job and writing on the side

• Write as my main job but pick something up part-time

• Or keep writing full-time, but try writing something else that will make more

The first is out. There’s so much content left in the series that it would take me well over a year to wrap it up without doing some abrupt sham ending like “oh no, she dies at level 20,” which is a bit too long for me to be slowly losing money.

Very well might do two or three eventually if I have to, although the change in my happiness levels after I started writing full time is so massive that I’m hoping to hold off on those for now if I can help it.

Which pretty much leaves me with the last option of trying to write something new before I effectively give up and go back to standard work. I’ve also been thinking about trying something new for a while. Firstly, that’s because I made about 70 gajillion big mistakes back when I first started writing, marketing, and publishing Protagonist book one, and I’m really hoping to see what things would look like now that I know better.

And secondly, I know it often doesn’t feel like it with the slowburn we have going on, but this series is around a million words now, which is long, at least to me. Despite only being five books in, with how long these books are, once book five is done, the series will be about as long as the 12-book series of Cradle and is already past the page count of a lot of “longer” series like the 7-book Dungeon Crawler Carl or the 9-book Ultimate Level One. I started writing it on and off again back in 2019, and I essentially haven’t written any other fiction since then. 

All that to say, I think I could stand to take a quick breather and write something in a new world for a change. I love the Protagonist universe, but it’s all I’ve written for years and years. As much as this is mainly about the money issue, I’m genuinely kind of excited to start writing something new.

So, with that in mind, here’s my current plan.

• Finish book five. Patreon keeps on going until we’re completely done with the dungeon. No ending mid fight or on a cliffhanger.

  • To that end, I’m just keeping the Patreon’s billing paused until then. It’s already paused, and I don’t want anyone renewing their membership and then having there be only 2 chapters left, and they get shafted by paying full-price for a single week’s content.

• Take a bit of time off to edit and publish book five (mostly doing this first because I owe the audio folks the edited book in a timely manner).

• Take a few months to start something new and write my ass off until I have enough to post.

After that, things get a bit more nebulous. I’ll likely focus on the new series for a bit to make sure it has a very healthy backlog and that I don’t make the same initial marketing mistakes as last time. Then, like a lot of authors do, I could see myself posting chapters for both Protagonist and the new series at the same time, although that’s something I’d decide and post about later on. Alternatively, the new series will tank, I’ll be forced to get a full-time job again, and I’ll go back to writing Protagonist as a hobby. Really, anything could happen.

Either way, I’m planning for this to be a pretty temporary change. Instead of the larger 200k-word books I’ve been putting out, the goal is to write some smaller ~80k books, with a series that’s three or four books long, max. At a moderate 2k-words-per-day pace, that’s about 4-6 months of writing, which is to say, this is not some super long series I’m replacing Protagonist with. The goal is to do something fresh, but to wrap it up well and finish it without lingering.

With all that said: Sorry! I read a bunch of stories on Royal Road, and I know how annoying it can be when something you’re reading goes on hiatus. Same goes for books on Amazon where there’s no new book for years. I hope to eventually get to a point in my writing career where I’m making enough to feel comfortable writing whatever I want without worrying about the money, but I’m sadly not there yet. Once again, this is temporary, and I have no plans of abandoning the series, but I’m sorry for the big pause nonetheless.

On the flip side, if you’ve enjoyed the story thus far, I’m hoping you’ll be excited to read something new from me maybe.

That’s all I got for now. Patreon billing is paused for the foreseeable future, so there shouldn’t be any new payments. More posts on that later, and I’ll also be making some posts about the new series for anyone who’s interested. Otherwise, no real changes until the end of book five.

All the best,

Whimsy