Announcement and Scheduling 2/10/25
Okay personal stuff out of the way first. Apparently, I'm moving. Doesn't affect, you but it will affect me as all the stuff that has to happen to sell our house and finalize the financing for the new house will take up my time. We close on the new house on March 7th, so the window for that is pretty short and obviously, I need to sell my current house as quickly as possible, since the equity in it is part of what's making this other house possible and I have to get something called bridge loan financing to cover the down payment on the new house. Go figure, I don't have piles of money sitting around...
Done with personal stuff-
1) Welcome to the Multiverse - My plan and schedule have evolved some while remaining the same in other regards. I wasn't planning on writing Invasion yet, but it was the easiest thing to write and I was very much feeling the story so I started posting chapters in it. I'm not 64,000 words into a projected 150-180,000 words. (You all know I have a problem ending books within the real target of 150-160,00)
I intend to release 1 chapter Monday-Friday of Invasion. There may be chapters on Saturday/Sunday, but no promises.
2) Life in Exile- No, I haven't forgotten about this. I'm currently 50% through book 5 in my reread/study to prepare for book 7. I have to get through book 6 and the 64,000 words already written for book 7.
This is taking FAR longer than I want, but I am making some progress every single day. I'm hopeful that by the end of February I'll be adding new chapters. The target would be to add at least 3 new chapters every week- hopefully more.
3) Co-Author Project 1 is a dungeon core project with an isekai. The first draft is written. I'll share more about it here later. I am the secondary on this project so my time spent on it is far, far less than the primary author. It is undergoing revisions now.
4) New Project- so, the original plan had been to start Village of the Damned, a series under my pen name, David Burke. I am pushing that back by at least a couple of months because of a pair of reasons. This mostly centers around concerns I have regarding audiobooks and the new contract Podium is operating under with regard to Audible. You may have seen where some of my books are now free to read on Audible+ and others (Crystal Core) are now wide- meaning they are available on a number of platforms including Spotify.
So, instead, I decided to write a trilogy of a story that I've wanted to write for a while. The working title is Magic Eater- but everyone tells me they hate that title. No, he isn't an eater who his magical, rather he consumes magic. That series will have the audiobooks published by Royal Guard Publishing and will be written under my real name. That is the second reason for the switch besides the concerns with Audible/Podium. Right now, Sean Oswald is riding high as an author name for the litrpg genre. Small, small fish in the grand scheme of things, but the publisher feels like it will be better to write another Sean Oswald series.
That will also push my next series for Podium back until I can see the data about how their new deal is affecting authors in June.
I intend to release 1 chapter per day of Magic Eater, Monday through Friday, with the possibility of chapters on the weekends as well.
I'm toying with holding back the first three or four chapters so that you all can get a better feel for the story when I release all of them at once, but I haven't firmly decided. If you have an opinion, I'll listen.
Comments (10)
I feel like it would be wise to hold a few chapters back. Would give you more to show us what we are jumping in to. I don't think I've ever had a chapter hook me, but I'm weird so that's probably irrelevant.
What is the schedule for the Multiverse Anthology project?
I'm waiting for a response from Podium about the audio. I have to give them first dibs on it because it's part of WtMV. After that, I will make a formal announcement and would love to get most of the short stories by the end of April with the plan being to publish it in June. But once we have all of the authors figured out, if their schedules seem that they will need more time, then we will move it accordingly. Will probably create a discord channel to discuss it.
Everyone loves mass releases, right?
As a new Author trying to get my first book published. Can you explain what publishers are doing? I have yet to get an agent or make the final decison to self publish so i have no idea whats happening with audiobooks/ publishers?
Podium is the largest audiobook publisher for litrpg. They are very big in wider sci-fi and fantasy amongst other things. I've always used a publisher to do the audiobooks for me for a variety of reasons. If you self-publish your audiobook and pay the narrator upfront then you stand to make the most money possible on the audiobook. However, you also take all the risk. I've always tried to mitigate my risks by involving publishers. I now self-publish almost all my ebooks- because that part is easy and then I get 100% of the royalties after expenses. I use publishers for audiobooks for two primary reasons. 1) Advances are a way of getting guaranteed money and thus being sure that my time will be paid for even if the book doesn't do that well. 2) There are nuisances to dealing with Audible and narrators and such that I've never wanted to bother with, but prefer to let the publisher do so. They can also get narrators that I might not be able to. What has happened is that Podium had a special deal with Audible but that deal ended. Now we will be getting paid less per book sold. It was okay to give a chunk of royalties to Podium when they could get more per book sold from Audible that I could. But far less desirable when that amount is cut significantly. This is part of a change that Audible is making. More books are being put into their subscription service. The changes between Audible and Podium have led Podium to go wide with some of their books. The general consensus amongst litrpg authors is that we will be making less from audiobooks than before. The pessimists say 80% less the optimists say 33% less.
Honestly. Publish welcome to the multiverse so I can throw money at you already. Jokes aside take care of yourself and your family no1
Shut up and take my money?!
I think doing the first release as a chunk of chapters let's us get into the story faster. Especially as it is a fully new story, give everyone a better idea of what they are gearing into and how things might progress....plus I really just like having more to read. Thank you for the update and good luck with your new place.
I agree with this. Having several chapters upfront to get a feel for things is what I would prefer as well.