Hello everyone,
this isn’t a story post, sadly, but one regarding some technical difficulties that have been ongoing for a while – it appears that wordpress has some kind of issue that keeps pending comments off the list for me.
Some appear, some don’t. Some come in days, weeks or, in a case I noticed today, months late.
If you’ve been commenting here for a while and your comments have yet to appear, that may be the reason for it. I’m trying to figure out how to fix this, but for now, it appears that whether or not I even get to decide whether to approve a comment or not is up to the RNG.
Sincerely,
Tieshaunn Tanner
I hope this one makes it through.
It seems like comments from users that have been previously approved all come through. But new commenters sometimes don’t show up in the “Pending” tab of the interface, nor on the wordpress app I’m using on my phone
Hey Tieshaunn,
I’m not sure if this is too personal, but I do really want to know. Is making writing a full time job something you’ve considered and if so how much would you have to make a month (from donations, Patreon, etc.) for you to consider it. I for one would certainly contribute to you monthly or even weekly if it meant you could do this full time :).
making this my fulltime job would be a dream come true. I’d love nothing more than to say, “This is what I do 6-8 hours a day, 5-6 days a week”
But to be able to do that, I’d need to be making at least 1500€ a month, off of it, to cover everything (Germany is quite expensive), preferably 1800+ even…
If that were your goal I would recommend posting on a site with more exposure. Have you considered slowly transitioning over to royalroad.com?
If you manage to post 2-3 chapters a day for a month or so it should be quite easy to get into trending (and maybe even popular).
After that, you would have to maintain a fairly high weekly chapter quote while giving your patrons 1-2 weeks advance access to new chapters. If you can keep that up reaching 1500+€/month should be possible.
Maybe check out some of the popular fictions and the corresponding Patreon pages if you have some spare time. Though I should warn you, royalroad can be a tough place for new authors. Expect to be review bombed the moment you start climbing in ranks. And the comment section is a LOT less personal than what we have here. You would also have to temporarily lock the chapters here to incentivize people to actually visit the Patreon…
Not sure if switching website is something you are willing to do, but as far as I can tell it’s your best option if you want to start working full time. No offense, but this blog is really hard to find for new readers.
Rereading my comment it reads a lot more aggressively than I had initially thought. Don’t want to push you towards making a decision or anything. What I actually wanted to express is that I, and probably everyone else who follows this blog, firmly believe that you and your novel have the potential to support you as a full-time writer. I kinda suck when it comes to putting my thoughts into words.
Hello Ansraer,
thank you for making the effort. I hadn’t heard of royalroad.com before, and I wouldn’t mind also publishing there (though I would want to keep this blog, perhaps with a delay, going).
The problem however is, not really that, but how much to write – I WANT to write 2-3 chapters a day, or at least 1 chapter a day. I wish I could take 6-8 hours a day to crank out daily updates.
The problem is time. I have bills to pay. Which means having an income. Which means a proper job – and frankly, if I didn’t have my family, I wouldn’t be able to make it as is.
If I could get to the point where I could take a month to crank out daily updates, that’d already be a huge improvement to right now.
So, it’s a bit of a catch-22 situation – I need the money to be able to take the time to earn the money -_-
I totally forgot to mention it, but should you ever consider another platform do NOT, under any circumstances, publish on or sign a contract with webnovel.com. I have heard horror stories about their interpretations of IP and copyright law. Also heard rumors that some of the authors that signed a contract suffered burnouts from the constant pressure.
I have heard of webnovel.com, and I have no intention of ever utilizing that site
If you decide to post on RoyalRoad, do it like Ansraer said. Post the chpaters you already have with 2-3 Chapter a day. Not all at once. Maybe even only on a day. It should give you a big enough following.
that… is not an idea which I’d considered before…
Yeah, I am aware that you (currently) can’t write that many chapters.
That’s why I suggested that you post (edited) versions of what you already have. 2-3 a day for the first few weeks to show up in the updated category twice daily. That should hopefully get you enough attention to get into trending, at which point 4-5 chaps a week should be enough to maintain your rank.
(To be fair, your chapters are very long compared to what other authors write, but readers have the tendency to ignore that when they demand new content.)
That’s also why I suggested to temporarily lock the WordPress site, to make sure that people have to come back to your fiction on royalroad repeatedly.
The goal would be that by the time your stockpile runs out you have enough supporters to focus entirely on writing new chapters.
Admittedly, you would probably still have to invest some time and rework the first chapters, but it might be doable if you pause writing new content. At least that’s what I would consider doing if I were in your position. I obviously don’t know the specifics of your situation, so maybe just take some time and look at it. I have a feeling that especially for someone who has published stuff online before (and has enough experience to deal with unconstructive criticism) it could be a useful tool.
I’ll second Ansraer’s suggestion.
The time between chapters here is long enough already that should this pan out, it would be an acceptable amount of time to wait until you’ve “caught up” to be able to read new chapters again.
Most of the people who have stuck around this long would be happy to follow you round the web to see you make a good solid go at completing this.
Like he said, the community there is different. Less personal, you would be competing with a lot of crap stuff on the site. You would be beholden to their interface. Also, it might not pan out. Shallow powerlevely stuff tends to do well there. Sometimes the best stuff just doesn’t hit the big time.
But I think it’s worth a try.
The topwebfiction link currently points to this blog. If you commit to this, you might want to look into changing the topwebfiction link to the royalroad site. If you took the site down temporarily so new readers could only follow the progress on royalroad, I could live with that but please do have some way to keep this site around to put back up later even as an archive because all the comments are so fun and informative.
I agree with what the others said, but it would probably pay off to do the rewrite of the prologue before you start, because readers at RoyalRoad tend to drop stories very quickly if the initial chapters don’t connect with them. As it is, the current Brennus prologue is more than a little rough compared to the rest.
You are a lying liar. It’s not rough at all. It’s complete and utter crap.
I can barely look at the first four or five arcs, I feel like a part of me dies each time I do, they’re so embarrassingly bad.
In short, I need to rewrite that entire crap, plus the Falling Hearts arc
Puppy Poopy Puppy. How many days will it take for you to see this?
Also, alternatively you could always go to both Fictionpress or Spacebattles for exposure.I don’t think you should do what the other comments are saying. The Wandering Inn is still doing great on a WordPress site,same with ‘ole Wildbow.
Yeah but pirateba also posts like 50,000 words a week and also has been on RoyalRoad for a long time.
But the wordpress is still there. Also cerulean and erraticcerra and Rhodeworks
I’m honestly just cool with whatever works to get tieshaunn more views and potential support.
No one ever said to completely kill the WordPress blog. All I recommended was to set the chapters that haven’t been re-published yet to private. This way readers would have to keep returning to the book on royalroad, which is very important if you want to increase the books rank (which results in even more exposure).
The moment a chapter has been made public on royalroad it could also be re-enabled on WordPress with the click of a button. By the time tieshaunn starts writing new chapters again this blog would be exactly as it is right now again.
And sure, Fictionpress or Spacebattles are also viable options, but they both neither have the sheer mass of readers royalroad has nor the discovery features that allow new works to gain followers.
I don’t know, most of the writers that I know that use WordPress do it the other way around.
I just wanted to second the royalroad plan.
Post 1 to 2 chapters a day for a few weeks, and you will definitely get a ton of exposure.
Be sure to post here that you are doing so, so that we can all go there and give you extra hits.
Also, you have more than enough collected material to self-publish a few books on Amazon, in order to make you a little more money.
I read a lot of litrpg titles on there, and many of them are nowhere near as polished or edited as your work.
It shouldn’t cost you anything to self-publish that way either.
Good luck, I love this story.
Also, many of your chapters are long enough to be cut into 2, giving you even more content to post on royalroad.
And going back through them to edit would make it even easier to batch them into books for publishing.
Maybe put all the intermission type stories into novellas for sale for a dollar or 2, with the main books going for 3 to 5 each.
There’s also Kindle Unlimited, which pays per download, but there are some restrictions to using that service.
Either way, I know I am not your only reader that will buy your books, and there are so, so many more who will as well.
Okay so does anyone know how to set up a WordPress blog because I’ve been trying to do it for awhile and I don’t know where to start.
If you don’t want to host it yourself (wordpress.org) you can host it on wordpress.com. Try this link: https://wordpress.com/start?ref=calypso-nosites.
Thanks, do you know how to set everything up? Make it at the bare minimum navigable?
you can find multiple tutorials and guides on youtube and reddit on that.
personally, I mostly did it via trial and error. it’s pretty easy if you take some time to work yourself into it – just don’t get frustrated or discouraged if it doesn’t look the way you want it to right away
Yeah I got kinda confused because some videos showed WordPress in bitnami while others showed it as a direct download. And both of these options had completely different interfaces for setting up everything.
Have you’ve ever thought about doing a discord?
I must admit to a near-complete ignorance in regards to discord. It’s something like irc, right? just fancier
Basically yeah
Hi.
Quick question, does this accurately describe ‚kill orders‘?
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Kill orders happen when Heroes and Villains stop playing dress up games and start dropping bodies in the street. Kill orders are an invisible sniper with a Magic Fifty three miles away and a supersonic bullet with infinity +1 damage passing through your scull three seconds before anyone hears anything beyond your body hitting the ground. Kill orders are a black-hole car-bomb in your driveway, a 120mm discarding-sabot depleted-uranium tank round through your front door on a Sunday morning.
And then, if you keep being horrible, if they can’t kill you quick enough, if you are truly a contender for worst human ever, you get an extended Kill Order and civilian casualties become acceptable collateral damage. They’ll put a missile into your car on the freeway, then pepper the road with 105mm and 40mm rounds from three orbiting C-130’s for ten minutes before the heroes arrive to cremate and urinate on whatever left. They’ll drop a thousand pound bomb on your family home, or the workplace where you pretend to be a decent person, or the bar you hang out in with your less spectacularly Evil buddies.
And then, if you’re still not dead, if you’re a magik regeneration mage with infinite lives or immune to all physical harm or can only be touched by a virgins tears gathered by a druid below Stonehenge on a snowing winter solstice night, and if your still homicidal enough, they’ll go the extra hundred miles when you have an extended Kill Order on your head.
They will find that druid. They’ll find a virgin, show her a tape of her boyfriend cheating on her and then fly sixteen firefighting tankers over Stonehenge on solstice filled with freshwater and liquid nitrogen if that’s what it takes to hurt you. They will make it happen. Because to get an extended kill order your body count is four digits long and climbing like a pedometer on a centipede that’s been dosed with amphetamines. You are a monster, and they’ll hold a parade and street parties after you’re dead.
While amusing, it is rather… very off.
First of all, kill orders are declared by the government and the government can’t condone the wanton slaughter of innocents. It just doesn’t work.
Kill Orders function rather like this:
Regular Kill Order: you have been deemed a sufficient threat to society that your right to live has been revoked. You are still hunted like any other criminal, but henceforth, killing you – that is, YOU personally, not people around you, not even members of your villain team, unless they have KOs of their own – is no longer a crime, even if it is premediated and not an act of self-defense. Normally, even criminals aren’t allowed to be MURDERED, someone whom assassinates a mob boss, for example, will be persecuted and tried just the same as any other murderer. Not so with people whom have a Kill Order/Death Warrant.
However, you are not yet at the stage where the government/society ACTIVELY wants you dead – they merely won’t care IF you are killed, even if it happens in a premediated fashion.
If you are captured alive, you will be tried properly and may just get a life sentence.
If you show up to an S-Class event, having a death warrant on your head, you will fall under the protection of the Truce and be allowed to participate in the operation, as well as leave, unmolested, so long as you yourself adhere to the truce.
A lot of veteran villains have a regular KO on their head – The Dark has one, and every member of the dark five has one by default.
Extended Kill Order/Death Warrant:
now you’ve gone and done it. You’re such a prick, society and the government want you DEAD. Even if you’re captured alive, it’ll only delay your death – you’ve been tried in absentia and given a death sentence.
Anyone is allowed to go after you, and people are allowed to put out bounties on your head – hell, government agencies will even collect the money put out on your head, post the bounty, and then pay whoever did it – even a villain with a Kill Order can bring your head in and walk away with the money!
Government capes, military units, they’re all gonna hunt you, with lethal force. You need not be brought in alive. Or in one piece.
Furthermore, at this stage, any adult whom actively aids you is considered to be under a regular KO; they need not die, but the government will NOT prosecute anyone whom kills or otherwise hurts them in the course of coming after you.
Your human rights have effectively been revoked at this stage – you aren’t even an animal, cause those get animal rights. You’re just a problem to be solved, nothing more.
You won’t even be accepted at an S-Class event – there is no truce which covers your ass.
Hi, still occasionally writing fanfic. This would come right after the lair bit. I do not promise to ever finish this. – I tried to add italics for the text message bit, i don’t know if it’s going to work.
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It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Mindstar sat on her throne and brooded while the holographic Dowager in front of her droned on. The ruler of all crime in South America was, as usual, plotting to extend and protect her endless webs of financial manipulations and insider dealings with more of the insanely complex schemes that she seemed to enjoy so much. Amy just could not see what the woman got out of it, other than her obvious pleasure at proving she was the biggest smartarse in the room. Mindstar tried to keep her utter boredom with the old witch’s absurdly complex scheme off her face while she, reluctantly, traced out the plan on the financial spreadsheets the screens of her throne displayed. Amy wasn’t stupid, certainly not stupid enough to stop listening to what the Wicked Witch of the South was actually saying or to take her eyes off the money, but this kind of crap was not the reason she’d become a supervillain.
Although considering she’d recently discovered all her memories of her path to supervillainy were completely fake, she couldn’t say what her actual motives for it had been at all. Which was utterly terrifying, but irrelevant right now. She was a supervillain, one of the best. Or worst. She either owned it and excelled, or let doubt set in and ended up like her predecessor. Whom she had mercilessly predeceased herself. Despite how her beloved baby brother felt about her job and her lifestyle, Amy had no intention of reforming.
Besides, the job had its perks. A silent text appeared on the screen besides her. Lamar the Purple.
Hello, my incandescent little star. Got something interesting for you.
?
Crown jewels of Sweden. Coming to LE tomorrow. Got the schedule and some inside intel.
So? I expect my boyfriend to give me jewelry, not send me out to steal it for him.
Boring. This will be fun ; )
I have work.
Boring work
I have dinner with Basil on wednesday.
So fly out afterwards. Or bring him along? We could chat
NO.
Amy tried to keep a calm face for the teleconference camera as she angrily mashed the keyboard and tried to crush yet another attempt by Lamar to wiggle past her defenses. She was not going to let her idiot Hero brother and her reckless Supervillain lover meet. Ever.
NO NO NO hell no. Do not even fucking joke
Aw. Have to meet sometime.
I will murder you first
As long as it is a slow and vigorously done execution I’m ok with it
When will you be there
24th. I bet you can’t steal them before I get there
What bet?
You win, we have a long weekend in Vegas. I win, we have dinner with your brother.
No bet.
I’ll throw in the Cullen diamond. Yours, if you win.
No bet.
Boss owes me a week’s holiday on one of his super yachts. Was saving it for Valentines. I can get us both off work?
Amy agonized. It was genuinely painful to contemplate Lamar meeting Basil. Or Basil’s reaction to Lamar. But. Hell, she could do it. Bunch of old jewels in a museum. Easy. And a week off work sailing with Lamar…
Fine. I WILL win.
By the 24th. Midday. Five days away. At least the crown, if not the entire set.
Done.
Sent the file. Looking forward to some of your brother’s legendary cooking.
Jump in a hole and die there
;D
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