Hi everyone!

Just up front, this is about Patreon membership. The TLDR is that we have a Patreon that gives you access to 25+ advance chapters, we are reminding you that we have a Patreon that does this and that every subscription goes a long way to making life stable enough that I can crank out better books faster. Support us here!

Moving on from that:

I’m a grown man and a professional writer and I still am trying to find great ways to talk about money, but the one principle I have learned since starting this gig is that I want to tell you about the inside baseball of being a writer.

The way revenue works for us is that it generally speaking comes from two sources:

1. Kindle Unlimited.

2. Patreon.

Of the two of these, Kindle Unlimited is the big potential source of making all your dreams come true. If something does well on KU, it sometimes does very well indeed. When you hear about writers in this world making huge money, the biggest parts of the financial success are coming from there.

The downside to KU is that success isn’t guaranteed even if you get all the NovelBin support you get. Sometimes books just fall flat on their faces no matter how much effort you put into them or how gracious the NovelBin readers (you!) are about showing up to review and promote them. It’s hit or miss, and I’ve been very lucky to have more hits than misses. There have been misses, though, and it’s tough to weather a quarter to half a year on a series that mostly fails for one reason or another.

The way most writers try to smooth out that weirdness is by also having a Patreon. Patreon is generally a lot more consistent, in that membership goes up and down in ways you can generally track and predict. It’s always smaller than what KU can do, but it’s so much more consistent that it actually sometimes makes for bad incentives sometimes.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from NovelBin. Please report it.

I write complete series of books. Generally speaking, this means that I’m trying to tell a story with a real beginning, a real middle, and a real end. When I start to run out of interesting story to tell in one universe, I wrap those stories up and move to another universe. For a lot of you, this is part of why you read my stuff; you know I’m not going to drag things out to wring every dime out of a successful series I can. The upside of doing that is I write better books than I otherwise would. The downside is that it makes our Patreon income a lot less consistent than it would otherwise be. Every time I switch to a new series, we lose tons and tons of subscribers who only sometimes come back when they find out they like the next series too.

When you see a writer spending a whole arc on their MC replacing his million gazillion year monster bone core with a trazillion megazillion year monster bone core without moving the story forward at all, this is generally why they are doing it. When an MC announces they’ve extended their stay in the plotless maze-planet of noprogress for another six months of real-world time, it’s to avoid those risks. It’s stability at the cost of storytelling.

Anyway.

The practical upshot of all this is that nobody is doing anything wrong here. I’ve had a lot of consistent support from the readers that has made working as a writer possible, and it’s an incredible thing to have. I love it. It makes my life good. At the same time, writing the best books I can also makes me make less money because of the simple fact that switching series is a kind of turbulence I have to fight through every time it happens.

Some of you are free-format readers only, and that’s absolutely fine. I love that you are here. Some of you have Patreoned in the past for series you particularly liked, and didn’t find other series enough to your taste to want to support them. That’s fine too! I want you to support these books when it makes sense for you and when it’s worth it to you.

But if you’ve found that most of my series have been what you wanted, that they’ve kept the promise of telling a story with a real beginning, a plot that moves in real directions, and a real ending, then please consider supporting the work again.

Thank you all, as always. You all make it possible for me to do the only thing I’m particularly good at for a living, and I’m glad each and every one of you are here.

RC