Hello everyone,

It's been some time! I'm dropping this notice to make a few announcements relative to Commerce Emperor (I wished to do so a few days earlier, but I've been swamped with the end of my break, work on other project and a long plane trip). The break has been a good occasion to ponder my new outline for volume 3 and the future of the series, and I would like to share those news with you.

- Current plans for the series: concluding the trilogy and making the setting an anthology

Commerce Emperor has been on my mind a lot these past few days, especially on how to properly advance with volume 3 after the lackluster reception of its predecessors. The break was partly meant to help me stave off my burn out on it and taking some distance let me better figure out where I want to go with it, and I feel taking some distance helped with it.

While CE did alright on Amazon, it's well below that of past releases and the number of people following it on Patreon is dwarfed by those who support Blood & Fur. I blame a few things like the burn-out on volume 2 and the narrower subject matter, but I'm very much close to an Underland situation with this series where I have a lot of stuff to cover, but other series work a lot better financially for me. I've been considering how to resolve that problem and I think I've found one.

So after much consideration, I've decided to keep the Pangeal universe as an anthology following multiple heroes; volume 3 will conclude the Robin's/Devil of Greed (alongside others like Soraseo's and Eris') story arcs, but not the wider conflict with the Demon Ancestors. This will allow me to revisit the universe later with different leads and plotlines in future series if I decide to do so (such as the Ranger, the Bard or the Mage) while giving the current core character cast a satisfactory ending.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

I understand that some of you might be disappointed with this decision, but I feel it's the best compromise I can come up with. I think I've been a bit overambitious with this series and there are too many moving parts to conclude in that universe to cover everything in a single book, but waning interest makes it unwise to continue it for years on end; as I've said a few times earlier, most of my new releases are meant to fund projects like The Perfect Run game (currently in development) and Commerce Emperor is clearly not doing well enough; but on the other end, I don't want to leave this storyline unconcluded. Finishing the Merchant trilogy and keeping the world open for other heroes and stories seems best at this point.

- Volume 2 Takedown at the end of May

My publisher has set a date for June 13th for the second volume's publication on Amazon and Audible, which means I'll have to take down the second volume's chapters by the end of May. As such, if you want to reread the volume or didn't have time to do beforehand, now is the time. This is an unfortunate calendar issue caused by my break, but I'll publish a summary of the series' first two volumes when I start updating book 3 again in June as a reminder.

- Volume 3 resuming in June, though with slower updates

I plan to resume Commerce Emperor in June to conclude the third book, though releases will be more irregular than before since I'm also working on other series on Patreon and focusing on Blood & Fur for now; expect something like an update every two weeks or something similar, with the first chapter of volume 3 being likely to drop close to volume 2's amazon launch. My new commerce-focused outline indicates that this book should be around the same length as the first (20 or so chapters) so I hope to conclude the trilogy by the year's end.

And that's all for now. Thank you all for your patience during the break, and I hope you'll be happy to see this story resume in June.

Best regards,

Voidy.