So, I have no released about three and a half novels worth of content, spanning a little over a year of writing. In retrospect, I'm not exactly happy with Act 1 but there's no real way to go in and fix it without just redoing it from the ground up, and there's no way I'm doing that. Unfortunately, I think the quality difference from Act 0 (written halfway through 2022) to Act 1 causes a lot of readers to drop the series. Maybe that's just speculation, but I don't have much to go on. In the spirit of that investigation however, I wanted to use today's "chapter" release in an attempt to engage with everyone reading the series ab it more.
I suspect a lot of people are reading the series but for a variety of reasons have been keeping their thoughts to themselves. There's probably a good number of people who have refrained from reviewing it because even if they enjoy it and think it quite above average, they don't want to give it a 5 star rating, but know that anything less than 5 stars actually penalizes me because of the inflation of ratings that puts even IGN to shame. If I just described you, please consider sharing your thoughts as a comment on this chapter. I'm still very much trying to improve as a writer, and critical feedback is helpful.
That said, I think that after a year of releases, Undying Emperor has stagnated. It's arguably more successful than anything I've released on Amazon, but I think that with my current skills and knowledge, if I were to start a new series I could make a very strong bid for Rising Stars. I don't plan to abandon UE, but in the future it might become a series I update at random through Amazon, not on here. Until then, I won't quite be putting UE on hiatus, but I am going to step down to one chapter a week, to free up time in my writing schedule. A proper launch on this site requires a lot of material to release very quickly, so I need to build that up and also continue releasing stand alone novels.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
With that said, please make use of comments on this chapter to let me know your thoughts. I never made a Patreon or a discord, so this is the best I've got for now.
And if you're curious about what else I'm up to, you can follow my twitter https://twitter.com/KrakeJames or check out my website, jameskrake.com
Act 4 - Fallen Crest Abbey will begin releases this monday. I took a different stylistic approach with it, which I really enjoyed but some might find too much of a departure. I think it will come out at 9 chapters in total before I start the next arc of Lucius' story.