I've added a PayPal donation link to the author note at the end of the epilogue, but I wanted to add something here to give a little more context as to why I've put up a donation link now.

Pretty much from the beginning of my career, I've worked with a company called Nemesis Age for logistical support and assistance -- they often provide resources, business input, infrastructure, and coordination with folks like artists and other collaborators to support my craft and reaching out to people. The company was founded in 2013 on the idea of publishing games, books, and other art formats that normally require big publishing firms and industry support under a single roof where creators could collaborate, receive support, and pool their talents and resources to support one another -- they're a very small company, which originally only had two people in it (a married couple).

In 2021, one of them passed away.

The remaining person, who I won't name here for a large number of reasons, has been struggling to keep the company alive ever since. Despite being in business for nearly 11 years, no project has ever made it to the publication stage, and what support could be given was mainly funded by other revenue streams that have begun to dry up since COVID. An initial attempt to set up a Print-on-Demand publishing effort for the Zeroth Moment light novels was explored earlier this month, as a last hope for funding the company without resorting to donations.

The resulting cost analysis was brutal.

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Simply to create the cover art through artists in our network, costs came out to roughly $1000 per cover. The expected cost/margin through Draft2Digital, selling at a reasonable price-per-volume of $15, came out to about 37 cents per copy sold; a standard print through Bookpatch came out to around $6000 just to print the copies (before sales and shipping), resulting in a total per-unit profit of $2, meaning they'd still have to sell more than 6,000 copies just to break even on the covers alone. The per-unit cost was cheaper through KDP, but that has its own problems (including being forced to take the books down from Royal Road) and would still require selling thousands and thousands of copies just to fund the covers.

A few people advocated using AI art for the covers, but that's fairly antithetical to Nemesis Age's mission of supporting creators -- there are also legal concerns and other issues which prevent that from being a viable approach even if it was something they (or I) would want to do, which it isn't. At that point, the reality of the situation became clear.

Many people have asked me why I don't have a donation page, or a Patreon, or some other way to be compensated for my work; the answer is that I believe, like many others, that we're stronger together. While setting up donations for myself would benefit me personally, it would happen at the expense of what the Nemesis Age folks have been trying to build for so long -- a multimedia publishing enterprise where people work together to make each others' dreams come true.

So, we'll give this a try. It might not work -- and if not, I'll probably have to retire from writing professionally. But if that's what happens, I don't have any regrets -- I did the best I could, and was blessed to be encouraged and helped by so many of you. Thank you for everything.

-- Ashley M. Able (AMBLE)