Saturday, August 27, 2022

Sleeping Prince Stats (because I think this is interesting)

I have been posting my novel 'Sleeping Prince' on four free ebook websites and doing two updates a week.  Two posts ago, I posted here how the stats were going.  They are different now.  Let's look at them.

#4. Booknet - As I said before, I took a break from Booknet because of the war and I'm being punished for it.  Winning back followers there is super hard.  But I have been getting a few likes and dozens of people have added the novel to their bookshelves.  When I finish the book, that may make the stats jump.

#3. Quotev - I got slapped with a Mature rating here, even though it is usually where I get my best stats, I'm unlikely to now.  I'm a little choked about the Mature rating.  I just watched 'Romy and Michele's High School Reunion'.  It was PG and had a ton of course language, adult themes, and smoking.  I love that movie but I am a little choked about the Mature rating when I compare my story with it.  Mature ratings mean that a lot of the readership there will not have access to the story.  It won't even appear unless they are over 18.   I don't know if very many people are over 18 there.  My story is not 18+.  I'm not sure what it is.  Gah!

#2. Royal Road - I got a very flattering review on Royal Road this week where the reviewer said that I was likely to get creamed there because my story is a romance and they don't like romances there.  True dat.  However, even so, my story is performing better there than on the other two and Booknet is a major romance novel site.  People who like romances don't like my books any more than people who don't.  I don't write erotica and I don't write hard action with no romance.  I'm in between and it makes me a little bit of a freak.   

#1. Inkitt - When I was choosing the cover for the book, I struggled because I had to choose between a book cover that would appeal to the audience of Royal Road or the audience of Inkitt.  No.  I would not have been able to find something that appealed to both audiences.  The one that would have appealed to the Royal Road audience was one of Gage wearing his blue and silver armor.   The one that would have worked for Inkitt was the one I chose.  Here's my reasoning: there is no reward for kicking butt on Royal Road that I know of.  If you get a high enough readership on Inkitt, you can land a contract with Galatea.  I did it before, but my book wasn't hot enough to keep the contract, so it was canceled after three months.  HOWEVER, three months of paychecks from Galatea paid all my writing debt and brought me back to zero.  That's pretty good for an uncompromising little brat who won't write even one detailed sex scene.  So, I chose Inkitt and Galatea because even though I'm unlikely to keep that contract, I could get one for three months if enough people come to read.  I'm really far from that threshold, but I still have twenty chapters to publish, so we'll see how it goes.

O.O  It's also summer.  Summer is death.  No one reads in August.  Things could really pick up all round.

Also, the scouts have come around.  That means I have been offered a collection of publishing contracts from novel aps for 'Sleeping Prince'.   Naturally, I have turned them all down.  The only one of these aps that I liked the contract for was Hinovel and I alienated them when I pulled 'Whenever You Want' from their site so I could give it to Galatea.  It was the right decision, but I handled it badly.  Why couldn't I have been cooler?  I'm so mad at myself.  Gah!

Anyway, don't take tiny contracts from little guys if you want to catch a big fish.  

Haha... ha... I'm actually crying.  It's so hard to do all this novelist stuff and not sell your soul.  

Getting on it with it now.  I don't know how much potential 'Sleeping Prince' has.  It's a scifi romance that is quite heavy in the action/adventure department.  That's not a super popular genre.  It's not like I wrote a billionaire romance, or a werewolf romance, or a shifter romance, or a reverse harem romance, or a BDSM romance.  LOL!  I'm joking.  All the other types of romance I just mentioned are all BDSM romances.  

It's like that amazing time on 'Daria' when Daria and Jane are giving new students a tour of their high school.  Jane's like, 'If you're good we'll tell you which of the shower stalls haven't been peed in.'  

And Daria is like, 'She's just joking.  They've all been peed in.' 

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