#serial authors

[b-a-pigeon]

The thing about Kindle Vella is that it is a dumpster fire, but not even for the reasons people think! (Realized this post is extremely long and about a topic few people care about so I'm dropping it under a read more now sorry)

There are some weird rumors going around (which is fair imo since the ToS is like notoriously vague & untransparent) but nothing as funny as the truth: it was an absolute fuck-up of a money pit on Amazon's part that totally failed to retain authors even after throwing random quantities of cash at (some of) us, and everyone just took the money and ran.

To clarify a couple of rumors I've seen: no, nobody signed a contract guaranteeing Amazon indefinite weekly updates!!! (Lol.) There are also, like, some pretty arbitrary rules about availability, but nothing close to KU's draconian exclusivity policies; my story was serialized concurrently on multiple platforms & has since been published wide in the same places as usual while still available on Vella.

What happened, I think, is that Amazon began offering these mysteriously generous bonuses* (calculated through some arcane and ever-shifting metric that nobody has ever been able to figure out) to attract authors. The problem is that Vella sucks to use for readers, too. It's in beta with almost no visible improvements in two years; it looks like shit, especially on desktop; there was no quality control for a while, so the charts were dominated by scammers posting AI-translated gibberish; there were all these weird glitches that made entire chapters of different stories randomly swap; it's actually more expensive than indie e-books in most cases, etc.

So there were not enough readers to sustain the bonus pool, which used to increase every month but has stagnated at $1mil for several months. Everyone got pissed about the drastic drop in income (mine dipped almost 50% between months despite performing better by all metrics) and left; now this website, which nobody uses, is a graveyard for unfinished stories. Even if they did promote it for once, so much of the stuff there is abandoned! I truly doubt it is long for this world unless they massively overhaul it, but it's clearly not a priority, so...

Anyway I find all of this very funny & think it's a bummer that people don't know about it & instead believe that a bunch of people voluntarily signed up to be permanent content generators for Amazon. Like, no... they were obviously trying to create a system of financial dependency to coerce authors into sticking around a la KU, but made such a bad website that they couldn't even afford that :)

*For reference, just to show how absurd the bonus system used to be: my first year on Vella, I made $100 in royalties (meaning people spent around $200 to read it in total), which is nothing. Only 150 people ever paid to read my work by reading past the sample chapters; of these, only 35 finished the first story arc. I made $4000 in bonuses that first year and stayed on the bestseller-equivalent list (typically bouncing around the top 50-150) basically the entire time. I still don't understand how or why & it still didn't stop me from jumping ship the moment my bonus decreased, but yeah... I made like $30 for each individual person who paid any amount of money to read my story. Incomprehensible.

[kimboo-york]

Recent post over at the Scriptorium, all about writing long running, epic stories!

”In a recent podcast interview, I was asked, “What does a person need in order to prepare themselves mentally for writing a long-running serial?” To be honest, it made me pause for a second, because while I'm sure the best answer to that question is “it depends on the writer,” I believe there are aspects which are (probably) universal because it is about mindset, as opposed to practical advice. Practical advice is helpful, of course.”

[sunderwight]

I think that one of the most underrated reveals in Scum Villain was that Luo Binghe inherited his big dick toxic alpha male energy from his birth mother, and it actually has nothing to do with his demon side.

[gigireece16]

how i’m trying to distract myself in my writing from everything that’s been occurring 😅😅

[eddathegreat]

Things That Happen in Pale

There's a quest-giver who is clipping through the floor and ceiling and is pretty much fine with that.

A man pees with such force that he is used as a jetpack by another character.

Heroes are chased by a murderous big-titty corporate executive with a croquet mallet.

There is a dead-serious plot about successfully delivering ice cream cake to a bunch of monsters without spilling any.

There is a very tense scene of the hero being outed to a family she's working with to navigate a giant game board.

A character's bond with a opossum is a deciding factor in a fight.

In an emergency, the main character uses fireflies to pull off a double-jump.

A villain catches the big bad wolf in a magic mirror and sics it on the heroes.

The main character does a magical girl transformation into a mailman.

I misled you, this all happens in one fucking chapter. And that's not even a full list.

[else-creates]

A thought on Superhero media within Superhero media

I was having world-building thoughts about "Nobody Can Help You" the original Superhero I'm going to start uploading next year and the idea of Superheroes having sponsorships, merch and tie in media in-universe.

It's and idea that Worm and MHA have and one that the Boys leans heavily on, given that it's a parody and we see that with the Seven playing themselves in a movie about themselves. There's a general consensus that Superheroes would be movie-star type famous.

But I don't think it would be quite like that.

I mean they would absolutely be famous, both individually and as an institution and they would have merch the way sports teams do....But I think their presence and depiction within media in-universe would be different. Superhero media is by nature escapist, something it immediately loses in a world where Superheroes actually exist....So I think it's actually reasonable to say that popular escapist media is actually different kinds of fantasy and sci-fi which don't feature Superhumans at all. Where you'd expect to actually see Superheroes in the media in this scenario would actually be in a plethora of Copaganda-type TV shows.

In a world with Superheroes the flash would cameo in Brooklyn 99 and Lex Luthor would be funding an NCIS style show about good, non-powered cops reigning in characters who were clearly aimed at the Justice League.

[toorumlk]

just to clarify before I follow cause your art is rad

are you a "thanks for the character concepts and vague world outline, we'll take it fron here" fan of Harry potter? or a J.K neutral/supporter?

thank you so much anon!

my work tends to be pretty aligned (and by pretty i mean like 98%) with canon and you’ll find me praising and engaging seriously with canon a lot.

i fully condemn jkr’s transphobia and gender crit NONSENSE. i truly disagree and hate her politics now but i think when she was writing the original 7 books, she had a good head on her shoulders. i read the books for the first time just this past year in my early 20s and man i’ve become a canonpilled book purist if there ever was one and i love these damn books/characters/world *shakes fist to the sky* so maybe this veers me more toward jkr neutral?

i can’t say definitively because i have and will continue to have complicated feelings about this but it’s up to you to decide!

[else-creates]

Nobody Can Help You. Prologue A: The San Francisco Incident

Superhumans have existed for decades. Superheroes are a simply a specialized division of law enforcement answering to the Department of Superhuman Integration. As a result Superheroes exist to protect the status quo, serving a government and the politicians' wealthy donors through a legal monopoly on force. To the average Superhero, it's not about saving people... It's just a job.

Who protects the people in a world where the heroes have been bought?

Who do you call for help when the heroes don't work overtime?

Who stands up for the rights of the people when the heroes side with riot police to squash dissent?

In Port Xavier that job falls to Cassie 'Culverin' Queensbury and the rest of her team 'The Nobodies' because when the heroes aren't Super then... NOBODY CAN HELP YOU

[morbethgames]

Chapter 4 of Love in Stasis is out on Patreon!

Hey everyone, just wanted to do a sort of weekly announcement that Chapter 4 of Love in Stasis, the serialized online novel, is now out on Patreon for the $5 a month tier!

With everything that happened in the previous chapter, Luz is taken to the police station for questioning. Meanwhile, Madeline has to somehow try and come to grips with what happened to her the previous night.

Along with Love in Stasis, be sure to stay caught up on the latest The Bureau news over at Patreon as well! I tend to do updates here too, but sometimes Patrons get exclusive progress updates.

I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on the first three chapters and beyond of Love in Stasis (though I may not be able to answer asks which contain spoilers from anything past chapter 3, unless they're vague enough of course).

Thank you so much for the support!

Patreon : Love in Stasis Chapter 1 :

Love in Stasis Chapter 2 :

Love in Stasis Chapter 3 : The Bureau Current Demo

[elvensemi]

Hey guys hello guess who has a website now.

On ElvenSemi.com you can read all of my webnovels, most of my short stories, and soon, a large portion of my fanfiction!

A lot of things, including all fanfiction, forever are free to the public. This includes, for the first time, the first handful of chapters (about 10k words) of each of my webnovels. There's also summaries and beautiful art! Poke around!

Subscriptions to paid material are still being done through Patreon, just click the orange "log on through patreon" button when you go to log in.

[shsl-heck]

Thinking about the Chevalier interlude, specifically the inaugural team of Wards. Like in universe, they sell it to this first group of kids (and presumably the rest of the world) as a place for second chances, to find friends and mentors who understand what youre going through, where you can learn to use your powers safely while making good memories. The kids broadly seem to believe in these noble intentions of course, but what really gets me is that I've seen readers buy into it!

"Oh, it's such a tragedy that the Wards program became this awful thing that traumatizes kids even more, and expects them to die for the sake of civilians! It's fallen so short of what it was originally supposed to be!"

No it has not??? The fact that the triumvirate and Hero are saying it has this noble goal doesn't make it true. The Wards was pretty clearly always a way to increase the amount of bodies the prt could throw at threats, and we know this because it was started by the fucking Triumvirate as a part of the Protectorate! Alexandria literally came up with the idea of the Protectorate to legitimize the power of capes, and have a consistent source of heroes Cauldron could throw at problems. That is the whole reason for the PRT/Protectorate existing. So when we have this group of children brought in a subsidiary, there are 2 real options.

1). Cauldron and Alexandria decided they would be really niceys and created this program with no intentions other than helping these kids out.

Or 2). As things got worse, they realized the Protectorate didn't have enough manpower to do what they needed, and so they expanded it to include children (the demographic most prone to triggering). That way, they greatly increase the number of capes who they can send to fight and die as needed, and the ones who do survive their tenure in the Wards will be better trained when it comes time to join the actual Protectorate.

At the risk of sounding conceited, I think the second one is far more likely based on everything we know about Cauldron. Maybe it was originally a little nobler, and the goal was just to create more well trained heroes and cut back on young villains, but there's no way Alexandria, Doc Mom, and Contessa didn't factor in the ability to sacrifice the kid heroes if it improved their chances of success. That was absolutely a perk at minimum.

That's the real tragedy of the inaugural Wards. The kids were lured in with promises of safety, comraderie, and second chances like lambs to the slaughter. All the while, Alexandria and Cauldron knew that many (if not most) of these children would suffer abuse by the prt (like in the case of Reed), die, or face a fate worse than death like poor Mouse Protector. It's horrifying! The idea that they didn't know the danger these kids would be in is literally inconceivable. Especially when one of you is also the head of the prt! They knew, and they didn't care. It improved their chances at the end of the world, and so they did it no matter the cost.

[lucaswarmhotchocolate]

I think that Morgan is vastly underestimating the amount of women who would throw themselves at Reid being a submissive nerd like. Idk I think he should be blushing and smiling and nervous instead of “in control” of a conversation. He was basically made to be a dominant woman’s plaything yknow

[dreamflayer]

The what the impalement scene looked like if anyone was curious

[vampiresandotherdelights]

If bookstagram and booktok has taught me anything it's that people love a good graphic, right?

Read The Vampire's Betrothed now!

[argentum-in-aqua]

Silver in the Ashes (Argentum in Aqua #2): Chapter 73

No smoke without fire

In which the ritual proper begins, and Archer finally admits the truth

(New to the story? Start here)

(No idea what this is, but interested/intrigued? Go here)

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