Normally I save these for a little later in the month, but it's pretty clear to me what I'm going to be doing for the next month, so I might as well talk about it now!
Last month I released my novella 'The Rubber Order: Sanctification' and a short story, 'The Gift That Keeps On Giving.' I consider the former to be more of a mood piece, while the latter is more of a squicky stroke story.
Neither of them did all that well, which could be because I suck at advertising, or the niche I'm writing for is fairly small. Either way, this is a hobby, so it doesn't really matter. It is nice to get validation that people are actually reading my stuff, though!
I suppose I thought another outing to the Rubber Order universe would be more popular, as 'The Rubber Order' is my second best seller of all time, though there are several possible reasons why that wasn't the case this time:
- 'The Rubber Order' has been released for almost two years now and this story hasn't had enough time in the limelight.
- The subject matter is a bit more serious this time around so it may not have appealed to the same audience.
- The people who read the first novella didn't like it and aren't going to read another in the same universe.
- I just suck at advertising.
I'm sure there's a few more possible reasons that I haven't identified. In the end, since I have no idea what's going on since I never really receive feedback on my KDP books, I'm not going to sweat it too much; I'll just keep moving forward onto something else.
I will say that the relative popularity of my works does somewhat influence decision making for what I write in the future, though it's somewhat of a 'squishy' thing. I'm mainly writing things I would like to read myself, so I wouldn't decide not to write something solely based on how popular I think it will be. However, I would be a fool to say that it doesn't influence my decision making at all.
Orthogonally, at the moment, my two other bestsellers are 'Sky Trained' and 'Doll Factory,' which kind of makes sense, I suppose, because they're a little more mainstream in their content - as mainstream as dollification and milking can really be.
Anyway, no more dwelling on the past. Let's talk about what's next.
I'll discuss my next work below, but if any of you has a preference for what I should pick up next based on the list I posted last month, do drop me an email and I might consider re-sorting my priority order.
Over Easy
As mentioned in my January update, I have a series of story ideas I delineated there. I'm still working on the story titled 'Over Easy,' which has grown larger than I intended it to. It's 30K at this point, and I expect that it might need another 10K before I'm done with it, which will put it in novella range. I'll just have to see what it looks like when I get there.
Given that, I expect the writing should be done by the end of the month, and I might be targeting an early March release. The cover is already done (see below), so I just need to do the editing and formatting, which these days usually takes about a week to get through.
There's going to be a healthy mix of humanoid alien women, breast expansion, alien parasites, collars, egg birthing, lesbian romance, and bodysuits that look suspiciously like latex (but are definitely some kind of alien material). If you like any of that sort of thing, stay tuned!
