The future of AUOBE and a poll

Yo! This is a very important post so if you got five minutes to spare, please read it. I will also preface this and say that this isn't a post about me abandoning A Universe of Bloody Evolution. Don't worry.

In that case, what's this post about? Well, it's still about AUOBE and its future.

Writing AUOBE taught me a lot and also showed me how difficult writing a web serial could be. I failed more times than I succeed but in the end it brought me here to this point. To a nice reader base and a deal with Aethon Books to publish my story.

I'm grateful for it all. However... there is one big problem.

As some of you might or might not know, for the past few months I made many changes to AUOBE's update schedule and patreon content. I did that because I wanted to give my story a second wind on both RoyalRoad and Patreon. For a bit (October, November), I even thought that maybe I succeeded, but in the past month I realized that I didn't.

The truth is that "A Universe of Bloody Evolution" is a failure when it comes to RoyalRoad and Patreon. You might not see it, but I have constant access to views per chapter and let me tell you, the second chapter of book 4 doesn't even have 4k views, which says a lot when a story has almost 7500 followers.

Now again, this isn't that bad. 4k is still pretty good, yeah? Well, unfortunately it gets worse. No chapter released in the past month went past 3k views, which I will say is a bit demoralizing to look at. So many apparent followers, yet not even a half of them reads the book.

However, again, views aren't everything in the end. Those could be just people who wait for the book's end before reading again (Wishful thinking lol). That's why we arrive at another problem.

Patreon.

Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful to all of you for supporting me and for using your hard earned money to pay for a few chapters. But as someone who writes for a living, AUOBE is failing, hard. Why is that? A lot of reasons, all of which are my fault of course. I failed at the beginning of the story, didn't set up Patreon properly, and my book unfortunately isn't something people want to pay for (At least not for a Patreon).

Again that's my fault for how I have written AUOBE. I have learned from those mistakes (or so I think), but it's a bit too late to fix that. The numbers suffered already and not even bringing the number of advanced chapter to 50 helped that.

So what now?

Well, I plan to change AUOBE's update schedule again so that it won't take that much of my time and let me focus on other stuff. Currently, even with only 3 chapters per week, this story is always on my mind and I always worry about how it will do. I can barely focus on other projects and it's bad for my mental health.

That's why I need for AUOBE to fade into background. Take less of my time and give me a room to breath. This mental block it created needs to go.

That's why I'm proposing following changes:

Option 1. AUOBE moves to one chapter per week posted on Mondays. They will be much longer (about 3.5k-5k) giving you about the same amount of content as you get now. This would allow me to stop overthinking and just sit down on one day and write the chapter down. Then I would have the rest of the week clear and hopefully stop worrying about AUOBE's performance.

Option 2. AUOBE moves to two chapters per week. They would be about the same length as of now or a bit longer (1.5k-2k). Personally I would rather not go with this, but if that's something you guys really want, I will consider it.

Now, there's one more thing to address. What this would mean for Patreon content going forward?

If we go with option 2, things stay as they are. 50 chapters ahead and no changes, just less updates.

Now, if we go with option 1, the number of advanced chapters will be slowly reduced to 25 for Akirian Tier. This would still give you guys about 100k words of advanced content, which is more than you get now. So in the end, everybody wins, but the price is lower update frequency.

Below you will find a poll where you can vote on those options. Again, this won't decide what I will do, but I will seriously consider the poll's results.

That's it from me. Thank you all for reading this lengthy post. I have been holding this in for a while now, and I am glad it is finally out. Things, as they are now, just aren't good for me, and I just stress more with each chapter's bad performance. This has to change if I want my future work to succeed.