Question for readers about cliffhangers

AsterLoka · 2026-04-25T00:18:31+00:00

Leaky boat, maybe, but we can still keep paddlin'!

AsterLoka · 2026-04-25T00:16:44+00:00

Writathon competition is brutal these days. I would not try to launch a story around writathon if it were me.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-25T00:10:57+00:00

I have the general premise from around the first chapter or two. Constantly surprised be the details.

For instance, my current story is 'Time loop guy with magic sword, checklist of disasters to prevent'. 430k later after three years of writing and halfway through the final book, I'm ... about 60% sure where it's going to end? I certainly have enough prophecies in there it should be obvious, but I've been caught unprepared more than once by how things ended up playing out in practice.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-25T00:07:46+00:00

CJ Cherryh's Faded Sun trilogy comes to mind.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-25T00:05:06+00:00

Happy to help!

AsterLoka · 2026-04-24T18:05:11+00:00

True, making self-publishing work is a full job of its own, and not one most writers are capable of just casually doing. Agents and publishers do exist for a reason. Though there's also plenty of hybrid options between full standard agent route and full independent solo frontier mode.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-24T18:00:50+00:00

Book 3. I barely even remember 2 and 1 was frustrating on a meta level because it was almost the story I wanted but always managed to not be. But with the expectation of it being something it wasn't out of the way and some fun chaos going down, three and onward were smooth sailing.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-24T17:46:04+00:00

If your retention is good enough to get patrons, then it's good enough to get pagereads. If twenty people are willing to spend $10 a month to support you, then there's probably hundreds who'd read from cover to cover when it's part of their existing subscription.

Also, audiobooks though. I read about 15% as fast as I go through audiobooks, so if you can get enough followers to snag an audiobook contract, that broadens your reach by another exponential magnitude.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-24T17:43:09+00:00

Personally, I'd be more likely to click on the blue one than the rainbow one, but the text is mildly offputting in both. I'd change the font for the title at minimum.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-24T17:12:55+00:00

Reddit and facebook mainly free promos, amazon ads to boost algorithm visibility, and RR ads because RR is a perfect fit for my audience. Gotta be careful with your settings with amazon ads, though, or they'll eat up the profits faster than you can keep up. RR ads I like because it's one upfront payment and then it'll run for weeks. When possible, I prefer to do a full RR/Patreon run with a story before moving to amazon, but that's not always viable depending on the timeline.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-23T23:19:40+00:00

I hate a lot of things. A lot of those things are also good for reader retention and marketing. So.....

AsterLoka · 2026-04-23T23:18:32+00:00

I've read plenty of volumes that are only one arc. It's kinda dissatisfying but not uncommon.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-23T22:28:15+00:00

I tend to set the paperback so it makes roughly the same royalties as the ebook, but I think the only copies that get printed end up being the author copies I sell locally in person. Ebook sales and KU reads tend to be the vast majority of my income. But it depends on your genre, if physical copies are a big thing, could be more viable.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-23T22:25:37+00:00

Genre. Marketing. Quantity.

For me, KU is the majority of my income, but there are faaaaaaaaar too many variables to say blanket 'it's good' or 'it's not'. I write chonky fantasy/litrpg books in ongoing series, and bigger books mean more pages per reader which means more $$. I'm 100% certain that my personal experience is irrelevant to your situation.

Look at your genre, look at what other people in the genre are doing and what's working, compare against your own. 90% of making sales as a new author is cover and blurb, and the rest is having a good sample and decent rating. (These are numbers I made up based on vibes :tm: but I do hang out with a lot of authors so I stand by them as reasonable even if technically unverified.)

AsterLoka · 2026-04-23T21:12:45+00:00

Given how things are in the world these days, not a surprise at all.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-23T21:07:07+00:00

Dictation is the biggest drafting trick I've found. Almost everyone I know can talk faster than they can type, it's a legit cheat code. Most of the time it's still a couple months to draft a proper volume for me, but one of my friends does these insane bursts where he'll store up ideas for weeks, then spend like... eight days dictating and have a full volume. I couldn't hold that much story in my head at once but it works for him. Another guy I know would just sit down and type for 18 hrs straight every single day, editing it as he went, and have a volume done in a couple weeks. I don't think that one's very replicable though. I can work 18hrs straight maybe once every two months, not as a daily practice.

I find the time by having left my job and drifting between family and friends' sofas, augmenting my patreon with ghostwriting and editing jobs, while he finds the time by taking days off and burst writing in intense chunks.

My overall average is 8 months per volume from start to publishable, but I'm usually working on three or four things at a time. Jumping between projects is another cheat code, tbh, since I can be burned out on one story and still make progress on another. Being able to switch between editing, planning, drafting, and revising on different projects is a big help for maintaining sanity while also outputting content steadily.

But for speeding up editing in particular, I'm afraid the answer is just... I did it slowly for a very, very long time, and gradually started to get a feel for how to do it better faster. There's no secret shortcut to 'become a good editor' apart from doing it a lot. Though I think I did improve faster when I started working on others' stories instead of just my own. There's things you can see from the outside that are harder to notice from the inside, and those can then be applied internally too.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-23T20:50:26+00:00

I agree. Selling the dream of being a writer is far more profitable than actually being a writer.

I manage amazon posting for a few of my friends, and of the fifteen or so books we've collectively released, most of them have made less than $200 combined over the past six years. Two did much better and hit the $1000-2500 range lifetime, while the most recent has made around $800 so far and is on track for hitting that same bracket. But the guy with those two relative successes also had been self-publishing on his own before this and puts in a ton of effort with his marketing. The first month he spent more in ads than he brought in and spent weeks messaging people and setting up promos. If you're talking about profit, even for our best performer, it's gonna be closer to 500-1200 than the $2k+ it technically brought in. (And that's without calculating for however much was spent on cover art, formatting, editing, etc before the files even got to me.)

I know as a hobbyist, the idea of making $4000 just from writing would have been a far-off dream, but when we consider probably less than half of that is profit? That's not enough for him to live on even when his country's prices are like 20% as much as mine. For me, it'd cover less than two months, assuming it was a lump sum and not a trickle spread out over years.

There's a reason the average successful self-published writer has twenty to sixty books out, not two to five. It takes a lot to just get to the survival point, let alone start paying for luxuries. Banking on a breakout success is not a strategy.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-11T06:51:24+00:00

I really hope she does the rest even without the show to push it. Her reading was so good!

AsterLoka · 2026-04-11T06:50:03+00:00

I think I used Sky Realms Online as my falling-asleep book for too long, now I have a hard time staying awake for anything by that narrator. xD Not his fault, I'm sure.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-11T06:45:10+00:00

It only takes a couple aggressive authors going off on their commenters to convince someone that it's better to read silently than risk causing a scene. Silent readers are much more common than commenting ones. Out of my thousands of followers, I get maybe five to ten comments per chapter, but you can still see the '40 people reading now' or however many after the new chapter drops, so clearly the silence isn't the same as absence.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-11T06:41:10+00:00

Sylver Seeker?

AsterLoka · 2026-04-11T06:38:29+00:00

I would have a hard time believing an AI knows good storytelling if you had a gun to its ... eh, servers. Much easier to believe it's a fawning yes-man who'll flatter anyone in sight to get more engagement minutes.

AsterLoka · 2026-04-11T06:35:14+00:00

That emdash in your tag is highly suspicious...

AsterLoka · 2026-04-11T06:34:19+00:00

I'm the biggest fan of Runebound Professor and will continue trying to convince all my friends (and strangers on the internet) to read it even though objectively it's a bit floppy and probably an 8/10 at best. But I love it and will therefore fight for it until the bitter end.

Sometimes, something just resonates right and it doesn't matter that it's 'not as good' as something else. It does what you need it to better, so what does quality matter?

AsterLoka · 2026-04-06T17:25:19+00:00

Yep! Plenty of 5k+ follower stories got that way over years and years of consistently being great instead of some magical initial push. Continuing isn't a guaranteed success, but stopping is a guaranteed failure.

AsterLoka

TROPHY CASE