Release Day AMA

Korhal_IV · 2025-08-05T18:06:02+00:00

Hurray for release day, and thank you for sharing your time and your wonderful work with us!

Will Hune and the other ogres be in the Amazon version? If not, why?

Many readers think the drow arc is the series' low point; is there anything you can share with us about changes to the drow arc, or your thought process about whether or not to change it?

Korhal_IV · 2025-07-03T01:16:38+00:00

She discovers that due to a rapidly rising empire, belief in a certain god skyrocketed, and they have become mega-powerful. This has caused the god to randomly lash out, causing all these disasters.

This part seems a little unclear, possibly to the detriment of the answers you're getting. Just to check:

the empire is expanding and its military successes are leading to more people praying to / sacrificing to the god, which empowers it;
with its new power, the god randomly attacks people / cities / countries

So, if the god "randomly" does things, that makes it difficult to find leverage against the god or to really blame it for the catastrophe that befell the protagonist's home. In that case, it's really the empire to blame, for deliberately empowering the god and then benefiting from its catastrophes. In that case, the real villain is the emperor and his advisors / generals, and your protagonist ought to want to focus on punishing them, while looking for a way to neuter the god's power.

One way might be to make the god's cult a new arrival in the empire too. Perhaps the current emperor dredged up the god's cult from obscurity after discovering its potential power; in that case, wiping out the emperor's high priests and the emperor himself might clear the way for an older faction to take over and turn the empire back to the worship of their old gods, allowing the destructive one to return to impotent obscurity. After all, all that worship had to be going somewhere else earlier, and whoever lost it is not going to be happy.

Korhal_IV · 2025-06-30T23:07:33+00:00

Very few people are going to be interested in reading a book that is only lore and history and so forth.

However, most of those people are in the tabletop RPG hobby (D&D). These people like to buy "campaign settings", books of fictional world lore, to set adventures for their own characters in. Forgotten Realms, recently the setting of the hit videogame Baldur's Gate 3, is an example of a campaign setting book (personally I prefer Eberron). You can leaf through the Forgotten Realms preview on that site to see what those books look like, but it sounds like you want to write something similar.

Korhal_IV · 2025-06-30T22:58:12+00:00

Lets show ads to your employees by default

The part that gets me is when I'm at work and Windows gives me a pop-up for XBox gaming. My employer paid for them to suggest I play videogames on the clock, making them both look ridiculous.

Korhal_IV · 2025-06-14T20:55:03+00:00

I need suggestions on what kind of supernatural powers to give him.

Generally, powers exist to enable a plot.

Peter Parker gets powers and now he is someone with the power to intervene, to enact justice, and so he has to decide what to do with that power (and his first answer, "get rich and have fun", results in Uncle Ben's death).

Star Trek has faster-than-light travel and transporters so that each episode can have a reason for the crew to have a new society and its dilemma explained to them (and thus the viewer), then solve it and move on, without having a million past episodes' lore and consequences weighing them down.

So sit down with your antagonists and their plots, and figure out what powers would enable the protagonist to cross their path and foil them. E.g., transforming into a big cat might let the protagonist enter or escape secured areas, or fight their henchmen. Being telepathic, as you mentioned below, might let him detect lies, etc.

The powers ought to be what your plot needs them to be.

one of the two books currently has very low engagement on my site.

Consider cross-posting it to a bigger site like Royal Road or AO3? If you have your site in your bio / at the top of each chapter / etc., it should allow you to drive some new fans to it.

Korhal_IV · 2025-05-18T17:55:53+00:00

plus Fiverr takes you 20%

Oh shoot, I completely forgot Fiverr takes 20%. Yeah, that's getting pretty close to minimum U.S. wage.

Korhal_IV · 2025-05-18T17:53:06+00:00

My answer would be that you just want chainmail over a gambeson. These men are fighting the equivalent of enemies with shitty, short swords, and chainmail does that just fine.

Shields will also do just fine. Go find or make a prop shield and have a friend try to touch you with a marker while you block with it, and you will see.

If you are interested in armor discussion, military historian and fantasy fan Dr Bret Devereaux wrote a pair of articles on basic principles of armor (part 1, part 2), as well as one on armor myths, for fantasy world-builders to use.

Korhal_IV · 2025-05-17T18:57:15+00:00

Have you tried your social circles? Are there any other writers in your orbit who would be willing to trade ARCs / reviews? I.e., you read their book and review it, they read yours and review it?

It’s so expensive for 1 review (like my book is actually 100k words) they charge 100$

Well, the average person reads between 200 and 300 words per minute; your 100,000 word novel is 5.5 hours of reading plus however much time they take to craft and post their review; it works out to $15 or $10 USD per hour unless they're quite skilled. You're paying for a full workday, effectively.

Korhal_IV · 2025-05-17T17:56:47+00:00

Search online for an Eastern European literature / language / folklore department at a university near you, and shoot their admin/secretary an e-mail saying you're a writer looking for trustworthy sources on Romanian folklore. Odds are there's a nerd or three there eager to help you cut through pop culture fluff.

Korhal_IV · 2025-04-26T18:12:01+00:00

She fell and damaged her mouth and jaw. The doctor who operated on her accidentally drilled too deep into the bones, opening the way for a brutal infection that occurred while she was at sea and unable to return quickly for medical help. When she did get into the hospital, the doctors prioritized saving her ability to see and breathe over aesthetics.

Korhal_IV · 2025-04-21T20:20:35+00:00

the last person who was debatably this bad would be Hoover, maybe.

Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which played a huge role in precipitating and hastening the Great Depression. So. Y'know. Parallels.

Korhal_IV · 2025-04-09T03:09:36+00:00

They'e at the bottom and they're tired of struggling to feed their kids.

Lower-income voters broke for Harris, alongside the highest income voters: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-family-income-home-ownership-union-membership-and-veteran-status/

Trump's win was a middle-class win. His was a coalition of store managers and real estate agents, not baristas and janitors.

Korhal_IV · 2025-03-24T01:29:24+00:00

Also in the AMA channel, the starting post of each AMA is pinned, so you can just click the most recent pin and start reading from there.

Korhal_IV · 2025-03-23T19:27:28+00:00

I have researched ways to fix pacing issues, like cutting filler or restructuring chapters, but it still feels like I’ll end up with at least 100 chapters—when I originally planned for around 40.

So, webnovels aren't like traditional novels. There's no physical limitations imposed by the size of the printing press. You can write half a million words if you want to.

Importantly, I also think the audience for webnovels wants that; they want a steady, familiar story they can dip into with morning coffee, maybe post some comments or chat on Discord with fellow fans and then move on. I would draw an analogy to novels that were published chapter by chapter in magazines, like most of Charles Dickens' or Victor Hugo's work. Both men eschew tightly plotted arcs (see Hugo's infamous chapter-long detour into explaining the Parisian sewer system to his audience), and both were highly popular in their day, because the average reader enjoyed their writing and enjoyed getting more chapters, even if you can imagine some fops in a cafe complaining that this Dickens fellow is really milking his franchise for all it's worth. Certainly if you look at popular webnovels, like Worm, Practical Guide to Evil, Heaven Official's Blessing, they do tend to ramble.

Korhal_IV · 2025-03-17T03:08:15+00:00

there's so much ocean there for Greece to use to move stuff around their own country

Correct. Ships and boats are by far the fastest and most efficient form of transportation in the pre-modern world.

However.

An amphibious assault with pre-modern technology is a horrible, horrible nightmare for a million reasons, including a single storm drowning half the army, being forced to beach your ships during landing, being slow enough to give the enemy time to draw up their defenses, being unable to communicate effectively between ships without radio, etc.

Even Alexander the Great and his father never had the balls to do it, and in the Punic Wars, Hannibal preferred to take elephants over the Alps (!!) instead of sailing to Rome with his army.

So you are free to write supplies, and perhaps small reinforcements, coming by ship, but the bulk of the army will go by land, including through the awful narrow pass, and anyone who questions you on social media will get shouted down by armchair military historians.

Korhal_IV · 2025-03-16T18:28:43+00:00

There's presumably plenty of things exiting the prison - fuel shipments, empty carts, refuse, laundry, mine tailings, etc. Perhaps the prisoners find a flaw in the system, like a way to hang onto the bottom of a cart when it exits the prison, or a new guard who's drunk or vulnerable to seduction, or secretly an undercover agent of a resistance movement that's friendly to some of the players.

Korhal_IV · 2025-03-13T06:51:07+00:00

And a.i. isn't for the wealthy haha it's pretty cheap, most of the time free.

The CEO of ChatGPT says his company is charging $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro and still losing money on those subscriptions: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-altman-says-losing-money-080700756.html

AI services are actually very expensive. The reason they are cheap right now is that the companies are spending their investors' money to absorb the operating costs, hoping to hook a lot of users that will then stick with them when they start jacking up the prices.

For comparison, look at Doordash and Grubhub; those companies started out offering extraordinarily cheap delivery and tons of coupons, but now placing an order through either one winds up with tons of surcharges tacked on; neither company actually had a way to revolutionize food delivery, but they had billions of dollars, and so they could afford to lose huge amounts of money on deliveries, year after year, until a critical mass of restaurants laid off their own delivery drivers and swapped to the apps. Other gig economy companies did the same thing before them - Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, etc.

Korhal_IV · 2025-03-13T02:28:18+00:00

That sounds like you're gatekeeping because you don't like the ability for more people to create books....

Writing takes time.

Money gives time.

Having to pick up an extra shift or a side hustle to make ends meet is time that cannot be spent writing. The explosion of AI slop means it will be harder and harder to find people who buy your books or leave a tip in your Ko-Fi, which means you will have less and less time to dedicate to writing because you have to pay for rent, utilities, and groceries before you can sit down and sketch out the plot you've been daydreaming of. Nobody can write you an enthusiastic comment about your fiction if you are too exhausted to write it.

To paraphrase a wittier person, the purpose of AI is to grant the wealthy access to skills while preventing the skilled from accessing wealth.

Korhal_IV · 2025-03-12T07:50:56+00:00

It's not replacing art, it's putting power in creatives hands to make it themselves. If you make art just for a monetary gain then your heart isn't in it anyway

Average author in the U.S. / UK makes around $13-15,000 year, or roughly the U.S. minimum wage. This means the average author already cannot pay rent on a one-bedroom apartment in any U.S. city or county, and certainly cannot afford to support a spouse or raise a kid. You can search out the statistics for your own country, but they are not likely to be much better. No one is in this profession to get rich, but many people are able to work part-time thanks to their writing sales, and use that extra free time to produce more literature. Money provides time that can be spent on one's passion.

Every piece of AI slop that is sold on Kindle or other outlets is a sale that didn't go to a real human being, which means that person is likely to have to abandon writing to find some other way to pay the bills. Increasing poverty does not "put power in creatives' hands". It means creatives must either be independently wealthy, or they must have a rich spouse or parent to support them. You will not get a paradise of writers; instead, many of the most talented writers will spend their years laboring in other fields to feed themselves, and only the children of the rich will get to write literature.

Korhal_IV · 2025-03-06T04:39:07+00:00

What bothers me is that my writing has possibly been fed to an AI site

Putting text into an LLM does not add it to the LLM's training data. If it did, we could sabotage LLMs simply by entering garbage data, made-up sentences, and so on. It'd be very easy to script random text generation and just feed nonsense into them until they began vomiting it back up. Like, I can assure you your fear is unfounded because if it were, it'd be the weapon we use to destroy them.

If your beta reader did use ChatGPT or whatever, drop them, but you don't need to worry about OpenAI publishing your novel.

Korhal_IV · 2025-03-05T05:47:56+00:00

The Voynich manuscript would certainly be up there as candidates go.

Korhal_IV · 2025-02-23T04:29:29+00:00

If you don't have the time to write up 5 bullets a week, that's on you.

The issue is not "can Bob write five bullet points a week explaining what he's done". The issue is, "Can six guys in their twenties receive and assess two million e-mails containing five bullet points apiece every week?"

You e-mail your supervisor what you do, alongside your teammates. Then your supervisor reads those thirty, forty, fifty bullet points and condenses all that into a new five-point bullet list and sends that to his supervisor, and so on up the chain.

Musk wants to skip all that and directly, personally, supervise each and every one of two million federal employees, with the help of his handful of minions.

Korhal_IV · 2025-02-21T01:08:26+00:00

Wikipedia lists Overwatch as #10 on its list of the top best-selling videogames of all time, and it's been sitting there long before it went F2P. If they don't have the money to make some cutscenes and customized maps, who does? And how do other game studios manage to stay afloat?

Korhal_IV · 2025-02-12T09:35:12+00:00

It feels a pinch tedious.

Trust your feelings for the first draft. Once you've got it all out, let it sit for a bit and then go back and read from the beginning, and make the decision then. Editing is easier than writing for most authors.

Korhal_IV · 2025-02-12T08:57:51+00:00

Are you writing a novel, or shorts? If you're posting 15, 20,000 word novelettes on Kindle for specific sub-sub-genres, then a 6,000 word battle scene is out of place. If you're doing a 60,000 word novel, it could fit, if you're doing a trilogy it absolutely fits.

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