Here's what I've learned 1 week into my new publishing experiment

"Demon Sword" publishing plan part 2

Last week I dropped an all-new story I had written in secret, I’m In Love With My Possessed Demon Sword, on Royal Road.

I released one chapter each day (except for Monday, when I released two) and this past Tuesday, I released the last installment.

That’s right, the story in its current form is now complete, clocking in at about 15,000 words, which is equivalent to 50 pages.

My publishing strategy for this story was somewhat against the grain for new Royal Road stories. Typically, authors usually release a big batch of chapters on the first day, followed by daily or several-times-a-week drops until a regular cadence sets in.

By releasing new chapters constantly, you get free visibility on the front page of Royal Road, at least until the next group of releases bumps you down. With enough release velocity and with enough readers finding and enjoying your story, you can gain a readership, and maybe even appear on the Trending list, offering more visibility. You can then take things to the next level by starting a Patreon (which RR lets you link to with a nice button at the bottom of your chapters), on which you offer advance chapters to your readers.

Doing all of these things requires you as a writer to either i) have an enormous backlog of chapters ready before launching on Royal Road or ii) write consistently and somewhat quickly after you launch to build up an enormous backlog of chapters to release to your Patreon subscribers.

That’s a big time commitment to a story that people just might not be interested in. And posting consistently on Royal Road is no guarantee that you will find thousands of excited readers for your story.

I published Guild of Tokens on Royal Road for the better part of a year (although at a one-chapter-a-week clip) with an average of 270 “views” per chapter. Now, ideally I would have dumped the entire book on RR in the span of a month, but I didn’t have the backlog of material to keep going far into book 2, as I was still writing it. And I knew that the series was a bit outside what RR readers typically like.

So that’s why I wanted to conduct an experiment with I’m In Love With My Possessed Demon Sword. It’s not an isekai or LitRPG story, but still more aligned with other stories on RR than NYC Questing Guild.

One week later, and I’m happy with the number of views on Royal Road and everyone’s reactions so far.

However, I’m slightly disappointed that I didn’t meet my other goal, which was to get everyone anticipating the chapter drops each day, and to read the story in real-time as it was released.

I knew it was a tall order, but I felt that the serial release of the story would build excitement along the way, so that the ending would hit in an optimal way.

But I realize that everyone has so many competing distractions for their time, that without a 100K readership base, there was a high likelihood that only a few people amongst my readers here and on other platforms would be reading each day.

Now that the daily experiment is done, it’s time for the next phase: releasing an ebook version of the story for free to you, for the next month.

The story will remain on Royal Road indefinitely, but now you can read it as an ebook on your preferred e-reading device, rather than going to a website you perhaps have never used before.

You can download your copy by clicking the button below:

I hope you enjoy the story! If you want to help spread the word, leave a rating on Royal Road or on Goodreads.

The download link will expire on March 1, after which time I will be releasing the ebook for sale on Amazon and on my online shop.

I’ll be back with another behind-the-scenes post in mid-March, after the retail release is in full swing.

What’s coming up on ARC Worlds

One month into 2024, and I’ve met my goal of publishing a post every week here on ARC Worlds.

In this new section, I want to preview what you can expect in upcoming posts:

Yes, I’m going to keep things meta with another behind-the-scenes look at one of my major audience building efforts from 2023.

MAJOR Comics-related announcement!

The end of my comics vague-booking is at hand, as I will have an exciting announcement related to Project Plato hopefully on Wednesday, February 7!

Here’s a preview:

Stay tuned!

The next part of the publishing plan

Before you go off and read Demon Sword, there’s one more part of my publishing plan I wanted to share.

If you’ve read through to the end of chapter 8, you can see the seed of a longer story that I have planted.

I crafted Demon Sword, in tech terms, as a minimum viable story. The current set of chapters is a satisfying self-contained tale, and if I never returned to this story, I would be OK with this.

However, if you, the reader, want more, then I will oblige.

Before you decide, I’m giving you a preview of some other story ideas that I think would also work well as minimum viable story novellas.

Check them out below, and then please sound off in the poll at the end of the Royal Road version of chapter 8. (Spoiler warning: there is a spoiler-filled version of this post in the Author’s Note just before the poll, so don’t read that unless you’ve finished).

And I’d also love to hear what you thought of I'm In Love With My Possessed Demon Sword in the comments here or on Royal Road.

Jon’s other awesome story ideas

I Solve Time Travel Mysteries with My Teenage Daughter From the Future: 

Wyatt is looking forward to his quiet summer working at his father's clock shop in the coastal village of Schalar.

But that all changes when a mysterious girl appears in the middle of the night, incredibly claiming to be Wyatt’s daughter Sasha from 30 years in the future. And even more incredible, Sasha insists she is a member of the  Time Immolation Management Enterprise, a time-traveling agency that manages incursions, expeditions, and other potential immolations to the Timeline. And she needs Wyatt’s help to solve the mysterious disappearance of the prince’s sword, 400 years in the past.

Sasha is headstrong and adventurous, two things Wyatt is not. And she looks suspiciously like Aya, the girl who lives just down the street. Going against his better judgment, Wyatt steps through the shimmering blue portal and finds himself in medieval times, a veritable fish out of water in a dangerous era, with only his headstrong future daughter to prevent him from being killed.

Can Wyatt help protect the past to save his present, and ensure his future?

Steward of Avalon

Cassie Girard is at the end of her decade-long quest to locate the lost shards of the legendary sword Excalibur, and help usher in Avalon’s emergence as a new power in the 21st century.

But on the eve of what should have been her greatest triumph, she is betrayed by her best friend Gwen, who, unbeknownst to Cassie, has been working for Avalon’s enemies the entire time. As she lays bleeding in front of the last Excalibur shard, Cassie makes one last desperate attempt to save herself and everything she’s worked for. But it fails, and she dies an almost hero.

Except, she doesn’t. Not quite. For when Cassie opens her eyes again, she finds herself not in the afterlife, but 10 years earlier, a fresh-faced college graduate about to be given the adventure of her lifetime. This time, though, she has all the knowledge and memories of her previous life, the lessons learned from her travels, and of course, the betrayal lying in wait for her.

Can Cassie succeed her second time around and restore Avalon’s glory?

Or will she be unable to outwit her fate?