A lot happened in February. Let’s address that first.
February was a very busy month. Information on all of these:
First and foremost: Raw V. I finally got it out, and for reasons I’ll go into below, I had to swap the cover art out. That’s why there’s several different links.
Nude Alternate Version (Rylee)
Nude Alternate Version (Zora)
Monster Girl Inn - The Complete Trilogy: This has no new content, it simply collects all three novels. I’ve dropped the price to 2.99$ and there it will likely stay.
Sci-Fi Shared Universe Collection - Volume 01: I’ll talk more about this below.
Dragons & Damsels: This is out. I’ve got a short story in this collection that is completely stand alone. Characters, setting, and plot are all self contained. That being said, if you liked any of my fantasy stuff, you’ll like this. I was in mind of Monster Girl Inn somewhat when I wrote it, so similar vibes.
Audiobooks
Haven 3: This one is out.
Haven 4: This one drops March 13th.
A Warm Place 3: This one drops March 7th.
Now let’s talk about my Sci-Fi Collection.
I made a blog post explaining the reasoning for this happening. You can read it here. The short of it is: It really bothered me not having those books where my main market is anymore, and also taking down two and a half million words worth of content hurt my wallet more than I thought it would. So I decided to repackage them into cheap, better-formatted Collections.
This also means I’ll get the opportunity to write new content for series I thought were finished. Not all of them, as some of them I’m finding that I really have nothing further to add, but some. I’m basically examining each one as I come to them and see if anything comes to mind.
That being said, it does mean that I’ll finally be writing a proper epilogue to Like A Fine Wine in the form of a novelette. The same is true for Sex & Survival.
Here’s a quick rundown of what each Collection will contain.
SCI-FI SHARED UNIVERSE - VOLUME 01: HELLCATS | MY UNDEAD LOVER | ALIEN HAREM | AMAZONIAN’S LOVE + All Associated Shorts & new shorts for Hellcats & Amazonian’s Love
FANTASY SHARED UNIVERSE: WANDERLUST | MY UNDEAD LOVER | LARGE & LOVELY | ROYAL LUST | LUST & ADVENTURE | LAY OF THE LAND | SNAKESKIN | ADVENTUROUS + All Associated Shorts & new shorts for Wanderlust, Lust & Adventure, and Adventurous for sure.
PARANORMAL SHARED UNIVERSE: PARANORMAL PASSIONS | PINK | ROOMMATES WITH BENEFITS | PARASEXUAL + All Associated Shorts & a new short for Parasexual for sure.
POST-APOCALYPTIC SHARED UNIVERSE: Sex & Survival | The Pale Redhead | A New World + All Associated Shorts & new shorts for all three of them. Really looking forward to writing The Pale Redhead 4.
SCI-FI SHARED UNIVERSE - VOLUME 02: DESIRE | BLIND DATE | LIKE A SEX TOY | LIKE A FINE WINE + All Associated Shorts & a new epilogue for Like A Fine Wine, & probably new shorts for all three of the others.
Each collection will be 99 cents and in the Kindle Unlimited, meaning that I’ll need to be removing all my novels and shorts and collections from all other places on the internet, most notably here on my own website.
Some things will not be going in the collections. Valkyries, Demoness, & Women of the Wild will all remain for free on my website.
I’ll be releasing these as I get to them, (it takes a bit of time to format 2.5M words), but I’m intending to have them all out before May. And yes, each of them will get sexy new covers, with sexy new alternate nudes.
I have to admit, it’s been fun writing the newer content, and it’s reminding me why I liked writing bonus shorts in the first place. I can’t be positive, but I might bring them back in some capacity for future titles.
Real quick, we’ll talk about what’s coming up this month, so that I can then get to the unhappy part.
Honestly? Not much. I’m hoping to bust my ass and possibly get Raw VI out before the end of the month. Besides the pair of audiobooks, it’s all I’ve got in terms of announcements.
Now, let’s talk about the unhappy future.
Raw V sort of scared the shit out of me. You know how in movies there comes that scene where someone gets a gun shoved in their face and all other sound drops away as the camera zooms slowly in on them and you can just see the sheer terror on their face? That’s kind of what I felt like when it seemed like Raw V, and thus Raw as a series, was dead in the water.
I had a lot of troubles at the end of 2022, and have spent the first two months of this year trying to get my shit back in order. I mostly feel better, and I’ve been a lot more consistently productive.
However, there was a six month gap between the release of Raw IV and Raw V. Which is an ESPECIALLY long time in the harem genre. Obviously, this wasn’t on purpose. I fully intended to have Raw V written and released sometime last November. But I had something of a breakdown when I tried writing it back in October, and I was forced to put it aside.
There’s little in the way of hard evidence when it comes to determining or predicting the success of a given title, but this many years into the game, I’ve gotten better about learning to read the algorithm, and it was looking like Raw V was dead on arrival. That was my ‘staring down the barrel of a gun’ moment. Because Raw V flopping doesn’t just mean a book I wrote flopped. It means that the next four novels that I have planned, the next four novels in my most successful series EVER written, are now virtually meaningless, and would in fact be a bad decision to write.
This is precisely why so many authors drop series abruptly. Because writing a sequel to a dead series isn’t simply writing a book that won’t sell, it’s also not writing a book that will sell. Every time we choose to write something, we also choose not to write everything else. That’s part of the reason this job is so fucking stressful.
So, with that happening, I did the only thing I could think to do, and I swapped covers. I have personally seen this move take a book that was failing to sell and send it into the top 1,000, which is insane. THAT is the power of cover art. Literally the exact same book, and yet suddenly it’s selling 20x as much.
Yeah, it really bothers me, too.
I wanted to put Zora on the cover because she’s a main character in this one, but I knew it was a risk because too many people hate anthro characters on their covers. I figured this late into the series it wouldn’t matter, but apparently I was wrong. After I swapped out a drawing of Rylee I was going to save for the next collection (a drawing that is admittedly much more visually appealing), it immediately started selling better. Although I can tell that damage was definitely done, it hasn’t done as well as it could have. Which, in a way, is sort of my fault, but also…I wouldn’t have had a mental breakdown if I could have avoided it? I don’t really know what else to say there. The dice just landed against me.
That alone was frightening enough, but I’ve faced it down before. No, what is really freaking me out is Artificial Intelligence. It’s become clear that 2023 is the year of AI. Right now, there are discussions in this fandom, and certainly all others, over the validity, legality, and morality of using AI-generated cover art. Speaking for myself: I have not, nor do I intend to, used AI. But something that people also aren’t realizing is that whatever fucking exponential breakthrough AI has experienced has also resulted in commensurate advancement of book-writing AI.
Yeah, that’s fucking frightening.
Given the fact that this genre is led by four ghost farm pen names who pump out works as quickly as they possibly can, I have no doubt that haremlit will eventually begin to fill up with AI-produced content. We won’t be looking at dozens of releases a month, we’ll be looking at hundreds. I don’t know when this will happen, but unless there is some massive change, and soon, it’s going to happen. There are some other people in the industry claiming we will see it begin before the year is out.
Which means my job is being threatened. Which means, functionally speaking, my life is being threatened. Because my job is basically my life. For better or for worse, that is the position I find myself in.
I might be wrong about all this. I hope I am. In either case, since I have no intention on integrating AI with my work in any capacity, it means that I need to assume the worst and shore up my library while I still can. In short, it’s caused me to reassess my current plan.
In the most immediate sense, that means nothing will change, because writing Raw novels as quickly as possible remains my most logical next step.
But beyond that? I’m still reassessing. At the moment, Raw gives me some time to think, and that is what I’ll be spending March doing: writing Raw and thinking and reasoning out my next project. I believe I may already know what it will be, but the past several months have taught me one thing: I need to shut the fuck up more and let time pass.
So, a month from now, I should have a clearer image of what’s coming after Raw. If it is what I currently believe it to be, it will make many people happy, at least.
Wish me luck.