So, I have no released about three and a half novels worth of content, spanning a little over a year of writing. In retrospect, I'm not exactly happy with Act 1 but there's no real way to go in and fix it without just redoing it from the ground up, and there's no way I'm doing that. Unfortunately, I think the quality difference from Act 0 (written halfway through 2022) to Act 1 causes a lot of readers to drop the series. Maybe that's just speculation, but I don't have much to go on. In the spirit of that investigation however, I wanted to use today's "chapter" release in an attempt to engage with everyone reading the series ab it more.
I suspect a lot of people are reading the series but for a variety of reasons have been keeping their thoughts to themselves. There's probably a good number of people who have refrained from reviewing it because even if they enjoy it and think it quite above average, they don't want to give it a 5 star rating, but know that anything less than 5 stars actually penalizes me because of the inflation of ratings that puts even IGN to shame. If I just described you, please consider sharing your thoughts as a comment on this chapter. I'm still very much trying to improve as a writer, and critical feedback is helpful.
That said, I think that after a year of releases, Undying Emperor has stagnated. It's arguably more successful than anything I've released on Amazon, but I think that with my current skills and knowledge, if I were to start a new series I could make a very strong bid for Rising Stars. I don't plan to abandon UE, but in the future it might become a series I update at random through Amazon, not on here. Until then, I won't quite be putting UE on hiatus, but I am going to step down to one chapter a week, to free up time in my writing schedule. A proper launch on this site requires a lot of material to release very quickly, so I need to build that up and also continue releasing stand alone novels.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
With that said, please make use of comments on this chapter to let me know your thoughts. I never made a Patreon or a discord, so this is the best I've got for now.
And if you're curious about what else I'm up to, you can follow my twitter or check out my website, jameskrake.com
Act 4 - Fallen Crest Abbey will begin releases this monday. I took a different stylistic approach with it, which I really enjoyed but some might find too much of a departure. I think it will come out at 9 chapters in total before I start the next arc of Lucius' story.
