From Grathew’s Desk
ep.2
Seeing as the last one of these did fairly well. I’m going to keep doing them. I’m not sure what to do title wise. As From Grathew’s Desk sounds rather series not individual posts. I’ll have to think about it, let me know if you have any thoughts on the mater.
I’m going to move on to a thank you to S. Donovan Croft and Clayton Barnett. Mr. Croft for letting me interview him: at time of writing I’m still waiting on my copy to get here, you will be on the shelf soon. If you’re interested in the interview it’s linked at the bottom. I saw Clayton’s website machciv.com pop up in the inbound traffic, thus thank you. Clayton’s written a lot of books, and generally has his current work in progress chunked out there. Worth checking out there’s a lot of interesting stuff there.
Following the author friends I seemingly have found a good number of internet friends. For those who only follow me here you may have seen that I post notes with the articles now. This has added a couple of followers here, which is nice. X has exploded. Last time I did one of these I was sitting at 18 followers over there; now it’s 54. If you’re from X let me know. It seems the ‘analytics’ I have pointless. As you’re here, if you want to follow me over there you can. You’re not going to see much outside of posts for the substack. Especially since I’m planning on doing more substack content.
Speaking of Substack content, next week will be the first Sci-Fi Saturday. It will swap out with Fantasy Friday and this on rotation. Fantasy Friday and Sci-Fi Saturday will be once monthly (or there about), with these letter from the author in between their releases. None of these three series will pushed out to social media going forward. I assume that will lead to a dip in views, or rather a dip in growth of views, I want to give some stuff to my subscribers here. Thus if you are from another social media platform, subscribe to not miss out.
Speaking of future plans I have a bit of a dilemma: how to put out short stories. Two weeks ago I was thinking about putting them out in chunks, say two or three parts for each story. I would put the full thing up in a post (probably at the time of the first part going live) behind the paywall. This is what seems to be the ‘recommended route’ for people looking to monetize their substack. That doesn’t sit well with me. It feels like I’m penalizing those who don’t pay. That said I am planning on monetizing this substack. My plan is to put ‘early release’ chapters of Noah Bannon: Space Ranger. These would be the same chapters that go out to Royal Road, and here, for free. It would be a way to get your hands on them earlier. As I will be releasing two chapters of Noah Bannon: Space Ranger a month starting next year, and planning on launching another two chapter a month serial, probably around June, I figured it would be the ‘fairest’ way of earning some money from my work. Although if you have thoughts (and I’m sure some of you do) let me know. I am interested in what you think would be fair.
Continuing the tour behind the curtain; I am honestly humbled by how many of you come to view the Gazette. So far there isn’t a day without at least a view in October, and the month’s average 15.13 views a day. That’s more than double September’s 6.5, and just over triple of August’s 3.9. Thank you. While the raw numbers may be small that’s a massive increase in traffic. Subscribers are still static, which isn’t great, but not unexpected. The way I see it if everything goes out to various social media people will follow there and just click the links when they go up. Hence why I’m going to be ‘reserving’ some stuff for my subscribers here. I want to take care of you guys first.
That all said there’s a lot more to share, but I don’t want to play all the cards. So I will see you in two weeks on Halloween. Until then.
Grathew
