State of the Serial: December 2022

Welcome to the end of hiatus!  There's a bunch of stuff to cover, so I'll try to be concise.

1.  Godslayers is resuming this month.  

For Patreon, the first update will be Tuesday, December 13.  Since everyone probably forgot what was going on, I will release a summary of the current plot before the chapter goes up.  That will take the form of a publicly available post on Patreon.  Billing will remain paused until that chapter goes up.

For RoyalRoad, the first update will be Friday, December 16.

2. The update schedule is changing to 0-1 chapters per week.

I have a strong history of using writing to procrastinate on school projects, and I expect that will continue.  I often joke that my best work was written when I was supposed to be doing something else.  (It's not a joke.)  But I'm not confident that I can use that behavior to produce content on a regular deadline, and I don't want to commit to doing so until I get more data on my output during grad school.

For the time being, Patreon and RR updates will both happen on Fridays as long as I have available chapters to post.  

If a chapter is not available, that will be considered a "skip week."  During skip weeks, no chapter will be posted to either Patreon or RR.  I will instead make an announcement on Discord with the current status of the in-progress chapter.

Billing will not pause during skip weeks.  This is for two reasons: first, if I have to pause and unpause billing repeatedly, there's a chance that I make a mistake and people end up paying when they didn't want to.  Second, pausing billing prevents people from signing up, meaning that I would be preventing people from accessing advanced chapters.

The new Patreon tiers will guarantee early access to chapters, but not regular posting of chapters.  That means there will be some months where you receive less than 4 chapters.  I want to be transparent about this to set expectations.  If that's a dealbreaker for you, I understand.  Thanks for your support up to this point.

3.  Tier benefits are changing.

The change that's probably most relevant to you is that Patrons will get one advanced chapter, available at the $5 tier and above.

If content delivery is cut in half, it seems only fair to me that I ask half the price.  Patreon will remain one chapter ahead of RR; that means if Patreon doesn't update, RR won't either.

All patrons will have access to the same discord benefits as before the rework.

The $10 tier is going away.  If you really want to pay $10 a month, you can sign up for the $5 tier and pay extra.  I was tempted to try to come up with fun extra content to justify retaining this tier, but the whole point of the Patreon rework was to minimize responsibilities that would interfere with grad school, so for now it's going away.  It may return if I can think of something that's worth the extra $5/month.

Finally, the $20 tier will retain current benefits (all lower tiers plus shout-outs in the author's notes of RR chapters).  In addition, $20 patrons will receive access to chapters as they are finished.  Unlike the $5 tier, I won't make any guarantees about staying ahead of everyone else.  My sense is that the people who pick the $20 tier are doing so to support the serial; this is just a thank-you.

That's all for now.  Thank you for your support, and I look forward to finishing this journey together.