A brand new poll for you to answer! Again, I'm doing a bonus chapter for every 20 ratings, which means this poll will decide the chapters for 95, 115, and 135 ratings. As of this writing it has just passed 95 ratings, so I'm fairly confident all three of these will be passed by the end of October.

So, out of all these poll options, vote for as many as you want. The top 3 will be our next bonus chapters! There's some lore document chapters in here, too, but guess what? In the $15 a month tier on Patreon, you can request a lore document every single month, no poll required. (There are no $15 patrons yet but I really hope for someone soon :D)

Some more news in my "overly transparent" style:

#1

By the time this chapter comes out, Golemancer SHOULD be about gone from Rising Stars (It's at #20 now and falling, so I think it will drop past #50 in one more week). That means the story enters the Tough Stage, where getting new followers and patrons becomes a lot more difficult. Due to the way Royal Road works, the only real ways to get new followers are to be on one of the main site lists, which will now be Popular This Week, Trending, and Best Rated. Best Rated is impossible due to bad ratings, and Trending is for older stories, so Popular This Week is the best path.

As of this writing, the story is on Page 12 of Popular This Week. That's at ~1,000 views a day on average. The only way to get Golemancer higher on that list, like page 5, then, is to keep posting fast and furiously every single day, so that there's more chapters and more views.

To boost this, then, I'm going to keep posting daily all the way until the end of the Writathon around December 10th, and I MIGHT continue posting daily after that, too, depending on how much the story is still growing (especially on Patreon).

How YOU can help: Recommmend the story to people and ask them to read through it. Popular This Week is mostly just based on raw views, so that's pretty much the best option.

#2

Related to the above: Posting a chapter every single day is very fun, but also very exhausting. Now that the story is leaving Rising Stars, it's alleviated the pressure a little, but gosh it's still a full-time job on top of the one I already have.

I'm at risk of burning out, for sure. I can sort of feel it coming already, because my backlog has decreased more than I'm comfortable with, and outlining the third major story arc has been a challenge (yes, this means the second one is already done, and you better get super excited!). I got this far thanks to almost 6 months of pre-work writing, and I'm very happy I did that, so that I can survive this posting schedule for a long time.

The story is going really fast, and I'm really loving writing it. BUT, if I feel a burnout coming, I will make sure to save my health. Based on this, then, I plan to take a few days, maybe a whole week, off from posting or writing near the end of October. I might not do it, because that will hurt the Popular This Week momentum, but I won't sacrifice my mojo just to reach that--no story is important enough for that.

Let's hope I don't burn out, but also let's hope I stay healthy and happy. :)

#3

The first 38 chapters we've read now are all part of the first story arc, which is basically "Book 1" if this were put into novel form. The second and third story arcs basically form "Book 2" and that will start with Chapter 39.

I haven't had any publishers reach out as publishers sometimes do on Royal Road, so unless that happens I don't plan on doing any sort of Kindle Unlimited or other sorts of story removal (due to the story's subject matter and title, this unfortunately is very unlikely). I might make ebook versions of the story, but those don't sell well unless the story has several thousand followers, so maybe not. If it DOES happen, I'll make sure to announce it many months in advance, since y'all awesome readers deserve as much.

Either way, though, I might be looking for an editor to help with making Book 1 even more awesome in 2022. Reach out if you are interested or know someone else who is.

#4

Hey, can you subscribe to Golemancer on Tapas? The story is growing a lot there, too, but it still needs a little bit of a push. If you don't use Tapas already, I highly recommend it, because it's basically the best site on the entire internet for western-made GL novels and comics. Seriously, there's so much GL that it makes Royal Road blush with jealousy.

#5

There's totally gonna be another movie night on Discord on 10/1 at 9PM EST. Our movies this time:

VENOM and SPEED RACER.

I'll see you there. :)

Anyway, thanks so much for your support!!!