cathfach
patreon
The future of An Unruly Summon
🕑 Added 2024-07-04 20:18:33 +0000 UTCI've mentioned the J-Novel Club competition several times already, generally to express my surprise that I hadn't been knocked out yet. Well, it's finally finished, and much to my shock, An Unruly Summon was chosen as one of the three first prize winners. (Which, with a single grand prize winner, means it ended up placing in the top four.) Since the entire point of the competition was for JNC to find their first batch of original English light novels, that means I've signed an exclusive contract with JNC to publish it going forward.
That obviously has implications for my self-publishing. An Unruly Summon won't be coming to scribble hub or royal road, nor will volume 1 be coming back to Patreon. Since I didn't think it would be fair to abruptly stop chapters for current patrons, I've got a small exception in my exclusivity clause to allow me to continue posting volume 2 here. However, this is for current patrons only, not new ones, and so there will be no backlog. The existing posts will be removed tomorrow. The remainder of the volume 2 chapters will be by e-mail only, (edit: looks like the email notifications aren't completely reliable, for whatever reason, so it'll be a regular chapter. It just won't remain up for long, so you'll still need the e-mail if you happen to not have internet access for a few days. Or, in the case of emergancy, just ping me on discord and I can hook you up with a pdf.) so make sure you don't have e-mail notifications disabled and that patreon's address is whitelisted. Also, this will only continue until the end of volume 2 (chapter 83) after which the Tuesday/Friday slots will switch to a different story.
It's going to be some time until it starts republishing on JNC, but when it does, it will be with professional editing and illustrations. If you have any particular scenes you want to see illustrated, mention them in comments below.
The Monday slot will be occupied by another oneshot next week, but that will probably be the last Monday post for July so I can devote time to Unruly Summon editing and writing something to replace it once volume 2 completes.
Since this is a big shakeup of my patreon plans, I'm thinking about taking the opportunity to throw something else into the works while I'm at it. With patreon enshittification proceeding apace, and RRatreon still languishing in legal hell, I'm considering migrating my content to a personal website, albeit continuing to use patreon for user accounts/login. That would have a bunch of advantages for everyone, starting with me being able to use proper formatting without resorting to single-chapter pdfs like I needed to on Monday. It would also simplify my workflow, because I could automate upload and not need to worry about keeping patreon in sync with my local manuscripts. The main advantage for you lot is that it would let me solve all the fairness issues with patreon posts. (i.e. if you subscribe for one month, then quit, you'd maintain access to all the side stories you unlocked and would simply stop unlocking new chapters. Or I could have tiers for reading ahead a single story that could be bought as a one-off instead of needing to stay subscribed to avoid needing to wait months for RR to catch up. That sort of thing.)
E-mail notifications would continue, so this would only affect people who read on the patreon website or app. There wouldn't be any need to sign up to anything new, or create a new login, because it would continue to use patreon for that. If anyone has any other concerns/comments, or can think of a big obvious reason why this wont work*, now would be the time to mention them.
*I am aware that patreon's OAuth implementation—much like their implementation of... uh... everything—is somewhat flaky. I'm hoping that my use case is simple enough to not cause it issues, but I won't know if I'm wrong until I try it.
Comments
cathfach
There will be a volume 3. JNC have the rights to exclusively publish it. There's a chance they won't exercise those rights, if early sales are poor enough to make it not worth their while, but I'm not aware of any other novel they've given up on part way through, so that's unlikely. I don't know how many volumes there will be in total; I was originally planning 5, but I might rein things in a bit and end it on the third one. I don't have a timeline. They will be passing it to one of their editors, who will be back-and-foreing with me for a bit, plus there will need to be time to create the illustrations, so I imagine it'll be a while. It's possible they'll stream it bit-by-bit for members, like they do for translations, but afaik the exact sequence of events hasn't been decided yet. (It is their first time publishing anything untranslated, after all.) JNC sell via Amazon, kobo, ibooks, nook and bookwalker. You can also buy DRM free direct from their site. Short of living in north korea, I can't imagine not being able to get hold of it from one of the options. They also publish in other languages. iirc german and french, although not their whole range, so it's unlikely unruly summon will be translated unless it sells very well. Likewise, they do paperback editions, but only for things that are already selling well, so even if unruly summon gets one it will be long after the e-book versions.
Qahlz
Congrats! I'd like to see the party's exile/when they start their trip to the demon empire as an illustration. Also the first casts of Pereo and Miraculum, although I'm not sure if that translates well into an image. Three/four questions: Will there be a Volume 3, and if yes will that also be exclusive to that publisher? Do you already have a time line when the novels will be starting their sale? Will they be sold globally? Still miffed at how many stories are locked to that one relatively popular publisher who doesn't operate in the EU -_-
giom
Congrats! For the new site, what I’d love would be a pocket integration so that I could get my chapter directly piped to my kobo. Alternatively an email with the chapter in epub would make me happy.
