Kotharian Lightning

Hi everyone, thought I’d give a brief update about what’s been going on with my creative works.

Blog

First, I’ve been trying to post 1-2 folklore stories a week. I know it isn’t quite the rapid pace that I set for myself last year, but I’d like to try to keep a decent amount of blog content going, as my schedule allows. My personal practice with the stories is to transcribe them directly from the pdf ebook source which takes a fair amount of time per story. Unfortunately, my schedule and other activities means that the longer written articles are on a hold for now. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back into them by the end of the year, but until then the blog content will rely largely upon the transcribed stories.

Video Game

Second, progress on the video game is going well. I’m a few months away from level design, which I should hopefully have finished off sometime between the end of this year and the first quarter of 2024. This has been a long term project spanning a number of years, so I’m excited that it’s finally coming together.

Novel

Third, I’ve completed the initial draft of my upcoming novel which is at 145,000 words. I’m still undecided about whether it’s going to be a two part book series or a single larger book (I expect the second part to be between 100,000-110,000 words). Thus, I’m going to finish the second part before I make my decision on how that will work.

There’s also the issue of how to publish the book. Kindle has proved to be a rather… poor provider of readers. A new author ultimately runs into several problems using that service, namely that the market is oversaturated and that Amazon is strongly driven by the review and rating system. So you need reviews and ratings to sell your books, but getting a customer (even a free one) to leave a rating or review is not easily. And the oversaturation problem becomes an issue because everyone has to deal with the same problems. And advertising basically runs into the same issues, except that you’re also paying for each click (and way too much per click). Advertising, being bid based, is also a very oversaturated, and thus overpriced, system. For example, there have been times when the fantasy keyword has been priced at 5$+ and the epic fantasy keyword has been priced at 3.50$+ (in Canadian Dollars). To give you an idea of how bad a deal that is, my main fantasy book, Within a Hidden Sun, has about a 5.50$ return on an ebook sale, but a 2.00$ return on a physical book sale (I tried to price it as reasonably as I could). In other words, a single click (not even a purchase) at those prices is a very poor conversion rate for a relatively low cost good. The return on a physical sale of Starlight Coda is better, but that book hasn’t seen as much traffic and is competing in a more crowded genre than Within a Hidden Sun.

Obviously such excessive advertising prices are not possible for someone who doesn’t have a lot of cash to burn, which forces you to lesser known keywords that may or may not drive the people you want to your book. And when you have someone’s attention, you run into the typical Amazon rating issue. And frankly, I’m not sure I’d be especially inclined to take the risk on purchase if I was in their situation. So basically, advertising hasn’t been successful which leaves the books competing in a oversaturated market with the negative of no ratings.

Publishing has always been a venture which requires luck to be successful, regardless of the quality of your work. Just look at H.P. Lovecraft. He’s very popular now, but while he was alive his basic diet was literally canned beans and he lived in poverty. Oversaturated markets just makes it that much more difficult to get lucky. It’s an unfortunate truth that I was somewhat aware of going into the business. It’s just unfortunate that there isn’t a easy way of actually promoting a work without a lot of financial backing or existing fame.

So all that being said, I’m going to have to consider how I publish the next book. I will always stand by the quality of the books that I produce, but ultimately there’s a simple problem that it simply doesn’t seem feasible to compete on a larger platform.

Animation Series

So, that brings me to the fourth thing I’ve been working on. I have a comedy animation series which I’m in the process of animating currently. It’s about a man who gets forcibly mobilized into the modern Russian Army, parodying the mentalities I examined in my Modern Mythology articles. I’m doing it in a similar animation style to the online series, If the Emperor Had a Text To Speech Device. Essentially, that means that the artwork is of a highly detailed quality, with a side view perspective and sprite animations. It takes advantage of the advances we’ve seen in AI tech for the voices, backgrounds, and character models. I’m using the Unity Engine for the production of the series, which is going well so far. That’s the same game engine I’ve been using for my game, albeit for 3D models/animations (so 2D was a bit of a change). I’m also composing the music for the series, which has been fun to get back into. I have another idea sketched out that would be centered around a group of amateur paranormal detectives in a mid-west American Town. So there’s a lot of content coming up on that front.

Summary

So all things going well, there should be a decent amount of content coming up. As stated in the first section, I’ll keep posting 1-2 stories a week. There’s currently a catalogue of over 200 stories, if you’d like to have a read. You can access the full lists of categories and tags in the navigation page, which will let you access stories by regions, countries, religions, and ethnic groups.

https://atomic-temporary-196631146.wpcomstaging.com/site-navigation/

Regards, Joshua James Kingston