Hi Everyone!

　　As promised, we wanted to go into a little more detail about our paid-subscription support launch. This is partially just for visibility, but there`s also a certain amount of you who like knowing about the behind-the-scenes of writing/being authors/how-the-sausage-is-made, and we wanted to be as full-disclosure as we could. So here, in the flesh, are the answers to three questions that we think give you a pretty good idea of where our heads are at on the subject.

　　For an extreme TLDR: you can now support us and read our advance chapters here. That`s the really vital bit. But if you want to know more, read on!

　　Why now?

　　Dotblue and I are professional writers. But in a really boring way, we aren`t professional writers of fiction. In our "other" lives, we do various kinds of corporate work and non-fiction, and that`s how we usually pay our bills. Don`t get us wrong: we like our day jobs. But, we like writing Deadworld Isekai much better. It`s a lot more fun.

　　When we started this project, we both committed to taking a certain amount of time we would otherwise dedicate to paid work and applying it here. As time went on, we started dump-trucking larger and larger amounts of time. When you look at our currently published chapters, you see something like 120k published words over a little under two months. That represents a lot of hours writing, editing, and promoting the story.

　　In an ideal world, that story ends with us both on fantasy-themed yachts, sailing the world looking for writing adventures, or wealthy beyond all imagining and hunting George R.R. Martin for sport, in the Most Dangerous Game style.

　　Back to reality, we weren`t actually planning on launching reader-support stuff this soon. That was originally something we planned on doing at least a couple of months later than we are.

　　In a previous author note, I mentioned that we wanted to get to "A Full Zogarth" before doing this, where a Zogarth is a unit I made up that means being a full book (50 chapters!) ahead. But we changed our mind on that for two reasons:

　　Readers were contacting us and asking for ways to support the work. We started putting together ways for just those readers to do that, but then realized that was stupid, and we might as well make it available for everyone.

　　We took a really close look at our timeline, and realized that the way things were shaping up was leading to a situation where we would definitely have to stub. For context, stubbing is the practice of removing most of a published work from Royal Road and other platforms because Amazon requires you to do so when you publish on Kindle Unlimited.

　　#2 is the more important point for us. In our ideal world, we would never stub. We`d have financial support from the percentage of readers who wanted to support us and could afford it, but everyone else could read our stuff for free much longer.Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

　　We definitely aren`t expecting to get to quit-your-day-job levels of support overnight, but we looked really hard at our numbers and the version of the story that ends with us never stubbing (or stubbing much later) involves getting a head start on Patreon-style support.

　　Basically, it`s a balance. We`d like to share our stories with more readers and eventually do so well with reader support that publishing to Amazon looks like a mistake.

　　What`s the status of the backlog I`d be getting access to?

　　We`re getting started with this a lot earlier than we thought we would. That means that right now, there are 5 advance chapters in the tank, where the industry standard is something like 20 and the most successful Patreon we`ve seen is Zogarth`s, who has a full 50 chapter backlog.

　　In our early days, we were leaning really hard into publishing as much as we could, as fast as we could. That means we`ve published 50-odd chapters in less than two months. More than one per day. We are still maintaining that pace, but I`ve been getting a little faster at writing, which means we can do that AND improve our backlog at the same time.

　　At my current writing pace, we should be adding 3-5 chapters a week to the backlog. Will there be weeks when that doesn`t happen? For sure. If one of my kids falls off something and breaks an arm, it`s going to slow me down. But for the most part, we should be growing that backlog at a pretty steady pace. A couple of months from now, we should be 25-30+ chapters ahead.

　　Once we get to about 50 chapters and a reasonable "Oh, hell, my house burned down" emergency backlog, we will probably slow that down to maintenance levels so I don`t get heart problems. But right up to that point, we will be chugging away as fast as possible to make that backlog stouter.

　　What tiers are available?

　　We are launching with a single tier, a "pay this much and get access to everything" level. That`s all advance chapters, Discord access, and any other fun stuff we get up to. We`re calling this the Gaian citizenship. Because in some ways, you`re supporting Matt and Lucy on their journey.

　　We thought about doing other, lower-priced tiers, and we still might later based on the feedback we get. But tiers make us feel icky for reasons we can`t describe all that well. It feels like we are sorting fans into various levels of fan-ness, a world where some supporters are better than others. It`s not exactly a rational thought, but we wanted to give single-tier a shot anyhow. Every Gaian citizen means just as much to us as another citizen.

　　If it ends up not working, we might change that a bit later. The current tier won`t change, but if we get enough feedback going "stop being weird and do it a different way" we will definitely consider it.

　　College-essay-type Conclusion section

　　We really like writing, and we really like writing this story. We`re hoping we can carve out a world big enough that both me and Dotblue can live in it full-time, working on Deadworld until it`s everything we wanted to be and even pivoting to other worlds and other stories once this one is done.

　　We are thankful and flattered that some people want to support us, and we are really glad to make that possible. For everyone else, we are still more than happy that you are here at all, reading our stuff and going on this adventure with us.

　　Again, the relevant link to become a Gaian Citizen is here. If you see any problems or bugs, please let us know right away at [email protected]. Otherwise, we look forward to seeing you there, and once again extend our very sincerest appreciation for you.

　　See you tomorrow!