Rants & Ravings

Well it’s actually been more than a year, but it’s close enough, as I realized I hadn’t posted anything since my 6 month update. Plus the first chapter of Book 3 (The Atlantean Federation) has just recently hit the sites.

I’ve been busy writing and editing. The first book is just going through a final re-read before it gets self-published. The second book is going through the editing process and I’m several chapters into the third book.

I have talked to several publishers, they’ve all turned me down, but they’ve given me some great feedback. Almost all of them have said my chapters are too long, coupled with… “120K words is too big for an author’s first novel. You need to cut it down to about 80K words!”

A few of them even expressed concern that I was posting the story on free websites, but others commended me for doing that, as it was collecting public feedback and growing an audience, plus I was using the feedback from the readers for editing and story development.

Long story short, it looks like I’m going the self publishing route!

Anyway, without further adieu, here’s the stats from the biggest sites, I’ve got the story published on many more sites than these, but Stories Online and LitErotica are by far the biggest and they provide statistics.

Stories Online 194,052 Reads, 1,328 Votes averaging an 8.04/10 score (80.4%)

LitErotica 252,794 Reads, 15,462 Votes averaging a 4.72/5 score (94.4%)

It’s been six months since I started publishing my story Cowboys and Aliens to various websites, all of Book One (The Cowboy and the Aliens) has been published to the sites and I’m now working on getting it actually published to Amazon and other book stores.

I’m also going to be selling the book directly from my website (after learning how much of a cut the various online bookstores take).

Here’s the tale of the tape after 6 months from the two biggest sites that self-publish to…

My story has been downloaded 283,447 times, it’s being actively followed by 1,495 people, it’s been voted on 11,219 times and the ratings are 4.71/5 (94.25%) on Literotica and 8.03/10 (80.3%) on StoriesOnline.

The first 4 chapters of my story have been on StoriesOnLine for a week now and I’m totally stoked!

Over 10,000 downloads so far! Over 300 people have added my story to their library so they’ll know as soon as I add new chapters and Cowboys and Aliens is rocking a 7.69 score which is one of the highest scores of all new stories added to their site in the past month!

I just submitted Chapter 5 to StoriesOnline, but you can currently already read up to Chapter 7 on my Patreon page.

Here’s some of the comments I’ve gotten so far… I removed the names to protect the innocent (ha ha ha)…

Keep it up, everyone is waiting for the next chapter

Chapter 1, I thought very good. By the end of chapter 2, I was thinking this has possibilities. By the end of chapter 4, I was wanting more, more, more. Keep it up, this story has a chance of 9.5 or better.

This was a very good story until near the end; then it became an Awesome Story. I’d love to read more, soon. Please continue.

Well this looks like it’ll be FUN! I for one am looking forward to seeing where you go with it!

Well yesterday I decided to actually start publishing some of my story to StoriesOnline.net.

I can honestly say that last night I didn’t sleep very well, I was so nervous for taking an idea that I started back in grade 9 or 10 (some 30+ years ago) and actually publishing it for everybody to see.

Here it is 4am in the morning and I still haven’t seen any email notifications for comments, votes or anything. Well it turned out those all ended up in my junk mail folder!

I checked my story and the first chapter has been downloaded over 3100 times and the second chapter almost 2400 times with the story scoring 7.79 through 137 votes, and thankfully there was some good constructive criticism and some volunteer editing.

The stories posted to my Patreon account have been edited and therefore will be slightly different from the ones on SOL.

Since I’m not doing IT anymore, I started looking for another hobby. I like to keep my mind busy.

I’ve been an avid reader of stories and books of years. So I’ve decided to try my hand at writing.

My first story is called Aliens and Cowboys, so as not to be confused with the Cowboys and Aliens movie and graphic novels, in fact, it’s the polar opposite! Thus Aliens and Cowboys and it’s actually a very loose adaptation of a story I wrote back in Grade 9 or 10 called “Turtle Island”.