Markets and Multiverses - Book cover and release schedule

All right, first thing's first. As you can see, this is a picture. Markets and Multiverses has an official book cover now! Yay! It's pretty cool. Or at least I personally think it looks pretty neat. We have the three main characters looking over the Market. I was personally hoping the theme of 'ruined Market' would be a little bit more prevalent in the picture, but although it's a little less ruined than I was originally hoping for, I still think the cover looks quite nice. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. :)

Second, as those of you who have read some of my other author's notes for MaM have noticed, I've mentioned chapter 21 a few times as being related to the public release. I just posted chapter 20 of the story, so I release chapter 21 tomorrow. What does this mean for various tiers of Patron?

Put simply, a few things happen here. I want to state in advance that there MIGHT be a delay of one day IF Royalroad or Scribblehub take some time to approve my story being uploaded on the websites involved. I'm hoping they get ok'd quickly, but if they get delayed, I won't post another chapter until they're approved. Put simply, I want to make sure Patreon has, in total, 20 chapters more than the public release. So if the public release gets delayed one day, so does Patreon release. I doubt it'll get delayed more than a day, just warning you in advance.

Third, thus far tiers below the 10 dollar tier have only had 1 release a week for MaM for a while, because I was setting up the tiers for public release. Once chapter 21 is released on public, this will start to change - in a good way. Currently, my patreon tiers claim that the tiers work as follows

$3 - 5 chapters MaM

$5 - 10 chapters MaM (+5 chapters from previous tier)

$10 - 20 chapters MaM. (+10 chapters from previous tier)

Right now, the tiers in practice look something more like this

$3 - 8 chapters ahead

$5 - 13 chapters ahead (+5 chapters from previous tier)

$10 - 20 chapters ahead. (+7 chapters from previous tier)

For 3 days of public releases, ya'll won't notice much change if you're in the $3 or $5 tiers. Then, by that point, on chapter 23 the patreon tiers should make the chapters on Patreon line up with the chapter numbers they are SUPPOSED to have. Meaning that afterwards, I'll be releasing one chapter a day, and this will be reflected in ALL Patreon tiers. If I'm doing my math correctly, anyway. I could be being dumb, but I think everything works out that way?

From that point onwards, every tier of Patreon will get 1 chapter a day until I burn through my chapter stockpile (I will, however, no longer be releasing chapters on Sundays starting this week. I'll be back to a 5 day schedule). 

Well, I'll be back to a 1 chapter a day release schedule until I take my vacation next month. Doing some quick math, at 5 chapters a week... I will not be done with my stockpile next month before taking a break, even assuming I start my break on December 23rd the way I'm currently planning. I stocked up like 50-60 chapters from my first two drafts of the story, and while some chapters will inevitably get deleted during the final release of the story, some other chapters will also get expanded and added to, sometimes getting split into two chapters if they egregiously exceed the length I consider fair for one chapter. Thus, while the total number of chapters I have stockpiled is slightly unpredictable due to the fact I'm editing it and changing it as I go along, 30 more stockpiled chapters is still a reasonable estimate for how many more days I have left to go before I run out of stockpiled chapters. 

After I run out of stockpiled chapters, I am... HOPING (not promising) to release 2-3 chapters a week for the story. Markets and Multiverses is a story I enjoy writing a lot, and I find it a fair bit easier to write than Budding Scientist. Not because I like the story more (I like both my stories equally, more or less, although it does fluctuate when I have writer's block for one story or if I'm at part of the plot that I think is surprisingly hard to make work out), but because the plot is a bit less based on corner cases and exceptions than Budding Scientist. For Budding Scientist, since Alice is prone to exploring anything weird or interesting, a huge amount of worldbuilding is devoted just to exploring how the rules work, and then exploring how they break in very specific scenarios. THis requires a very heavy amount of worldbuilding prep and consultation, leading to me reading through a large number of notes and information as I work to make everything stay consistent in-story and make sure the ways the System breaks is consistent given the same circumstances. This means I have a lot of extra hidden work I need to put in to each chapter. Markets and Multiverses is a bit less focused on weird exceptions to the rules, however, meaning that worldbuilding and its interactions with each chapter is a bit less insanity inducing, thus meaning more of the time I spend writing the story is actually spent writing the story. This means I can generally produce more words per hour writing MaM than Budding Scientist, weirdly enough. Which is why I expect it to have a faster release schedule overall.

Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. Thanks for your time, and I hope you also like the book cover. I think it looks really cool :D