Wednesday, May 8th

The Daily Report

Well, my first impression of the impact of the HPMOR plug was that I got a noticeable spike in my website traffic (that's how I noticed it), but I expected that to die away quickly leaving behind a few new long-term readers. Instead, a week after the initial mention, the traffic is still going up, and while most of the click-throughs are just clicking through, the snapshot I get from StatCounter (it only registers the last 500 visits) suggests that as many as 20% of them are staying and reading.

I guess this is just another example of how the best demographic to advertise work that's personal to you can be demographics you belong to. I was not a reader of HPMOR before, but there are a lot of similar elements, like lacing the whole thing with D&D references. And while I've seen people describe our stories as having "differing philosophies" or "opposite approaches"... the thing is, the Magic Is Magic And You Can't Expect It To Science attitude I take in my fantasy writing isn't coming from a disdain of science, it's coming from a disdain of sloppy, misapplied scienterrific buzzwords being used to badly explain magic, something that HPMOR sharply avoids (at least for the first fifty chapters, I can't say beyond that). It avoids it by swerving in the opposite direction than I swerve, but the same aversion being there is pretty clear.

And apart from slightly overlapping viewpoints and shared reference pools, there's the fact that people reading a long, long-running Harry Potter fanfic are my ideal audience in other ways. They're people who 1) read, 2) read fantasy, 3) read stuff on the internet, and 4) read stuff structured and published in non-traditional ways.

If I ever start buying advertising again, I really need to figure out how to reach fanfic audiences with it.

The State of the Me

Went to bed at a timely hour last night, slept in fairly late this morning. Feeling pretty good.

Plans For Today

Between changing my publishing schedule and then having more than the usual number of social engagements this week, I'm completely turned around on what day it is and what I have to do, but it's Wednesday and that makes it a posting day.

AWW: State of things.

Okay, so, there's another set of minor revisions coming on the Basic Character Guide... one tester noticed that when I reorganized the Gear section, language that prevented or limited stacking of bonuses from similar gear got poofed away.

I've got about half the work done on turning the second and third tiers into Advanced Qualities. When I've got that done and added in the financial side of character advancement, the BCG will be complete. Not "finished", because actual testing, but complete in the sense that it will have everything would need for the character side of gameplay.

Some of the Advanced Qualities are being revised a bit in the process. In particular, the Goblin chain... I like all the abilities that the Puck had, but they're not all uniformly Puckish. Now that multiple branches are possible, the Goblin is going to be the example of that in the BCG.

As of now, I've gotten absolutely zero feedback on the chapters of the Player's Guide that I posted. I don't know if that means no one's seen them, or no one's interested in them, or no one's seeing any problems with them. I've gone ahead and started writing the combat rules anyway. When they're finished, the Player's Guide won't be complete in the sense the BCG is, but it will be as complete as it needs to be for playtesting.