Okay – time for the actual January update!

BUSHFIRE UPDATE

(See my previous post on the Australian bushfires and their impact on me.)

Right now as I write this, the smoke is a little better than a couple of days ago, which is nice, but it’s still pretty bad, and we likely aren’t done with the worst of it.

We’re on evacuation alert right now, which in our case means that there’s not any specific fire that’s a danger to us at this time, but that if a new fire starts it could get very dangerous very fast and we may need to leave in a hurry.  Fingers crossed.

You have all been incredible with your purchases from my site in the last few days. Three days is not a reliable long-term barometer, but the numbers since January 1 have been what “write erotica full-time” looks like.   Don’t know if that’s people trying to support me, or just a giant New Year demand for erotica, but I’m going to assume it’s the former – so thank you all so much. Please do not be afraid to keep it up. 🙂

WHAT DID MEMBERS GET IN DECEMBER?

(Check out memberships in the shop.)

Early Access:

Thirty-three (33) stories were released to members through Early Access in December.  That’s more than one a day.

Story Collections:

Members got access to four story collections in December:

Note that Golden Sins is the first Premium Collection, containing stories never previously published and not available in any other format.  It sells at twice the cost of a regular collection but members got it absolutely free.

These releases continue the new cover designs and full-colour interior images, and additionally contain new exclusive bonus pages. 

If you’re a Stories Member, please remember to download these e-books for your personal collection ASAP, as after 14 January these collections will be archived into the Premium Member-only section of the drive!

Guide to Arth-Keros:

The member-exclusive Guide to Arth-Keros, which details a world of high-fantasy degradation, was updated with four new entries detailing the nation of the Dawn Shores.

Reality Check:

As of this writing, there is no Reality Check article for December – at this stage it’s a casualty of the bushfire smoke.  My plan is to do two for January, subject to working conditions over the month. I do consider these articles an important part of responsibly producing the writing that I do, and touching base with safe, respectful real-life practices is a priority for me.

Premium Benefits:

In addition to all of the above, Premium Members had access to the following additional benefits:

* The ability to request a story;

* Access to all story collections sold on this site;

* Access to my two long-form stories.

Membership benefits are made available through an invitation to Google Drive. If you’re a member and you have ANY questions about your benefits or membership, please don’t hesitate to email me at all.these.roadworks@gmail.com, as I really want you to feel like you’re getting value for your money.

REQUEST YOUR STORIES!

If you’re a Premium Member, please check out the Requesting Stories FAQ and then send me your story request for January at all.these.roadworks@gmail.com. Also, if you were a Premium Member on 1 December and haven’t redeemed that request, it’s not too late – let me know!

Story requests are a perk of Premium Membership, or can be purchased individually from the store.

HOW IS THE SITE DOING?

It’s doing very well.

December was the best month for All These Roadworks erotica so far.  Sales and memberships for the month were equivalent to about a fortnight’s pay in my day job.  If that happened reliably every month, I could probably step down to part-time at my day job and block out entire days to work on producing and packaging stories.

Thank you all so much for your patronage and support.  A lot of great writers don’t get the opportunity to be paid for it.  I really appreciate the privilege of being financially supported to pursue something that I genuinely enjoy doing.

In terms of what’s driving that success, I think the two biggest factors are:

(1) The release of the Golden Sins premium collection.  Obviously a lot of you wanted new, exclusive watersports stories, and were willing to pay to get them.  That sends me a clear signal that I should do more premium collections. BUT I’m keen to not break trust with you readers.  It’s important to me that new premium collections shouldn’t come at the expense of my regular output – I don’t want you to feel like buying these things incentivises me to put less free stuff on BDSMLR or anything.  So at this stage, these collections will only happen to the extent I’m able to write new stories after meeting my monthly obligations (or when I just have to write a story, for my own satisfaction, that doesn’t fit my normal free output).

(2) The TRILOGY sale.  (Still live until 10 January.) A lot of you took advantage of this to buy three or more books and get the cheapest free – which is a really great win-win situation for everyone.  I want you to be able to get more of the stories you want at a price that suits you. I also want you to make larger single purchases rather than lots of small ones, if possible, because then more of the money goes to me rather than PayPal.  (Don’t let that put you off buying single books, though – I wouldn’t offer any sales option that I didn’t want you to exercise.)

There’s probably also a seasonal element associated with it being December, but I don’t have the historical data to say anything sensible about that.

In any case, I’m pretty excited by how the site’s doing, I’m motivated to work to sustain that interest, and I’m frustrated that current environmental conditions aren’t letting me just churn through output around the clock while I have so much free time anyway.

There’s nothing new in the site stats.  The overwhelming majority of traffic is still coming from Google, BDMSLR and MCStories.  Google doesn’t tell sites what search terms were used to find them, so despite my curiosity I don’t have any deeper insight there.

The United States sends me as many visitors as the rest of the world combined, and the next largest nations for visitors are the UK, Canada, and Australia in that order, which sounds about right for text erotica written in English by a white guy.

By the way, if you haven’t noticed, I’m a statistics and data nerd. If you’re similarly inclined, and don’t already follow the excellent PornHub Insights blog, you absolutely should.

DONATION

As continuing members will be aware, I have pledged that in any month that the site made a profit of more than $300, I would donate at least 5% of profits to a women’s charity, as part of a responsible approach to the complex niche of porn I write in. (If you don’t understand this reference, please check out this page of my site.)

As a result, this month I have made a donation exceeding $55 USD in value to a registered charity providing dedicated support to women experiencing homelessness, domestic violence, legal trouble, and alcohol and other drug recovery. 

Total charitable donations for 2019 therefore have a total in excess of $160 USD. (The site went live, and the donations policy began, in August, and the first donation was for the month of September.)

Thank you all for making this possible.

ALL THESE ROADWORKS ON OTHER PLATFORMS

My main free story output remains BDSMLR.  No new free stories appear on other platforms which are not also published on BDSMR.

I regularly publish older stories on Reddit as AllTheseRoadworks, on MC Stories, and occasionally on XNXX.

I have formally ended my program of publishing stories to Literotica, and at this stage I do not expect to make any further stories available there.  The site is too difficult to deal with, and committed to preventing anything that would enable monetisation or the ability for readers to follow me back to my creator site.  I think the site has the best of intentions for fostering a vibrant, safe amateur erotica community, but I think the result of those policies is that it is accidentally predatory of those who could make money off their work.

OTHER SITE FEATURES

Despite a survey response last month that suggested people wanted to buy individual story requests, basically no one bought them once I added them to the shop, so at this stage that’s a bit of a flop.  I’ll leave them live throughout January but if there hasn’t been significant take-up by February I’ll probably drop them again, if only so that I don’t have to keep checking whether anyone’s bought one.

I also didn’t end up running a survey in December.  You can either call it another casualty of the bushfires, or the price of a much higher than average number of new stories in Early Access.

FEEDBACK

I am always looking for feedback as to whether you’re satisfied with my product and my site. Please don’t hesitate to send me your thoughts at all.these.roadworks@gmail.com on any topic.

Thank you all again – you’re excellent!

– All These Roadworks
3 January 2020

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