So I haven’t been keeping up with doing monthly news updates – I didn’t get a sense that were widely read or of use to people – but it is good to check in every now and again with some news about how the site’s doing and my intentions over coming months.
Personal News
I am now 100% employed by my writing as All These Roadworks. That means I’m working about 30 hours a week on ATR-related work, spread over all seven days of the week. That work includes:
* Writing new content;
* Producing art assets for content (including “cover pages”, blog banners, and advertising assets);
* Editing and publishing e-books and book updates;
* Placing products on storefronts (including ATR.com, Amazon and Smashwords);
* Processing memberships and providing customer support;
* Promoting new products;
* Recording audio for audiobooks;
* Queuing content to the websites that host it;
* Community engagement with writing and erotica communities;
* Maintaining accounts, preparing tax and other financial documentation, and making monthly charitable donations.
That split is probably 40% writing, 60% everything else at present, although in a given week it can skew more one way or the other depending on whether I’m preparing a new book or audiobook. It genuinely is a *job*, with a significant time commitment and a lot of rote busywork.
My health is generally good. I had some minor surgery recently that knocked me about for a bit, but I’m better now. It knocked my finances around a bit more though. Please buy books and memberships (link). Surgery isn’t always cheap, even in a country with universal health coverage.
My city is effectively COVID-free, thanks both to our location, and to effective territory governance during the crisis, but the Australian federal government hasn’t done a very good job of securing vaccine supplies, so it’s going to take us a lot longer to reach effective vaccination levels than some other countries. I’m not expecting my first jab for several months yet.
Site profitability
In April the site made about $3,000 USD (before tax or donations), which is its best month yet, and is at the level where it’s enough to support me working on it full-time – just.
Unfortunately that’s a bit of an outlier – it’s bigger than my best previous month by several hundred dollars, and is *significantly* higher than the few months preceding it. Some of that difference clearly came from the new 3-month and 6-month membership options, which means that some of the April dividend is displaced earnings from future months, where people would ordinarily have been renewing monthly but have instead effectively paid me in advance.
What that means is I’m not expecting that level to hold steady, and if it doesn’t, then no, it’s not supporting me full-time.
So please buy more books and memberships! (Link).
Also on the topic of profitability:
– Amazon and Smashwords sales only come to pocket change compared to the main site. They might buy me a couple of café breakfasts a month, at most. But there’s no good reason not to slowly get my entire catalogue up there, and the more books I have on those platforms, the more chance there is of someone finding one and then buying more, so I’m going to keep publishing there.
– The audiobooks don’t sell very well either. (If you have feedback on them, please let me have it.) But the process of recording the audiobooks is a great way to flush out the last typos and readability issues from these books prior to launching them on Amazon, so I’m treating them as a proofreading exercise that I can monetise, and on that basis every dollar is like a freebie.
Charitable donations
As promised, I donate 5% of the profits each month to a women’s charity, providing aid to women in the areas of homelessness, domestic violence, sexual assault, legal aid, and/or healthcare. Donations are currently spread between four registered charities on a rotating monthly schedule.
In the past six months, the donations have exceeded the amounts shown below. (I say “exceeded” because the figures below are in USD, but the actual donations are made in Australia, so there is some looseness in the currency conversion.)
October 2020 – $115
November 2020 – $95
December 2020 – $105
January 2021 – $125
February 2021 – $95
March 2021 – $120
(April’s finances aren’t finalised yet so the April donation has not yet been made, but I expect it to be in the realm of $150 USD.)
AllTheseRoadworks.com
As you will have noticed, AllTheseRoadworks.com now hosts stories directly, with a new story publishing every day at 11 PM UTC. (On some days there is a bonus story at 11 AM, too.)
This is largely in response to the continuing deterioration of BDSMLR, which is becoming increasingly buggy with no timeline to fix it and poor communication from its owners. I decided I had a strong interest in building up a content-delivery platform that I control and which was likely to remain stable – so here we are.
WordPress does allow you to like and comment on stories on this site – and I encourage you to do so! Comments will be moderated, so stay polite.
The story queue on AllTheseRoadworks.com is currently running a couple of months behind BDSMLR, so these are (mostly) older stories that are being posted, but the program of occasional double posts should allow it to slowly catch up over time.
Unfortunately publishing on this site does not inherently promote my work to new audiences the way that social media sites do – so please get the word out! Tell people about my work in any kink communities you’re part of. Remember to add a link back to alltheseroadworks.com! A good share can be worth a lot more to me than a single purchase.
WordPress’s format also allows me to get permalinks for unpublished posts – which means that all new chapters of ongoing stories on this site will have links back to previous chapters, for improved readability. I’m hoping to make the stories on AllTheseRoadworks.com the “definitive” version of my free content, with the best quality and best readability.
If you catch a typo or mistake (or broken link) in a story on this site, please email me at all.these.roadworks@gmail.com so that I can fix it!
Other sites
I’m not going to do a full rundown of links where you can find me today. Now that this site is hosting stories, I’m happy to say that AllTheseRoadworks.com is the *definitive* place to find me, and if you’re reading me here, you don’t really need to read me anywhere else.
But for the record, I’m actively posting new content on the following sites:
* BDSMLR
* newTumbl
* Read Only Mind
* MCStories / The Erotic Mind Control Stories Archive
* Amazon (EPUBs only)
* Smashwords (EPUBS only)
I’m not actively posting on the following sites but it’s not out of the question I might put something up:
* Reddit
* Warp My Mind
* Pillowfort (I have a placeholder account here that I intend to start queuing content at in the near future)
The following sites have hosted my work with permission in the past, but I will never post new content there because of their policies:
* Literotica
* XNXX / Sexstories
* CHYOA
If you see my content anywhere else, it’s unauthorised and pirated.
Upcoming content
Surgery knocked me about a bit in April and threw off some of my plans for content. (There were a lot of painkillers involved.) I got two audiobooks done, with their associated new PDF and EPUB editions, and I kept up the queue of new content for Early Access and Premium Serials, and that was it.
On the topic of Premium Serials, I *am* on the verge of running out of content to offer in that vein, and I haven’t decided what to do about it yet. I’ve written a little extra of Impregnating Layla to keep it running a few more weeks, but the reason it was billed as “unfinished” was that I was finding it hard to progress, and that hasn’t changed. I’ll let you know my thoughts when/if it actually does run out.
In May I’m expecting to deliver at least one more audiobook, with associated new editions, which will be Weird Science as the next book in order. There will also be a completely new e-book, although I haven’t decided what it is yet. If I finish the last chapters of Etrebor Exchange or Abby’s Identity early in the month, it might be one of them – they’re both almost finished now. Otherwise it will be an anthology as normal. (If it’s Etrebor, there’s a good chance it will release as a “Premium” book – i.e. at a higher price point, like Golden Sins – because the Etrebor material looks to be closer to 100 pages than the standard 60 for my e-books.)
I also want to get around to launching Collector’s Bundle #2, which will offer books 11 through 20 all together at a discounted price, in the same manner as Bundle #1 did for the first ten books. There’s not actually that much work involved in doing that – I just want to save it for a window where it will get noticed rather than drowned out by other stuff, as it’s likely to sell well.
If you’re a member who’s been following the Workplace Culture story in Early Access, it’s worth knowing that I wrote that for myself – it was just demanding to be written – and it’s written through to chapter 13 at least, so you can expect a bunch more chapters of that turning up in the queue over coming weeks. (The first two chapters of this are currently available on MCStories, and they’ll start publishing on BDSMLR in a few days.)
The last thing to say about upcoming content is that a *much* larger percentage of my writing these days is dedicated to ongoing stories. The average chapter of an ongoing story is about four pages, and can be anywhere from 3 to 10 pages. If you compare that to when I started on Tumblr, where I was generally writing two-paragraph microfiction, you can see it’s a big increase in workload.
I’m fine with that change, because reader feedback has consistently shown that people want these longer stories, and they’re often the first ones that people mention in talking to me, but it does mean that my work is skewing towards longer chapters, less often. It may be the case in future that more of my “daily stories” are reblogs, around a more intense release schedule of serialised content.
Endnote
As always, I want your feedback. Feel free to email me at all.these.roadworks@gmail.com, let me know if you’re a member or not, and tell me what you want to see from the site and from my writing!
– All These Roadworks
May 2021