I haven’t been keeping the habit of doing a news post every month, but I had a few thoughts and updates that were worth gathering together in one place for the interest of readers, customers and members.
While I haven’t been doing big news posts, I do drop a lot of short updates on Twitter, announcing when there are new chapters of ongoing serials, discussing plans for upcoming content, noting when I’ve made charitable donations, and other info that’s too short to deserve a substantive post on other sites.
I strongly recommend all my readers to follow me on Twitter – or if you’re not willing to publicly connect with the account, then at least check in regularly. It’s not necessary – and never will be – but if you like my writing I can only assume that you’ll also like my Twitter.
My Twitter account is @ATR_Fiction – click here to view it.
Early Access news
Paid ATR members may have noticed I’ve moved to a more regular, reliable schedule in my Early Access story drops. (These are the stories made available by Dropbox to paid members, representing early publication of what will appear on the free sites.)
There is now a new story every day, and the pattern of stories operates on a seven-day cycle, as so:
- New chapter of serial, or over-length one-shot
- Short one-shot
- Reblog
- New chapter of serial, or over-length one-shot
- Short one-shot
- Reblog
- Reblog
At the moment I’m managing to literally upload a new story every day, but if I ever miss an upload (for reasons of sickness, holiday, or technical issue) I’ll upload the necessary stories once I’m back to bring it up to where the schedule says it should be.
That pattern will therefore begin to populate through to BDSMLR and newTumbl – although I don’t specifically mark reblogs on those sites.
In addition, thanks to a request from an ATR member, I’m trialling a hyperlinked table of contents in the Early Access releases of longer serialised story updates, starting with today’s release of “The Bonuses, Part 5”. Let me know if you have any thoughts / issues about that.
Premium Serials
As you may be aware, paid Premium Members get access to weekly chapters of an ongoing novel-length serial story. When I initially pitched this, I warned that these were stories where I had developed writer’s block, and it was possible I may never finish them.
There have been two ongoing stories developed through that program – “Hailey’s Training” and “Impregnating Layla”.
Unfortunately I’m still up against the writer’s block in “Impregnating Layla”, and I don’t anticipate there being new chapters of that in the near future.
However, I’m finding it relatively easy to continue writing new content for “Hailey’s Training”, which has been the active story for the last few months. To be honest, the story is meandering a bit, but I’m enjoying writing the chapters. If you like incest, watersports, and humiliation, you’re going to see a lot more of it throughout that story. So you can expect that to continue on for the foreseeable future.
Current sites featuring my content
Here’s the list of what sites are currently receiving new content from me. (Links go directly to my profile on each site.)
- BDSMLR and newTumbl get new stories daily, and their schedules are pretty much synced up now so you’ll generally see the same story on both sites on a given day. (BDSMLR continues to struggle with technical issues, but the site devs say they’re working on it.)
- I’m posting content on HentaiFoundry now, primarily focused on my existing fantasy/SF/fanfiction stories.
- I post stories on Read Only Mind – primarily but not exclusively mind control/hypno.
- I occasionally submit content to the Erotic Mind Control Stories Archive (MCStories) – although I don’t directly control my presence there.
- I occasionally post story content on Reddit, and also interact with the professional erotic fiction author groups there.
- As mentioned, I link to content on Twitter.
Also I’m still a seller on Smashwords and Amazon, but those marketplaces only produce tiny sales for me (and Amazon is famously difficult to deal with), so I’m not bothering to talk those up a lot right at the moment.
Story requests
Nothing new to report here. You can’t buy story requests or commissions. I occasionally reach out to Premium Members of long standing to see what serials they want to see new chapters of. I’m currently still working through requests from people who were members in November 2020. As you can see from my Early Access schedule, I’m producing about eight or nine new serial chapters a month (not counting the Premium Serials) and I have substantially more than nine Premium Members, so the request program is unlikely to ever catch up to the present day.
Personal news
I’m in Canberra, Australia, and we’re currently in fairly tight COVID lockdown. We were doing very well, with a long period of zero active cases and very high vaccination rates, but sadly we’re an island within the state of New South Wales, and NSW’s approach to COVID has been, to be frank, pretty shit. The disease is pretty much out of control there, and they’re now looking towards some fairly distant vaccination targets as their best way to save themselves, and meanwhile our local borders are necessarily porous for a variety of reasons.
So we’re all at home until our local outbreak goes back to zero, and then just pray that our neighbours from across the border show a little common sense and don’t reinfect us.
I am, personally, double-Pfizer vaccinated, so that’s nice – but while my immune system was deploying against the vaccine, an unrelated respiratory infection snuck into my system and knocked me out for a good six weeks of pretty awful coughing and sneezing. Meanwhile, my primary partner *isn’t* vaccinated – she’s slightly younger than me, and that put her in a different eligibility category, and she can’t get the first jab for a couple of weeks yet – and that’s a source of stress.
Given I’m writing full-time now, lockdown hasn’t changed my work life. But I’m polyamorous, and I’m missing my other partners, and I’m missing my friends, and I’m missing being able to go basically anywhere that I can’t see from the balcony of my own house. I’m dying to get out to a kink event – or host one – and I’m dying to pursue several promising new connections that have been interrupted first by illness and then by lockdown.
Basically, I have it less tough than almost everyone else who’s experienced lockdown in the last two years – and it’s still pretty tough.
How’s the site doing?
It’s plateaued, at a level of sales that I’d describe as “viable” but not “comfortable”. It’s disappointing to see those figures evening off after two years of steady growth.
I can’t give a firm reason for this. One factor will no doubt be BDSMLR’s ongoing troubles. My follower count there has basically stopped growing, and interactions with my posts are down about 30% from where they were in December last year. That’s not surprising – the site is regularly offline, or broken, and even when it’s up there are a range of core features that haven’t worked for nearly a year. But it sucks for me, as BDSMLR has always been a major audience and major referrer, and there’s simply no other site with the same mix of “large userbase” and “ability to put my content in front of new readers”. (newTumbl is a fraction the size, and my brief experiment with Pillowfort showed no sign that I’d be able to easily find new readers without a ton of aggressive promotion work.)
My goal has always been about a 30% increase in sales from where I currently am. That won’t make me a rich man, or even equal the salaries I’ve had in more traditional work, but it will mean I don’t have to worry about the bills anymore.
OnlyFans, Mastercard, and the Porn Industry
I am, at the moment, personally unaffected by all the shit going on with OnlyFans, Mastercard, and so forth. The site still works. I still take payments. There’s no sign that’s going to change in the immediate future.
At a “rational humans” level, that should continue. I sell unambiguously legal text, contained in books, to consenting adults. I have a very low rate of chargebacks and customer dissatisfaction, and I have a very low profile of legal risk. I’m responsive to customers, I’m open about what I sell, and I go out of my way to avoid being dodgy in any way.
But the online payment ecosystem doesn’t like adult content, and that’s getting worse. There may come a day when PayPal has had enough of me. If that happens, I *should* be able to transition to one of the Tier 4/5 merchant operators like CCBill, but they have high setup fees, and then high ongoing fees, and it’s not something I look forward to. I really need to have bigger turnovers before that happens to ensure the business overall is still viable.
In the meantime, *support sex workers and content creators*. This is primarily a political issue, not a technical one, and the existence of alternate payment options won’t stop the fundamental forces driving this push. Creators can’t win this without vocal support from customers, allies, and the community at large. Use your platforms to stick up for adult content creators. Make submissions to government enquiries. Call your legislators.
Fighting abuse, exploitation and sex trafficking is important work – but it requires complex, nuanced responses that stem from government and consultation. It can’t be left to platforms, payment providers and religious extremists to police this space, because the people who end up getting policed are the same people who have always been policed around sex work – the workers – and the actual abusers benefit.
What can you do to support me, personally?
As always, buy my content. Purchase e-books. Become a member. It’s your custom that pays my bills.
If you can’t do that (or even if you can) then share and reblog the heck out of my stuff. Literally a third of my working week is trying to put my stories in front of new (consenting) eyeballs, and that’s something that you readers can do more effectively than I can. Show my stuff to your kinky friends. Link to me in your forums or Discords. Just generally tell the world that All These Roadworks creates some awesome fucked-up erotica.
If you’re not comfortable sharing erotica… then maybe share some of my Reality Check articles? They’re good advice for anyone. In particular, people seem to like these ones:
Conclusion
If you’ve got any feedback, I’m always open at all.these.roadworks@gmail.com. Send me your ideas, your favourite stories, or anything else you want to send me. (No nudes or attachments without asking first, though, please.)
And in the meantime, keep enjoying the smut, and being safe, responsible kinksters in real life.
– All These Roadworks
25 August 2021