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Recently got around to starting Beware of Chicken and it's so, so good.Cicero posted:Third AA was kind of a weird offshoot but not too bad. AA just seems genuinely bad and the teen drama writing especially so. I'm sure there's lots of LitRPG stuff out there that's worse but surely there's no shortage of better stuff too. Primal Hunter seems pretty solid at least.
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Sep 11, 2023 14:54
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DACK FAYDEN posted:no, holy poo poo, it's actually real and it's incredible (not in a good way (stop reading as soon as you get sick of it, because I've never heard anyone say it gets better)) It's written by the kind of person who thinks 'randidly ghosthound' is a cool, domineering name. I'm pretty sure the authors only exposure to human culture is through anime.
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Sep 11, 2023 19:52
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It's absolutely not good, but it sure is a lot of words. There are definitely good serials that also have the trailing better-edited KU book; ghosthound isn't quite the wandering inn but it does have a whole lot of material to get through and if you're bored and want fight descriptions and a constant, gradual increase in power level, you could do worse. I think it's moving into the last arc and will probably be complete this year. I skim/binge it every once in a while when I've got nothing else and want to turn brain off.
Bhodi fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Sep 11, 2023 |
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Sep 11, 2023 22:20
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I liked Randidly Ghosthound well enough when I read the first like 1500 chapters of it that were posted online several years ago; as someone said above, at the very least there’s a lot of it. To my knowledge it was one of, if not the very first “System Apocalypse” style stories, so pieces of the story that might seem derivative were relatively unique at the time. The name is obviously terrible and very much not self aware, at least at first. I think by later chapters it’s pretty acknowledged in universe that “Randidly Ghosthound” is a stupid name that no one would have. Edit: Jesus Christ the RoyalRoad for this garbage book is at chapter 2249 Silynt fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Sep 12, 2023 |
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Sep 12, 2023 00:06
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Silynt posted:Edit: Jesus Christ the RoyalRoad for this garbage book is at chapter 2249
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Sep 12, 2023 00:29
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How does it stack up to defiance of the fall, which is my yardstick for a "well there's a lot of it" book that I actually enjoy
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Sep 12, 2023 01:19
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30.5 Days posted:How does it stack up to defiance of the fall, which is my yardstick for a "well there's a lot of it" book that I actually enjoy I enjoy defiance of the fall enough to continue reading it and couldn't get anywhere near 1500 chapters into randidly ghosthound, probably less than 100. It's one of those things where I just kept reading it because I was like "well surely it gets better, why is it so popular?" and it never did. Azarinth healer is one where I feel like the start is kind of bad(although I read the KU version and it seemed improved on my memory of it), but it gets pretty good after a while and then kind of spirals out of control due to number must go up, but by then you have a giant cast of characters that you probably like if you've read that far.
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Sep 12, 2023 01:29
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I enjoyed Worth a Candle and it had some neat twists; it's a self-insert LitRPG isekai that purposely sets out to subvert the expectations of those genres
Xand_Man fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Sep 12, 2023 |
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Sep 12, 2023 02:27
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30.5 Days posted:How does it stack up to defiance of the fall, which is my yardstick for a "well there's a lot of it" book that I actually enjoy I don't think it's as good, DotF was enough to keep me reading to see where it's going, ghosthound just got too boring.
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Sep 12, 2023 03:12
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30.5 Days posted:How does it stack up to defiance of the fall, which is my yardstick for a "well there's a lot of it" book that I actually enjoy I paid the DoTF Patreon a lot longer than the LoRG Patreon, that’s for sure. Don’t keep up with either of them at the moment, but DoTF I’m much more current on, only dropped it a few months ago and haven’t read LoRG in years.
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Sep 12, 2023 03:26
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Sounds like I should skip it. I also ducked out of dotf during the current arc which is kind of boring
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Sep 12, 2023 16:22
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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHBJ7X7W I have a new story out on KU if people are interested  .
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Sep 12, 2023 20:17
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I'm reading Qi=MC^2 book 1 right now and it's kind of like if you crossed Cradle with Beware of Chicken.
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Sep 13, 2023 21:57
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i’m only a bit into defiance of the fall but it’s pretty good as far as these things go. it’s no cradle but it’s a cut above schlock and an enjoyable wind down evening read, so thanks for the recommendation!
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Sep 19, 2023 18:02
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For anyone who liked Iron Prince, the sequel Fire and Song comes out on the 31st on unlimited. I liked the original well enough even though it was super low stakes. It feels like the sequel needs to at least lead into the actual war that the galaxy is supposed to be losing instead of low stakes combat sports college, but I'll give it a shot.
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Oct 26, 2023 04:50
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Yeah the original was alright but also took 800 pages to get through one semester of combat school. They'd better pick up the pace for the rest of them, I think, or just have it outside the school. Also some parts feel kinda nonsense or not great: Not great: characters don't seem to control what abilities they get IIRC, they're just advancing along a predetermined path, and they can't even plan for it really. Nonsense: the system arbitrarily giving people different growth stats, the protagonist having the insane cheat that is S ranked growth, and how nearly everyone in the story is a huge moron about it.
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Oct 26, 2023 18:41
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Yeah, the setup to that book was too clearly "I want to write a litrpg, but I don't want a capricious and arbitrary system-as-god, and I don't want a system apocalypse, and I don't want a video game setting, so how can I have my cake and eat it too?" And it.. comes off very awkwardly. I'll still read the next book because I liked the writing and setting, though it was a shock to find out one of the authors was responsible for The Wings of War, a series I dropped because of excessive grimdarkness. Iron Prince was nice in a low stakes way, but I agree that it needs to elevate the stakes in the second book. But I am expecting mooooore tournaments! Mark of the Fool 5 also came out, it was more of the same. The body enforcement obsession from book 4 was mostly dropped, so that is nice. We learned more about the conspiracy and the bad guys, so that is nice.
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Oct 27, 2023 18:07
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Iron prince speculation spoiler stuff. I thought the framing for iron prince was essentially “the culture-like superintelligences are at war over there with a superior superintelligence and so they are leaning on humans for novelty.” Then the rest of it sort of flows from there in a semi-consistent fashion. Having the highest quality users quickly decide to optimize to not be fighting forced the superintelligence to allow games and collegiate circuits to have the humans continue to optimize in the direction it needed creativity. The decision to start looking for maximum creative types outside the previous mold instead of soldiers/athletes, while giving them different setups of the poorly understood adaptive technology also makes sense from a horizon theory point of view. The superintelligence finally hit the depth where doing the same thing, stalling with good to great human soldiers that fit some preset algorithm using well understood tech was a gauranteed loss allowing it to seed some hail mary candidates and/or use the more autonomous adaptive parts of the enemy. Presumably the next class through would have more odd candidates, etc. Of course, very little of that is outright stated in the text, but it fits the various glimpses we get of the situation from various not-the-main-character povs. Honestly it’s one of the setups for a litrpg where I think you could, in the footnotes as it were, tell a pretty interesting story where the protagonist’s home civ loses, while the number continues to go up. Doubt that happens, but if it does it would be cool. Anias fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Oct 27, 2023 |
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Oct 27, 2023 19:00
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ya'll hating on the Jacka Ineritance book are wild. this like... twenty steps above whatever random litrpg poo poo. half way through now, its pretty good.
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Oct 27, 2023 21:17
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Good Citizen posted:For anyone who liked Iron Prince, the sequel Fire and Song comes out on the 31st on unlimited. I liked the original well enough even though it was super low stakes. It feels like the sequel needs to at least lead into the actual war that the galaxy is supposed to be losing instead of low stakes combat sports college, but I'll give it a shot. I read this (Fire and Song) yesterday and found it deeply irritating. The exact same problems as the first one - low stakes, contrived, and slow. Hell, its basically the same book, complete with tiny titbits of actual plot being thrown in at the start and end to make you think something interesting is going on. But no, the meat of it is a giant long robot fighting tournament (fine), people keeping incredibly obvious secrets for basically indecipherable reasons (spoiler its because there's no other conflict to be had except student athletics) (ALSO THEYRE THE SAME SECRETS AS LAST BOOK!! THEYRE NOT EVEN NEW SECRETS!!), and a military system so incredibly stupid that I'm genuinely rooting for the aliens.
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Nov 1, 2023 23:00
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awesmoe posted:I read this (Fire and Song) yesterday and found it deeply irritating. The exact same problems as the first one - low stakes, contrived, and slow. Hell, its basically the same book, complete with tiny titbits of actual plot being thrown in at the start and end to make you think something interesting is going on. But no, the meat of it is a giant long robot fighting tournament (fine), people keeping incredibly obvious secrets for basically indecipherable reasons (spoiler its because there's no other conflict to be had except student athletics) (ALSO THEYRE THE SAME SECRETS AS LAST BOOK!! THEYRE NOT EVEN NEW SECRETS!!), and a military system so incredibly stupid that I'm genuinely rooting for the aliens. Well thats disappointing to hear but I’ll probably still read that garbage
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Nov 2, 2023 00:01
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I'm still at the beginning and can confirm it starts out exactly as garbagey
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Nov 2, 2023 17:32
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Everything and everyone in the book is stupid and dumb. I hope I don't read the next one.
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Nov 6, 2023 01:33
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Happiness Commando posted:Everything and everyone in the book is stupid and dumb. I hope I don't read the next one.  I have this problem. I usually start the second one at a minimum.
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Nov 6, 2023 03:10
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awesmoe posted:I read this (Fire and Song) yesterday and found it deeply irritating. The exact same problems as the first one - low stakes, contrived, and slow. Hell, its basically the same book, complete with tiny titbits of actual plot being thrown in at the start and end to make you think something interesting is going on. But no, the meat of it is a giant long robot fighting tournament (fine), people keeping incredibly obvious secrets for basically indecipherable reasons (spoiler its because there's no other conflict to be had except student athletics) (ALSO THEYRE THE SAME SECRETS AS LAST BOOK!! THEYRE NOT EVEN NEW SECRETS!!), and a military system so incredibly stupid that I'm genuinely rooting for the aliens.  . I still read this book of hot garbage hoping for some real alien fighting (we're probably not going to see them until the very last book) and was summarily disappointed.
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Nov 6, 2023 06:42
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I'm basically this meme, but with series. If it doesn't vibe, it gets the dustbin.
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Nov 6, 2023 07:33
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Haystack posted:I'm basically this meme, but with series. If it doesn't vibe, it gets the dustbin. Pretty much all kindle trash seems to run out it's welcome 3-4 books in. Ditch that poo poo!
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Nov 6, 2023 13:03
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I keep coming back to the hypothetical scale of this series. Two 800ish page books, and we have managed to get through a little more than 1 semester of a 3 year education, including one small not-intraschool tournament. I could honestly see the next book taking us through the rest of the semester, with a whole bunch of training and secrets that shouldn't, then book 4 through the between years tournament, and now we are looking at 12 800-page books to get through 3 years of school, and what, a handful more post-graduation? We are looking at a Wheel of Time length epic built entirely of tournament arcs. I guess we could pray that aliens invade the planet 10% of the way into the next book and save us all, but they signposted a 5 year time scale really, really hard in this book.
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Nov 6, 2023 18:46
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Weirdly if the book was literally 5 years of bi annual fighting robot tournaments in double elim Swiss or whatever with none of the goofy alluded to stakes to undermine the MC pounding his way through the circuits it would also be fine. It’s entirely that there is this framing device that totally trivializes the protagonist stakes and the author refuses to actually tell the story linked to the stakes of each novel instead teasing us with offscreen lost-style monsters and a pile of worrying prognosticators while the text focuses on how articulated our prosthetic boxing gloves are and building schoolyard ties. I like punch out. It’s a great video game with a wonderful cyclic arc. I also like final fantasy. It’s a great video game with a world spanning epic stakes and story. I even like persona. It can be fun to have a school vibe and fight monsters. I would be loving infuriated to play final punchona or persout fantasy, a game about world ending stakes happening in the interludes between boxing matches against faceless and rote opponents and study hall that I get told about 3rd hand by all my schoolyard friends who are also fighting monsters at night but won’t wake me up to go along. It’s just wild. The worst is that I know I’m going to read the third one of these dumb books just so I can make trilinear or whatever progress on these 3 seemingly unrelated stories.
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Nov 6, 2023 22:11
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yeah, because they set the stakes so high all the "conflict" has to be manufactured because otherwise everything falls apart. the protagonist wants to train super hard to be strong and fight, thats basically his character. The military command wants the protagonist to train super hard so he can be strong and fight. This literal alignment on both goals and methods turns into hidden messages sent in unsigned orders, or hacking the mainframe in the middle of tests and tournaments (that just kept on going immediately after a colossal security breach, lmao), to try to blackmail the protagonist into training harder. Or the way the guys robot is even stronger than they think! it might be making everyone else strong, too! wow, this is a big deal - gamechanging stuff! lets hide it from everyone because otherwise people....might want us to use it....to win the war? guys help my cognition stat stuck at F no wait the dumbest is still the initial sponsorship bit suspicious company: we want to sponsor you for a hojillion dollars, earlier than anyone ever mc: why suspicious company: because you're real good mc: but why tho suspicious company: woah this kid is so smart. next level. wow. in awe of the brains on this lad. how did he see through us. anyway i just hope the third one doesnt also take years to come out, i cant wait that long for something new to be mad at Haystack posted:I'm basically this meme, but with series. If it doesn't vibe, it gets the dustbin.
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Nov 6, 2023 22:39
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You guys are so forgiving. It’s giving me confidence to write a serialized novel for KU Shorts. “This is poo poo, yet I must read the next one” is strangely soothing to my Imposter Syndrome addled mind.
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Nov 6, 2023 23:46
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Fire and Song unironically rocks. how do these things even get published though, just poo poo post on royal road or w/e and then an amazon KU rep stalks you till you sign?
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Nov 7, 2023 01:24
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tokenbrownguy posted:Fire and Song unironically rocks. Unless this is a special case, KU is completely self-published authors. It’s both horrific and empowering.
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Nov 7, 2023 02:50
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tokenbrownguy posted:Fire and Song unironically rocks. Yes it’s quite good prose but it’s 3 loving books mashed together and the internal logic is atrocious. Again, I like the books. I’m going to read 3. It’s still infuriating that the internal logic is this bad and I worry the author won’t stick the landing because this has big kingkiller/game of thrones vibes where the ending just never shows up.
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Nov 7, 2023 03:00
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I haven’t had a chance to read fire and song yet because it didn’t land at the top of my reading list, but I actually liked the first one with the caveat that I wanted more from the next I feel like the first one and likely the second one have some issues with multiple authors on a single book? Like one of them is trying to inject the not-really-working conflict and the other is like tournament arc let’s gooooooo. This is just the vibes I’m catching and may be totally wrong.
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Nov 7, 2023 03:06
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Good Citizen posted:I haven’t had a chance to read fire and song yet because it didn’t land at the top of my reading list, but I actually liked the first one with the caveat that I wanted more from the next tokenbrownguy posted:Fire and Song unironically rocks. Warformed: Stormweaver specifically is published by Bryce O'Connor, who is the guy that writes it, with co-author credits to Luke Chmilenko, who is his sounding board for ideas and his contributions in shaping the overall story are considered significant enough for O'Connor to consider him a full co-author even though he's writing the actual prose. (source) Bryce is also the brains and owner behind Wraithmarked Creative, a small press that specializes in picking up successful Royal Road authors and helping them wrap up their serialized novels and publish on KDP (i.e. Amazon) and also doing Kickstarter special editions for the bigger fantasy authors. M.L. Wang's The Sword of Kaigen, nobody103's Mother of Learning, and YouTuber Daniel Greene's books have all gone with Wraithmarked for special editions. Bryce is a big name. He's also very good at both the business side of things and building community and as you can imagine, he's pretty busy. So yeah, not surprised it took this long for him to put out a sequel to Iron Prince. He's also a serial writer himself, but he doesn't serialize on Royal Road. He posts chapters in advance to his Patreon and a delayed public release of them on his subreddit. So you can read the chapters pretty much as he writes them. Amazon does have its own imprints that scouts and signs authors. But Bryce O'Connor is not one of them. Marsupial Ape posted:Unless this is a special case, KU is completely self-published authors. It’s both horrific and empowering. A lot is self/indie pub but it is not completely so. Trad pub books are on there as well, but they are not required to be exclusive and the books that are on there depends on whatever deal Amazon cuts with the publisher. Gideon the Ninth was on KU for a while, as were a bunch of others. But O'Connor's doing well for himself with Fire and Song - last I checked there were close to 2k ratings with a 4.9 average a week after launch and Iron Prince is close to 15k ratings with a 4.8 average. He's hitting his market and even the folks who were disappointed by book 2 are only leaving 3 star ratings, though if you hid the rating and just read the review, I would have thought they were 2 or 1 star reviews. There's a lot of good self-pub out there but there's also a lot of noise and discoverability is pretty broken. Like one of the best mechanisms we have right now that doesn't involve pouring a whole bunch of money into ads and book tours is the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off. It's historically skewed grimdark/epic fantasy but has broadened out a lot in the last few years. The overall quality of the entries this year was really high and if you guys are mainly looking for progression fantasy/LitRPG, there were quite a few of those this year. None made it through to the final but I did see several get favorable reviews. Full list here: http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/05/spfbo-9-phase-1.html
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Nov 7, 2023 06:30
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Marsupial Ape posted:You guys are so forgiving. It’s giving me confidence to write a serialized novel for KU Shorts. “This is poo poo, yet I must read the next one” is strangely soothing to my Imposter Syndrome addled mind. There's nothing like reading Royalroad to give you as a writer a confidence boost. "Holy poo poo, you can write this badly and still get readers? (Also, I'm enjoying it myself lol, shhh, don't tell anyone.) Time to crank out a progression fantasy litrpg!"
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Nov 7, 2023 11:57
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Leng posted:A lot is self/indie pub but it is not completely so. Trad pub books are on there as well, but they are not required to be exclusive and the books that are on there depends on whatever deal Amazon cuts with the publisher. Gideon the Ninth was on KU for a while, as were a bunch of others.
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Nov 7, 2023 13:55
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Leng posted:But O'Connor's doing well for himself with Fire and Song - last I checked there were close to 2k ratings with a 4.9 average a week after launch and Iron Prince is close to 15k ratings with a 4.8 average. He's hitting his market and even the folks who were disappointed by book 2 are only leaving 3 star ratings, though if you hid the rating and just read the review, I would have thought they were 2 or 1 star reviews. This is a five star review and I can't for the life of me figure out why. "Nothing happened in this book, wont continue reading the series, 5 stars" quote:enjoyable but overall terrible pacing
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Nov 7, 2023 14:53
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It's because everything on KU is graded on a curve.
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Nov 7, 2023 15:47
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