October Monthly Update

Hello and welcome to the very first monthly update from the new and improved Empires of EVE!

I hope you’ve been having a nice time clicking around the new site and getting acquainted with the content I’ve prepared for the launch. I’m deeply pleased with how the two chapters of A Eulogy for Death turned out. They are incredibly important to me so I hope you’ll use your free unlock to check out Part 1 and consider subscribing for Part 2.

This update is free to all subscribers, and all monthly updates will continue to be delivered for free. I’m just glad you’re here. Thank you for reading and if you’re not yet ready for a paid subscription please know that a free sub is still helpful and you are appreciated.

These free monthly updates are the biggest reason why I decided to switch over to Substack. Until today, my regular updates on the progress of Empires of EVE have been stuck on my Kickstarter campaign for Volume 2. This has always been a pretty big issue for me in terms of communication, because it means that the only people who receive updates on my work are those who signed up for that campaign years ago and are still checking Kickstarter updates on a finished project. I’ve been blessed to continue getting a lot of engagement on those posts, but it’s still a pretty slim slice of the potential readership.

The biggest problem is that nobody new was able to subscribe to that list. Even after Volume 2 released and thousands of new people were exposed to the series, nobody could access that feed. The Empires of EVE community was effectively frozen in time.

I tend to spend most of my time thinking about how to tell great stories and less thinking about how to market them so it took a long while for me to realize what a detrimental issue this was.

I think this format will be much more successful at bringing us together so we can accomplish great things. I’ve been playing around with Substack for the last month or so, and I’m really enjoying the toolset available to authors. I’ve been a writer at many web publications over the years, and I’ve never seen a backend I enjoyed working with more than what’s available here.

My favorite tool is this sick video generator which I’ve been using obsessively since I started building this publication. It allows me to take a few paragraphs of writing and generate a video that’s sort of like a read-along.

Here’s an example of what it looks like using an excerpt from A Eulogy for Death Part 1:

Kinda cool, right? It’s still a bit buggy, but it works shockingly well for a free feature I didn’t even know existed until I started fiddling around in the backend. There’s little things that still could improve. For instance, the Russian phrase in the clip above is misspelled because the tool had a hard time matching my voice to the text. In terms of bugs, screwing up the spelling a little because the speaker switched to Russian is pretty forgivable.

There are other little buggy moments like when the read-along highlighting doesn’t work quite right, but overall I love this thing and intend to make good use of it. As a writer it’s hard to overstate how nice it is to be able to turn my writing into video content for a video-obsessed social media landscape in a matter of minutes.

The only thing that was bad about the tool was that the end of every video had an advertisement for Substack. So I started hacking off the last few seconds, and created my own video stinger to personalize them for this publication instead of Substack in general. Much better now. :P

Volume 3

So what’s the situation with the third volume in the Empires of EVE series, and what - if anything - does this publication have to do with it?

This publication arose from a revelation I had over the Summer that the funding model I had been using to create these books had some really serious flaws. The biggest was that it put an enormous amount of pressure on me to create a huge Kickstarter launch and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars all at once.

This is no small feat and takes months of planning, and there’s a lot of things that can go wrong along the way. The way Kickstarter works is pretty mathematical. By the end of your first day you can already be pretty sure what your total funding is going to look like which means the first day is incredibly important. Your window for funding your project isn’t actually 30 days, it’s more like 24-48 hours. Synchronizing a successful campaign under those kind of restrictions is a huge challenge to coordinate as a solo indie.

Then, even if successful, it’s a challenge to then pivot to a completely different goal and complete a highly complex research project and come out of it with a book that sells. It’s also complex to budget the funding to not only keep myself solvent throughout the project, but also ensure that I have enough funding left over at the end to print and ship the book…when I don’t actually know what printing and shipping prices will be at that time. It’s messy.

I managed to find a path to complete the first two projects, but that situation was miles from ideal. Despite the limitations of this funding strategy, I had become stuck in that way of thinking. To me, this was the way EOE got done. It took a paradigm shift in my thinking to disrupt that thought pattern, and that’s exactly what happened.

Earlier this spring I experimented with a prescribed anti-anxiety medication, and the result was life-changing. Despite the fact that it was literally the smallest dose they bother to prescribe, I felt my life palpably slow down, and I was able to approach the challenges I was facing with a renewed clarity. With all my problems, I felt like I was going back to first principles.

I conceived of this publication as a way to break this cycle. If we’re able to create a reasonable amount of support here then I can focus all my effort on creating Volume 3 before running a Kickstarter campaign to gather funding for the print run. Beyond that, it diminishes the need to keep the writing private until release. I would be able to include you in the writing process, showing drafts of chapters as they’re being written. Which would help me write more consistently, and help backers feel more connected to the mission-in-progress.

Everything gets better and simpler by separating these two parts of the project.

There’s one hidden risk here. My supporters thus far are all on the Kickstarter platform. If I’m not able to attract enough support to fund the writing here then I’m not completely sure how we get to the next phase of the project.

So that’s why it’s important for me to be unequivocal that I need your support.

I believe I’ve found the best way forward for the project, but it can’t happen without the backing of the community. Simply subscribing for free is a big help, but please consider supporting the Empires of EVE project with a monthly, annual, or Founders subscription (which is an annual sub with a signed hardcover pre-order.)

The good news is that the amount of funding required to keep the lights on and keep writing is actually vastly lower than what’s needed from a Kickstarter campaign. I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope math and determined that I need about 300 monthly subscribers to keep the lights on (literally) which is about 1/10 of the backers of EOE on Kickstarter. So you can be sure that your support is not simply a drop in the bucket. Every subscriber matters very much.

The more I researched the possibility of this publication the more I felt like Empires of EVE belonged here. But I don’t want this to be simply another Substack. I want this to be one of the best, most unique publications on the platform.

To that end, most of the next year of content has already been planned out. This is not a publication that is flying by the seat of its pants. I know what I want to publish here, and have a plan for getting there.

That plan starts with A Eulogy for Death Parts 1 & 2 which I have envisioned as a new introduction to the trilogy. It’s not the first chapter of Volume 3. It’s a new first chapter of Volume 1. When these volumes are published together as a collective, it will be this story which brings the reader into our universe. It focuses on the same event as the original introduction chapter to Volume 1, but I wrote the original story back in 2014. I wrote A Eulogy for Death Parts 1 & 2 in 2024. The difference is massive. Not least because I’m a better writer now, and because my understanding of EVE’s history and the events of that story are far more nuanced.

But mainly it’s because I now know who the main character actually was. I had time to get to know Death, and most crucially of all, to understand how his story ends.

I’m honored and excited to be sharing it with supporters, and I’m excited for it to eventually serve as the first thing a new reader encounters when they read Empires of EVE.

After that story we’ll begin moving into the actual chapters of Volume 3. So far I already have somewhere between 4 and 6 chapters written. Depending on what state of completion counts as a completed chapter.

I’ve been thinking of Fanfest 2025 as an important psychological deadline. So my intent is to write like crazy for the next 8 months until May with the intention of having the majority of this book completed before then.

Right now, I’m focused on researching the history of World War Bee/The Casino War and in particular the turning point Battle at M-OEE8 which will serve as something like the first half climax of the book.

Preparing this publication to launch has been a big effort, but I’m excited that it’s now public and I can get back to the research. It’ll feel like a vacation to get back into the library and writing again after having to think about marketing and promotion for the last couple months.

I’ll be sure to update you all on the progress of the writing and do a deeper dive on the narrative of the volume soon.

Most of all, thank you so much for being here. I can’t thank this community enough for supporting my work all these years, and I’m deeply excited to take on a new mission with you.

Andrew