1) I just looked at his Patreon, and saw he had 493 supporters. He publishes precisely one piece of content per month, which is a recent development and is unlocked at 10 dollars. Its possible there are a bunch of people at his 500 or 5000 dollar tier. It just seems like an insane way to spend your money, but I don't have evidence as he doesn't publish his take. I think most supporters would be 10 dollars or less. Sure it will boom when he publishes a new book and puts chapters up, but who is going to put 10 dollars into a patreon for an author who is already successful in return for nothing? I'm all for charity, but i'm not donating to people richer than I am. I doubt anyone else will either, no matter how good/generous/ altruistic they are. I'd rather send it to a nigerian prince 2) Its not unusual for otherwise successful people to give up high paying jobs for uncertain careers because that's the life they want. Personal anecdote, my mother chose to give up a very, very wellpaying position as an it consultant with the government to get back to the work she burns for, working as a social worker specialising in children. Money is just a number to me and most of the people I know, if you have enough to survive then you don't really need more. You don't need a fancy car, or a large house or to go on holiday every year. These are luxuries that won't make you happy, on the contrary they will isolate you if you build your life around them. Follow your passion if you are fortunate enough to have one, not the money. 3) As for the idea that starvation will make you creative, take a look at the flood of creations coming out of China. Some of them are good, but most are terrible. They are made on demand by people who can only afford one or two missteps before they are on the street and it shows. The fear and stress make them take the same safe and generic routes over and over, leading to novels that are basically indistinguishable from one another. 1: Create self insert character 2: make idiotic villain who offends him for no reason 3: give him OP mcguffin 4: kill villain, possibly villains family/ clan/ sect/ master 5: repeat from step 2 Hungry people usually start looking for safish shortcuts. Ways they can work faster and squeeze out a few bucks on the side. 4) In recent years there have been experiments in Finland with what is commonly referred to as a Universal basic income. The study is centered on people without jobs, who received a UBI equal to welfare in Finland but without the usual strings. As one might expect, most of these people kept looking for jobs, though some created startups of their own. A handful kept lasing around as they had on welfare, usually because they had various issues that weren't monetary in nature. Nothing changed much. Personal opinion Most people don't want to be leeches, they want to contribute in a meaningful way to the society they live in. They want the status that comes with being an honest, hardworking member of society. Not everyone, but there is a reason that criminals make up less than 1% of the population and even among them most aren't doing it because they want to be leeches, they want drug money or they want somewhere to belong. When pushed to have multiple full time jobs to make ends meet after cutting personal expenses to the bone, people become warped, lose faith in the system and start doing whatever to get by.
Contribute is a strong word there. More likely they don’t want to be dependent on others charity. Huge pride issue there
A narcisist or a prideful person might be driven by that. I think "desire to contribute" is one of the primary drivers for the majority of people. An individual works to be part of something greater than they are. Most of the people I know take meaning from the jobs they do even when they are shitty jobs. They talk about what they do, the people they meet, diss their idiotic bosses and gennerally just find a purpose in it. I readily admit i'm a glass half full optimist on this particular subject.
Ok, there has been a lot of speculation what is going on?! An I have a Hypothesis!!!!! So AK is super smart, he really knows his shit, and he knows marketing, and sales etc... And this is a Business after all. So Imo Ak's Master plan is to CREATE a COMIC series form 20-40 Comic chapters then publish every new chapter per mo or week or whatever. This leads to massive new market for LitRPG its like a billion ppl who love MANGA and Now LITRPG is MANGA. Like srsly who the f**k is gonna read this sh*&. LitRPG also plz dm me is any of you might or could or would guess the pasw for moar comics!! So the plan goes like this AK makes 15+ Comics prob 17-20 then He has at least 10 more going on.. So every day average manga reader finds this stuff and reads for at least 15 min + and he LOVES this shit. So he does what? he wants more. So comics are coming out every week/mo thats fine but he can also buy books/ merch/ audible... this is a master plan. Now what does this mean for YOU!?! we will wait for another 2 months before the comics kick in and another mo... then we will have ~ 16 comics out maybe... And BOOM Book 9 comes out, and all those juicy manga fans now go into book 9 advertising boom(most sold on audible bla bla), and then buy entire sage So book 9 comes out after at least 8 more comic releases :/
That's a really great thought. Breaking into the manga world would allow him to a tap a different market. Sure there is some overlap, but we're still talking millions of manga fans that haven't heard of litrpg but who might love this. Not sure Aleron has a master plan here though.
"Hey Mist Villagers Anyone speak Korean, Indonesian, Japanese or Mandarin? If so please respond below with what language and your proficiency level Thanks! 1212 18 comments 18 comments Most relevant Kevin Edwards Korean, proficient. Are you looking for translators? Help with the community? I also live in Korea...haha. Author Aleron Kong, The Father of American Litrpg Kevin Edwards I'm translating my comic into Korean Would you be willing to take a look? Kevin Edwards Aleron Kong, The Father of American Litrpg Absolutely! View 11 more comments “You know very well who you are, don’t let em hold you down, reach for the stars” -Biggie. Glad you love the mashups" Say good bye to Book 9 coming any time soon. Now hes busy with Comics and older book translation to Korean, Indonesian, Japanese or Mandarin..., book 9, secret project, advertisements and sales of merch... Manga seems to be really effective.. If he is not releasing more chapters of manga.. So now book translation is going on too..(probably will have to do manga translation too) Amazing.
I think that expecting the UBI to work similarly in a country of a few million that’s super homogenous as compared to the US is faulty. Take a look at the people getting paid unemployment here in the US (with no possibility of eviction). AFAIK they didn’t do any great things.
Well, i'm not american and I don't wanna discuss this from an american perspective, because the US is under way too much political strain at the moment for it to be fun. Plainly put, its going to blow up in our faces. 0:That said, saying smaller/ more homogenous states are superior/ better able to enact basic policies than larger more diverse ones is a fundamentally flawed argument. There are many poor and badly developed small states with homogenous populations, the Scandinavian countries were that way a century ago. We took our own development in hand and started making changes to the way we did things. Some of those changes worked out well, leading to Scandinavia catching up with our more developed neighbors. Even Denmark, despite having no significant natural resources apart from land for agriculture, has managed to catch up. 1: We embraced the christian idea of redemption being greater than vengeance. We altered the focus of our prisons from vengeance to rehabilitation, and as a direct result recidivism rates have dropped, the number of hardcore criminals created in our prisons have dropped, the number of violent incidents in prison against guards or other prisoners have dropped in frequency and the amount we spent on criminals both in and out of prisons have dropped as well. This applies to immigrants and ethnic scandinavians. It has nothing to do with our population size and everything to do with a concerted effort to rip up the archaic and vile vengeance-based system we used to have. You can have vengeance or you can have a safe society, those are the options. 2: We embraced capitalism, removing most restrictions on the free markets, including failed ideas such as government mandates for the labor market, with very rare exceptions for longterm strikes among critical personnel such as nurses and doctors. Instead the workers unions are required to reach accords with the employers union, with the government only acting as a referee. There is no legal danish minimum wage, no maximum hours, these things are based entirely on agreements between the parties on the labor market itself. There are some safety rules, but the accords reached between the employers union and the workers unions are gennerally much tighter. 3: There are very, very few government owned companies because they warp competition. There are no tarrifs applying to foreign goods alone, because that would warp competition. 4: The social angle There are social programs such as public schools - embraced to my knowledge by every western country -, public colleges, public universities and housing designated for students that consequently have a number of economic benefits over regular housing. Students are also paid a stipend from the government while studying, contingent on various terms and conditions. These programs have opened higher education to the people that weren't born rich or with a high intelligence. It has allowed us to develop a more productive and more intelligent workforce. That means we can compete better against other capitalist nations.
This is all really interesting. I would caution anyone against saying any one type of state or country is inherently superior. There are advantages and disadvantages to being smaller geographically and more homogeneous culturally/ethnically. I think the biggest issue is trying to suggest what works in one country automatically does or does not work in another. The geographic size of the US creates infrastructure challenges. It’s much harder to provide equal services for schools, healthcare, transportation, etc. There are issues with diminishing returns on certain types of investments within society. So people that want to recreate successful social programs from other countries, maybe don’t realize they probably won’t work in the US. Plus the US spends like 400b on defense, so that takes away a lot of money. Even as a % of GDP it’s still higher than most European countries. Plus thanks to NATO a lot of European countries can comfortably rely on the US to keep them safe, so they don’t have to spend as much on defense.
I'm not going to get into that discussion here, as it gets right into practicalities rather than theories(Nordic Model) that I can justify talking about here in a general sense. We were asked not to talk actual politics and I respect that We can start a private conversation for those interested.
Translations are just going to be another excuse for delays while someone else does work and he takes the credit like the comic. He's putting in so much effort to not put in effort.
To be honest, translating the novels into other languages WILL give him more publicity. If he can get a toehold in Asia that could mean thousands of new fans. I'm honestly not sure why he hasn't done more to push the current books.
Unrelated, but by my will and rank. This 50 cent drugs f**cking cures covid. Billions of Readers Drago, Billions..
Ak just made a fb video, not much said but that translation of books is taking place to other languages.
Nice. This is a good thing for Litrpg. Aleron may be a show boat, but every book he sells means a little more attention for the entire genre.
True but wouldn't you prefer seeing the Facebook post saying "#1 Selling LitRPG series Translates ALL 50 Books Into 10 New Languages" instead of "sorry for the delays. release of book 9 delayed indefinitely"
Yes. I just look for the silver lining. Aleron is doing this. One thing I think he should consider is packaging the first seven books as a package deal, since they form arc one. Long series like this struggle with costs intimidating new readers.
Even worse is that the Comics strategy/tactic is not progressing he is stuck at 7 comics.. this is bad(based on my assumption comics should stop at ~ 20chapters and he can get back to writing book9, cause now ppl read comics get hooked and want more=> buy his books from book 1(chptr 20 around 1/3 of the book a great intro I think) to book 9, and gift book 1 5 starts )
