Launch Day Reflections

Greetings, Commanders:

Tomorrow at noon, this book would be going premium!

Allow me to report the current figures: 3,510 bookmarks, 766 follow-up readers, and 457 genuine readers.

Going premium with 3,500 bookmarks was truly a first for me.

Since starting this book, I had gone from soaring ambition at the beginning, to the heartbreaking crawl of bookmark growth, to utter dejection after failing to advance from the trial round, then reviving in the second round and rallying with confidence. And then... here we were today, having failed the second round.

My emotions had risen and fallen greatly throughout the process, so I would not dwell on them one by one. By the Lake had prepared this book with care. Though the result had deviated somewhat from expectations, I would still keep writing it with all my heart.

Another book was about to go premium.

There was a touch of unfamiliarity within the familiarity.

Yeah, in the blink of an eye, I had been writing for nearly ten years.

Ten years.

Time really flew.

Ten years of writing, ten years of being a flop.

Round and round I went.

As for results, I had trained my mentality quite well by now.

After it went premium, updates would still be in the morning, normally between eight and nine. If there was an extra chapter, it would generally be arranged for the evening.

Now that it was going premium, let's set a small goal: four hundred first subscriptions!

Going by the genuine reader numbers, that first-subscription goal was a bit of a luxury.

It would be fine if I did not reach it.

Well, I would not say much more. That was it—I was off to write.

I suddenly thought of a line: They all looked down on you, yet you were the