The book officially became a contracted work today. Those of you who invested should have received your reading credits by now.
I'm truly grateful to my editor, Fallen Leaf, for giving me this opportunity.
Special thanks to everyone for your support. Every day, I see a few familiar names on my author dashboard.
Especially my reader Ye Tianxiang, Xiao Ye.
My reader I Can Row Without Oars.
My reader Idle Person Loves Novels.
My reader Mohandar.
And everyone else who has kept supporting me like family. Honestly, without your support for a new author and a new book, I might not have made it this far.
At first, I was really just running out of things to read. I couldn't find a book that suited my tastes, so I decided to write one myself.
After looking up a lot of material and writing an outline a few hundred Chinese characters long, I boldly started posting with no backlog. Haha!
I uploaded the first chapter on January 1. Back then, I couldn't sleep at night. I didn't know whether writing a book would be easy, so I searched Zhihu and Baidu.
The more I read, the more stressed I became. The top results were all about people who hadn't been offered contracts after 50,000 characters, or whose applications were rejected at 100,000. Some outright said they still couldn't get a contract after 200,000 characters and had only 125 bookmarks. Others asked when they could get a contract with 100,000 characters and 48 bookmarks.
I also learned that you could either receive a site message offering a contract or apply yourself after reaching 100,000 characters. At the time, I figured I was writing this book for myself, so I should stop overthinking it and just write.
At first, I didn't even know how long a chapter should be. I dared to post chapters barely over a thousand characters long. Haha! It wasn't until I reached chapter five and saw that everyone else wrote two thousand characters per chapter that I realized, Ah, mine are too short! I hurried back and revised all the earlier chapters.
Then, when I reached chapter six, at around twelve thousand characters, I received a site message saying I could sign a contract and asking me to add the esteemed Fallen Leaf on QQ.
Haha! In that instant, I really felt like, Today's the day I slay the gods and prove my worth! The editor must have a keen eye for talent to spot my once-in-a-generation genius right away. Just kidding... After searching around, I learned that site messages generally arrived at around ten thousand characters, and quite a few people submitted directly to editors.
At the very beginning, it took me a whole day to write 4,000 characters. Now, I can easily write 4,000 in just five hours. I feel like I've improved quite a lot. Ten thousand characters a day isn't far off!
A lot of my friends read my book and said the title wouldn't work. Other people's titles all started with "Hokage: ..." or "Konoha: ...," while mine gave them no idea what the story was about. They said a bad title meant it was bound to flop.
But I'll never forget Hatake Yasuo. Even though Shaomai stopped writing it and went off to write historical fiction under an alternate account, I still want to write Glory of the Hatake Clan. I hope that someday, people who enjoy Naruto fanfiction will mainly search for "Hatake."
Of course, I'm nowhere near that right now. But no matter how the book performs in the future, I won't change the title.
Our book has now been up for eleven days, and it currently has 658 bookmarks and 147 recommendation votes.
Once again, thank you to everyone who has supported me like family. I'll keep working hard. Whatever happens in the future, I hope we can keep going together. As long as you stay, I won't give up.
Finally, let me ask for some recommendation votes. Could you let me experience, just once, what it feels like to be buried alive in them?
o≥v≤o┴┴~\≥▽≤/~┴┴≥□≤○
January 11, 2021