I missed Top 10 by three positions and I think I'm actually relieved. Probably. Maybe.
When I launched Ether Atlas three weeks ago, I told myself I'd be happy if it got a hundred followers in the first month. That was the bar. Its almost at a 1000 followers in just under a month instead.
It crossed a hundred followers in week one. I should have been delighted. I gave myself about six hours of being delighted before I started looking at the genre Rising Stars lists.
It hit a few genre lists. New bar: if I make Main Rising Stars, even at the bottom, I'll be over the moon. It made Main RS at #50. I was over the moon for about a day. New bar: if I can hit top 20, that's incredible. Top 20 came. I lasted about two hours at incredible. New bar: I really want top 10.
I caught myself doing this somewhere around bar number four. Not in time to stop.
I/the story stopped at top 13. The momentum seems to have run out. Three positions short of the goalpost I'd been chasing for a week.
And the strange thing is, looking back, I think the wanting was worse than the result. Each time I hit a number, the satisfaction lasted about as long as it took my brain to find the next number. The hundred followers I'd told myself would make me happy made me happy for an evening. The top 20 I hadn't even thought possible made me happy for two hours. The actual result - exceeding every honest expectation I'd had at launch - almost slipped past me because I was looking at a position I never had any right to expect in the first place.
This is supposed to be how humans work. What makes us the dominant species on the planet. We're built to keep wanting because the wanting drove us across continents and out of caves. It's a useful trait. It also is a trait that never lets you arrive.
For anyone who hasn't come across it -
Ether Atlas is a LitRPG written like Da Vinci Code where D&D turns out to be a leaked survival manual and Earth has been prepared for the arrival of the System by a secret society. A conspiracy older than civilisation.
Three weeks ago I had no readers. Now I have a thousand of them and they're some of the warmest, most generous readers any new writer could ask for. The LitRPG community has been astonishing. I don't have the words for it.
The RS run is what it is. I'm done chasing positions. The next few months I just want to write the book and enjoy the fact that people are reading it. Let the die fall where it falls.
Thank you. Genuinely.
Posted May 12, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC