Explaining why we are back to the old blog

So yeah, it’s final, I’ll be leaving Wordexcerpt so releases will be done back here.

I have spent the last couple days updating all the chapters since I left so…releases should be up to date and the ToC should be too.

I’ll be using this post to explain the reasoning behind it and the circumstances leading to this so it’ll probably turn into one of those big walls of text, feel free to ignore if you are not interested.

Just for the record, I don’t really have anything against the people over there, I’ve enjoyed talking to the people I have talked to. So, there’s no bad blood between us (or at least I hope so), continue supporting them if you enjoy the series they release over there.

I’ll be dividing this post into sections as always and will try to be as transparent as I can providing information.

Joining the group

I guess to understand how we got here, I’ll have to explain how I joined the group.

The idea of joining a group was born from wanting to earn a little bit of money for the effort put into releasing chapters.

At the time I was talking with multiple groups and they could be divided in 2 kinds.

One seemed to be the most common one, basically, you’d get paid at the end of the month and each chapter you released would be X amount of money. However, all sort of monetization would be directed to the group so that staff is paid. Basically, a completely transparent method that guarantees a fixed amount of income depending on how much one works.

On the other hand there was the uncommon one which would be WE in this case. In this case people would get part of the ad revenue and get a monthly pay that would fluctuate depending on the person. Everyone is free to set external monetization to help along with it.

As you can see, both have their pros and cons. On one hand, you have a stable and completely transparent way to get paid, and on the other hand, you have one that is bound to fluctuate and you won’t be sure what you will be paid.

In this case, I chose the second one. At the time, I was plenty aware that the 2nd option would provide lower income in the short term but it had the potential to eventually become more profitable than the first option.

For the people that have been following me for a while, you probably know what happened next.

I contacted the owner and said I’d join. We were unable to properly set the account at the time and I had a flight the next day.

Once I arrived, I was unable to get in contact with said owner, the reason for it was because she was on holidays and she was staying somewhere where the internet was really bad and she was unable to reply to DMs and such.

This continued for weeks, during this time I focused on preparing chapters for when I would be able to release chapters. I was obviously unaware that the owner had gone on a holiday since she never told me and I could only wait patiently.

When she came back, I was finally given my account. However, I was told that the series page for VRMMO would be made for me at the time and I would be taught how to properly post chapters.

Because of the time zone difference, we had to postpone things and she went MIA again, this time for a really silly reason.

Point is, I was left in the dark once again and I eventually got in contact with the other staff of the group after joining their discord. This was after a few days of being unable to contact her again. The members explained how things were done to me and I finally managed to start posting chapters.

Mind you, I was understanding of the situation and didn’t really blame the owner for all that happened.

This leads to the following point.

Working in the group

Another advantage I forgot to mention about WE is that translators are free to set their own pace when it comes down to their release schedule.

As any paid position, there might be times where groups request that you have a certain pace that you’ll be able to keep up and ask for a certain quality of work.

Despite the initial hurdles, I was able to get along well with people I talked to and the community is rather friendly.

I decided to set a schedule and while the 2nd month was a bit shaky, I believe I did a pretty decent job at having frequent updates.

Regardless, I’ll talk about the payments now.

The following points will be from my point of view and from information that I personally had access to. If someone from the group sees this and decides to argue about these statement, they are free to do so.

The truth is, I wasn’t paid anything for my first month of “work”. The reasoning behind it seemed to be because of the way ad revenue is paid. Apparently they are paid after certain periods of time passes.

I have no experience setting any kind of ad revenue so there’s no argument that I can make to refute the statement.

I was however, paid last month. No real need to hide this information from you, the amount I was paid exactly 39$.

Staff members actually have access to how much everyone is earning, so I personally thought this amount was a “bit” lower than what I personally expected.

While people like me have no access to real earning numbers, I personally kept track of the amount of “audience” other people had and made an estimate of what I should be learning due to my own work.

I’m aware that this is not “hard proof” or anything, but it should give a decent estimate since ad revenue is generated by your series getting views.

Of course, I won’t release information about other people since that’s not something I should be doing. I’ll also avoid getting into some other data since it would make it seem like I’m accusing them of something without any proof.

For people that are curious, the offer other groups made for my series in particular, was of 6$/chapter. Obviously, this amount is by taking into account the series I’m working on and my own experience as a translator. This number won’t apply to everyone out there.

The first chapter that was released over at WE was Chapter 34.

Anyway, on to the next point.

Decision to leave the group and future plans

Well, you might be thinking that I’m leaving the group because I’m not getting paid enough.

While it is true that not receiving much pay has had influence on my decision, it’s not really the only reason I have done so.

I’ll be getting busier into the future and this will most likely have an impact on how often I can release things.

Being able to release less basically means that the number of views for the series will plummet over the time which will make the already unprofitable endeavor even worse.

While there’s no one telling me how often I should release chapters, working in a group environment where everyone else keeps releasing content does personally, get into my head and pressure me to try and get something released.

I personally think being on my own does give me more of a sense of freedom.

Therefore, after thinking about it for a while, I decided to just leave the group and go back to this blog.

I have decided to just throw away any notion of earning money away and go back to releasing everything for free, so releases will be uploaded as I have them ready.

This also means that the current Patreon structure, will be changed back to the old “you won’t get anything from me, but feel free to make a pledge if you want to support me”.

No future plans to join any group even if it means I’ll earn higher amounts of money. Uploading everything again has made me remember just how annoying and boring it is to upload all the chapters manually, and it’s an experience I would rather not go through again. Even less, when the series have more chapters released.

In the end, something like translating WNs/LNs should be fun for the translator.

As for what is going to happen now, it’ll depend on my whims. Of course, I plan to keep releasing chapters of VRMMO, however, I won’t be making any promises on a release pace or give estimates on the time each chapter will be released.

I might even decide to pick new series or something else, just whatever picks my interest and I feel like doing.

I’ll just be happy if I manage to get a few readers for the series I translate whenever something is released.

I’m aware that this is turning out to be quite long so I tried to speed up things and gloss over certain details, so I’ll proceed to finish this post now.

I want to thank all the readers and the patrons that have supported me until now.

Sorry to my patrons for not being able to meet your expectations. I wanted to use this post as a heads up so you are able to cancel your pledge since there’s still time until next month’s payment. Feel free to remove your pledges if you decide to.

Anyway, this was a long post and I’m pretty sure it was kinda messy because I’m really bad at organizing things, but if you have read until now, I appreciate you taking the time to do so.

Oh, I nearly forgot, the WordPress plan that this blog currently has will be gone by the end of the year, there might be ads on the blog after that point in time that I have no control over. Of course, that won’t be generating any money for myself.

When the time comes, feel free to activate your adblock on the blog since that should be the only way to avoid them. I have no current plans to buy a WP plan or to buy a domain and installing WP along with moving everything over at this point.

A VRMMO chapter will be uploaded along with this post, so go check that one if you want to.

Thanks as always and I hope you continue to enjoy the translations I provide until I decide to stop one day.