This is a great question – and one that I don’t yet have the answer to. By the end of the next chapter, I estimate that TPH will be around 300,000 words, which would on its own already put it towards the top of Choice of Games stories in terms of word count alone. There are a few pros and cons for each:
Splitting up the two books would, to be completely honest, help me out a lot more financially. Publishing Book One (at the end of the re-election) would allow me to start getting a sense of what (if any) sort of market exists for the kind of story I’m writing. While there’s been a huge amount of support I’ve received on the forums, a fraction of CoG readers are actually on the forum. Being a published author has honestly been a huge dream of mine for quite a while, so being able to accomplish that goal a bit earlier while getting a lot of information is obviously quite tempting.
On the other hand, I did in all honestly plan on TPH being one story. Still, I think (scratch that, I know) that I underestimated how long it would take to write everything in one book. Writing it in one book would stick to my original plan for the story and it’d help me avoid learning the scary new code that’d be required to transfer variables and decisions from one game into the next.
In all, I’d truly love some feedback on this. Would you prefer one larger, higher-priced story, or for it to be split into two? One benefit of two books is obviously that I’d be able to begin editing and really improving on the first half of the story earlier. If we went down this route, we could possibly be looking at Book I of TPH being near-ready for publishing by the end of the year or early 2024.
As you can see, it’s something I’ve been quite conflicted about for some time now, and I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts or feedback on the matter!
QUICK EDIT: I wanted to include the link to the forum post that I briefly mentioned above, pretty interesting if you’d like to also take a look here!