Rise (Web Novel CN)

Hey guys! Rise Shanks, Devshard, and Sietse here! (Holy shit, we sound like we belong to an actual org when we include the Rise as a prefix to our names. Instant +25 to the cool modifier right there.)

Okay. That mild bit of our usual nonsense aside, this is a mid-translation interlude to have a serious conversation and gather some real feedback from you guys. We’ve always been open with you guys about everything going on behind-the-scenes and keeping everything to do with Rise absolutely transparent. Obviously there are things that we cannot share because they deal with as a whole. But those things usually have very little to do with Rise so it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. The reason we’re making this particular mid-translation chapter is because we've been publishing Rise for almost 6 months now and there’s a little bit of a troubling trend with the numbers.

As most of you already know by now, we worked on Rebirth of the Thief Who Roamed The World before Rise. And in all honesty, our release rate for Rebirth was god awful. For most of that translation, we bounced between 3-5 chapters/week. And we didn’t even do that at a regular release schedule. There would be some weeks where no chapters would show up for 5 days and then 3 chapters would drop almost one after the other. It was an absolute shitshow, and that is putting it mildly.

With Rise, we’ve been insanely regular. Unless something insane happens, there is a chapter released every single day. On the few occasions where something insane has happened, we’ve made announcements so everyone is aware. All in all, we’ve made huge strides in the professionalism department. It would even be fair to say that Rise is much less of a shitshow.

Here’s the deal though. The numbers show that people actually liked us more when we were constantly f.u.c.k.i.n.g up and releasing fewer chapters on an absolutely unpredictable schedule. Rebirth of the Thief Who Roamed the World averaged around 2,000,000+ pageviews every month. Not too shabby, right?

When it comes to Rise, we’ve been doing abysmal compared to Rebirth despite improvements across the board. Just as a numbers comparison, Rise has gotten 105,000 pageviews in February. We’re a LONG way away from where we were with Rebirth (Dev Aside: PP got much smaller). And to make things even more confusing, Rise got 134,000 pageviews in January (Dev Aside: Smol PP lost 3 inches in 1 month, become even more smol. Sadbois :| ).

Full disclosure, there is some fuzziness in the Rise pageviews because of how app views are counted and those views being excluded from the numbers that we have and all that. But regardless of app views or not, we’re not even close to doing as well with Rise as we did with Rebirth. And as a fun coincidence to make this sting just a little bit more, the completed translation of Rebirth of the Thief Who Roamed the World received 95,000 pageviews in February. Which is insane.

So it is clear that something isn’t working here. The problem is that we have no idea what that is. Which is why we’re coming to you guys. We legitimately do not know what we can change/improve on/issues to deal with to make Rise have similar reader numbers to Rebirth. And this is a weird place to find ourselves in because we started this translation out with the assumption that Rise was going to do insanely better than Rebirth did.

We’ve got a little questionnaire-type thing below. Three super simple questions. If you have anything extra to add, any thoughts or ideas beyond the questions, any other comments or concerns, feel free to throw those on. This is our 6 month translation team-reader check in to figure out how we can make this novel and the community around it bigger and more fun for everyone.

Is what we’re doing with Rise, the translator thoughts, the community, and community events working? (Super simple Yes/No question with a little expansion. Don’t need to write essays or be super goddamned detailed. If we done f.u.c.k.i.e.d up, tell us where and we’ll figure it out from there.)

IF YES - Which one would you say we’re doing especially well on and you’d like to see more things in that direction.

IF NO - What would you say isn’t working for you?

Have you recommended Rise to friends/acquaintances/other readers in the community?

IF YES - Did they like the recommendation and start reading Rise?

IF NO - Is there anything that you’d like to see improved with the novel that could get Rise to the point where you would strongly recommend it to friends/acquaintances/other readers in the community?

Did you find yourself losing interest in the novel at any point in the previous 260 chapters?

IF YES - Do you recall around which chapters/arc this happened? (You don’t have to be very specific. A general idea is plenty.)

IF NO - Awesome! Don’t need anything more after this.

Rise Devshard here! Thanks for taking the time to read this and answering the questions/throwing some ideas out in the comments for us. We’re also looking in the comments and available on Discord if you guys have any questions or things you want cleared up. Plz help make smol PP big again! Seriously. Views/reader counts/subscriber numbers are literally the only way for content creators to have big d.i.c.k energy. We would like to walk around like we packing, and we need your help to figure out how to make that happen!