It makes it all worth it!
Cover Artist: Prince Baliyan (being finalized currently so an AI placeholder is up.. I'll drop the sketch below though)
AI Usage: None other than the temp cover.
There's nothing I can say that this saint hasn't already in the review...
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/185521/the-lapsed-lease-a-cosmic-foreclosure-litrpg
I'm about a month into serializing The Lapsed Lease, a cosmic LitRPG about a recently fired NFL sports psychologist who dies and gets drafted into a very bureaucratic world invasion scenario.
My launch was... poorly optimized to say the least. I come from the much more traditional publishing world, and wanted to dip my toes into both serializing and writing a litRPG at the same time. I did a little bit of research but didn't see Milc's guide or any of the other strong guidance on how to do a release. The result being that I didn't dump 20k words, have a huge stack of shout outs prepped, and most of my marketing efforts came together after the story was already live.
For the first couple of weeks I honestly thought I'd ruined the book. But over the last 14 days or so the numbers have started moving.
I'm a tinkerer so I'm trying my best not to overthink it and just keep feeding the story.
The Pitch:
What to Expect
Party-focused progression
Strong character arcs
Humor without turning the stakes into a joke
Voodoo-inspired magic
Tactical combat
Moral decisions with real consequences
Cosmic bureaucracy and weird system humor
Earth has defaulted on its cosmic lease. Now the recently deceased have to save it.
Remy Broussard died saving a turtle.
It was, admittedly, not the death he had pictured. But then, nothing about his life had gone according to plan since the day his world fell apart. He'd spent the five years since doing what he'd always done: showing up for everyone else and quietly falling apart on his own time.
Death, it turns out, changes very little about that habit.
Earth has lapsed on its cosmic lease, and a galactic bureaucracy has opened foreclosure proceedings on the planet. Fifty thousand humans who died in heroic acts have been drafted into what's known as the Occupancy Assessment. They now face a five-floor trial to prove Earth is worth keeping.
Now Remy has a patron spirit he didn't ask for, a class rooted in a culture he spent his whole life dismissing as tourist kitsch, and two strangers who are quickly becoming something like family.
Death didn't end Remy's problems. It just gave them a user interface.
A LitRPG with humor, heart, and a body count.
RR Link: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/185521/the-lapsed-lease
Also, curious for the other authors here: I've struggled back and forth many times with potentially nuking this story and relaunching knowing what I know now. That's crazy, right?
and it has done absolutely nothing. 1 user for 1 session in the last 7 days :'-)
