Chip, chip, chipping away – how I finally finished the STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE trilogy
So it took a long time, but I finally finished the STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE trilogy with the last book, FINAL QUEST.
I am very grateful to everyone who read the trilogy and enjoyed it!
All told, it took about ten months to write STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: FINAL QUEST, from September 2024 to July 2025 when I finally published it.
What took so long?
Well, a lot of things went wrong. Let’s look back!
Towards the end of 2022, I decided I wanted to try something a little different, so I settled on LitRPG, which seemed promising because it’s pretty popular. For the story, I had an idea for a developer who was fired from a virtual reality MMORPG once he realized it was dangerous, and how he starts playing the game to uncover the proof he needed.
I also had what I thought would be a clever idea – the game would be based on my FROSTBORN books. Like, it’s set 700 years in the future, and some interstellar scout discovered the FROSTBORN books on a wrecked colony ship, and then the evil corporation built the game around them. I decided the game would be called SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE, which meant that was a logical name for the series, right?
So I wrote SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION, and published it in February 2023.
It didn’t do particularly well.
A couple problems because immediately apparent. First, the title was causing confusion. People assumed it was connected to the SEVENFOLD SWORD series and was in some way a sequel to that series, which it wasn’t. Second, people were confused and wondered if the Ridmark Arban and Calliande Arban NPCs in the game world were the actual characters from the FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD/DRAGONTIARNA series.
They weren’t, but in comedy there’s a saying that if you have to explain the joke, you’ve already lost. I suppose a parallel conclusion would be that “if you have to explain the characters are NPCs in a game world based on your books seven hundred years in the future” then the concept for the book is probably too abstract.
Second, the book didn’t really appeal to a majority of my regular readers, who prefer epic fantasy from me. Case in point – when I published HALF-ELVEN THIEF in December 2023, in its first month it did 66% of what STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: CREATION has done in the entire three and a half years it has been available, and I’m typing this on the last day of July 2025. In its lifetime, HALF-ELVEN THIEF has done 250% more than STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: CREATION, and it’s been out for ten and a half fewer months than CREATION. Clearly, a majority of my regular readers prefer epic fantasy over LitRPG.
Despite that, I continued onward and published SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: LEVELING in February of 2024.
It did slightly worse than CREATION.
In 2024, I tried a bunch of things to improve how the series fared. To avoid confusion, I changed the title from SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE to STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE. I redid the cover art, changed the description, all the usual things for improving a series. None of it ever really worked, and I could never quite turn a profit when advertising it.
During these experiments, I realized that I had fundamentally misread the LitRPG market.
The three most popular kinds of LitRPG are:
1.) Portal fantasy. The protagonist falls through a portal and ends up in another world that runs on MMORPG style rules for whatever reason.
2.) Isekai. The character dies and is reborn in a world that runs on MMORPG style rules. You’ll see this in books with titles like I DIED AND WAS REBORN AS A LEVEL ONE HEALER, something like that.
3.) System apocalypse. The world ends and is recreated as a living MMORPG, usually overseen by an all-powerful “game system”, hence the name. The system can be created by gods or powerful space aliens, and is often malevolent. DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL, where Earth is destroyed and remade into a MMORPG system as part of a sadistic alien game show, is probably the most well-known example of this particular subgenre.
The problem is that STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE fits into none of these subgenres. I joked that I had tried to write a LitRPG but had landed at a scifi thriller. I mean, “software developer fighting sinister corporation’s evil secret plans” is a scifi cyberpunk story, not a LitRPG. So I was trying to tell a story ill-suited for that particular genre, like attempting to write a cozy contemporary mystery in the format of an epic Arthurian fantasy quest. Like, that idea could potentially work, but it probably wouldn’t.
With that realization, I had three choices about how to proceed.
1.) Leave STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE unfinished and never speak of it again.
2.) Unpublish STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE and never speak of it again.
3.) Find a way to finish STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE in a satisfactory fashion with a single book, because I didn’t want to write a long series that sold poorly.
I disliked options one and two partly for reasons of professional pride, and partly because it’s bad to get a reputation in the fantasy genre for leaving series unfinished.
The tricky part for option three was that I had originally planned STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE to be like seven or eight books, and I was only two books into what I had outlined. An additional, potentially major problem was that the STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE books sold badly enough to seriously tank the sales of the month they were released. Like, both February 2023 and February 2024 were some of my weakest sales months in years.
So that meant I needed an outline for the final book that would discard all planned subplots and focus entirely on the main plot. I also needed to write the book on the side and not as a main project, because I knew it would not sell well. Ideally it would come out in the same month as a stronger seller, like one of the SHIELD WAR books.
So, in October of 2024, I started chipping away at what would become STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: FINAL QUEST at 500 words a day. I would write 250 words before going to the gym in the morning, and then 250 more words after dinner. During the day, my main focus was whatever book in THE SHIELD WAR, GHOST ARMOR, CLOAK MAGE, and HALF-ELVEN THIEF I was writing at the time (as I’ve said before, having five unfinished series at a time is way too many, which is why I’ve spent Summer 2025 trying to get that number down), but I did my 250 words in the morning and 250 words after dinner almost every day.
I kept chipping away at it.
Finally in July 2025 I was very nearly to the end of the book, and after I published SHIELD OF POWER, I decided I was far enough along to make FINAL QUEST the main project. Turns out I really was pretty far along, since I only needed to write 3,000 more words to finish the book! Two rounds of editing and some new scenes later (I added a bunch of stuff since I thought the original ending was incomplete), and I published the book in July 2025.
It turned out pretty well. People seemed to like the ending and find it satisfactory, at least those who read it. FINAL QUEST sold slightly better than its predecessors, but SHIELD OF POWER generated sales in its first three days equal to what FINAL QUEST did in its first two weeks.
So I’m grateful for everyone who read the trilogy, but I’m glad to be done. Like, I’ve been kinda sad when I’ve finished my other series, but with this one I’m just relieved to be done and that I don’t have to think about it any more.
It’s easier to promote a finished trilogy than an unfinished series. Probably I’m going to make the first book free every three months, run some ads to it while it’s free, and that will be that. I just signed up with CJ McCallister to do the audiobook version of FINAL QUEST, so eventually I’ll probably have a STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY audiobook since audiobook bundles always do well.
Amusingly, I realized that I essentially followed my own advice. I always say on the blog and the podcast that you can finish a novel if you just keep chipping away at it, and small efforts add up over time. FINAL QUEST turned out to be about 117,000 words, and I mostly got there 500 words at a time.
Do I regret writing STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE? No, but obviously if I had to do it all over again, I would do some things differently.
Will I ever return to LitRPG?
Probably not. I listed all the popular subgenres of LitRPG above, and while I don’t have anything against any of those subgenres, I don’t have any particular interest in writing a story that revolves around those tropes. For all that my books tend to be escapist, I always need to have at least a touchstone of reality in them so they make sense to me. Characters like Wire, Admiral Winterholt, and Alexander Maskell could definitely have their Real Life (even contemporary) equivalents.
LitRPG tropes in general seem to be about a flight from reality. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s not something I’m really interested in writing. I mean, I designed the Andomhaim setting around people who traveled from sub-Roman Britain to a world where magic is real, so that way I could make real world historical references. I think, if pressed, I could write a pretty good novel in the genres of epic fantasy, science fiction, mystery, thriller, and romance, but I’m not at all sure I could write a good book in the LitRPG subgenres I listed.
Maybe I’m just too old for it – I don’t think I encountered an MMORPG for the first time until I was twenty-four or twenty-five, and I’ve never seriously played one, so it definitely wasn’t a formative experience for me the way it was for many LitRPG authors. (In fact, if I remember right, my first serious encounter with an MMORPG was at work, with an IT support ticket about network throttling complaining about how long a World of Warcraft update was taking to download.)
So that is how I finally finished the STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE trilogy.
And once again, thank you for reading the STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE trilogy!
-JM
