At the moment, I think there are over 100 people reading <em>Tamao</em> seriously. It's a bit difficult to tell, because, of course, not everyone reads every day, and the statistics I get do not explicitly tell me how many different people have visited the site and read enough pages to have read the entire story. Indeed, given that I imagine at least some of my readers use shared computers, I'm not sure how the stats machines could work that out.

One hundred people is not bad. It's enough to convince me that the story objectively does not suck, which is something I believe most authors worry about.

It's not enough to make the story economically viable. In this context, "economically viable" means "paying me the sort of word rate I could get by writing RPG material". It doesn't mean "providing a reasonable return on time and effort by any normal sort of standard" or "paying me a living wage"; it just means "not a loss compared to something similar I could be doing instead". If the story doesn't look like it's going to become economically viable, I will stop it when I've completed the plot I sketched out initially.

That will take you to early December (49 weeks), and while it will resolve a number of issues, it won't resolve everything that has been raised.

So, how many readers do I need for it to be economically viable? I think, looking at my numbers and what I've heard from other people doing similar things, that I would need about 10,000. I might be able to get by with half that. But, in any case, 50 to 100 times as many readers as I have now.

I really don't think I'm going to get that many by the end of this year, so that's not the standard. If the numbers are going up in a way that suggests the story might become viable in a reasonable length of time, and I've not actually lost money on the story, then I'll continue it. But for that to happen, I need more readers.

So, if you think you are going to want the story to keep going, tell your friends about it. Link to it if you have a blog or webpage. Note that, because of the licensing, you may put bits of it on your website to give people a taster, but the only readers that count are readers here, so direct people to this site.

Thanks, and I hope you continue to enjoy the story.