iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Just saw a series of books that I know for a fact were written entirely by AI (I know the "author") on Amazon sitting at an average 4.5 star rating and hundreds of glowing reviews and at this point I am convinced the romance booktok crowd just WANTS the slop. It's just about having the ~content~.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Officially 20.000 words into AFTERGLOW. HIS PROTECTOR had about 27.000. AFTERGLOW is being birthed much, much more slowly, but it's a beautiful birth.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

happy pride month! give a queer author money today 😘

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Reposted by Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon.

Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

I want all my readers to know exactly where I stand.

Author’s Note No AI was used in any step of the creation or promotion of this novella. This book was researched, written and edited entirely by humans, and any and all audiovisual materials used in the cover art or to promote the book are commercially licensed stock assets, edited by a human designer. No text or assets were generated or modified by AI at any stage. I’d rather my art be crunchy than artificial. This is for all the Queer kids who were told their desires are wrong. For everyone who ever felt alone in the world. You are not.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

How do people feel about radically different chapter lengths? I like to think of my chapters as self-contained scenes that end either when the setting changes, or when a thematic moment is over, but that sometimes results in one being 25 pages and the next being seven.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

I was gonna give the CEO love interest in my new novel a button at his desk to lock the office door because I thought it would make for some fun kinky moments and then I remembered Matt Lauer had one of those for real and suddenly it seemed a lot less fun and the idea has been scrapped!

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

57 pages into the new novel and I have reached the exact halfway point of my first book's length. Starting to feel real. Starting to come together. Except this time this is the exact point the story set up arrives because this bitch is gonna be much longer than the first!

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Gonna run some more ads for HIS PROTECTOR as an experiment. Previous attempt got about 90% to breaking even, but included multiple ads and target audiences. Focusing on only the top performing ad and targeting this time. Gonna report back with my findings 💁‍♂️

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Writing is a lot easier when you have a rough word count goal. I know I'm going for 50k+ words on this one. So anytime I add 500 words to the draft, I get a little video game accomplishment sound in my head and get to feel the joys of adding another roughly 1% to the novel.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

#WIP snippet from the new novel Because I will always find a way to sneak my girls in there.

Carter woke up to the soothing sounds of Björk screeching an unhinged melody into his ear.

If he was going to wake up early with an alarm, he decided it should at least be on his own terms, and programmed it to play a random song from Björk’s Volta album every morning at 7AM sharp. It was a comforting album that reminded him of his youth, but more importantly, it was just grating enough when playing at a high volume and ripping you out of your sleep to motivate him to get up immediately and turn it off. There was no sleeping through this.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

I'm also on instagram btw. www.instagram.com/richardveina...

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Update: 112€ total adspend, 99€ total sales & Kindle Unlimited read pages income. Extremely close to breaking even but pages read have massively slowed down now. Bottom line is if your book is long enough to benefit from KU in that a full read brings in decent $$$, it's probably worth it.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

#WIP snippet from the new book. Yes this is just an excuse to get on my soap box about privileged rich white gays.

Carter had taught himself to keep his political views largely to himself and present a facade that is agreeable to all. You had to present neutral and apolitical to exist in the spaces they existed in, not step on any toes, not be too opinionated, not ruin anyone’s buzz. The hot professional money gays required you to perform a thin veneer of Liberalism but to have no real convictions that could make them feel bad about vacationing in countries perpetuating human rights abuses, or making their money by hitching their wagon to mass exploitation, or dancing on the military contractor float at Pride.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

I think I have a title for my second book. It's very cute and in line with both the themes and sexual innuendo, as well as doubling as a reference to a location in the story. I'm baffled this title choice didn't occur to me before.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

I thought I might have some writers' block the last couple days, but that seems to have dissipated entirely. 5000 words in one session. Let's fucking go.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Damn, I was serious when I said this second book is gonna be longer. I'm still writing chapter 1, our main characters have not met yet, and I'm at nearly 15% the word count the entirety of HIS PROTECTOR had already. We are fleshing out our worlds more going forward, babes!

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Reposted by Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon.

Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

#wip snippet from my new novel I didn't set out to write an ode to the bathhouse and gay cruising culture but if it happens, it happens

The city’s premier gay bathhouse was bustling with activity. Men of all ages, shapes and backgrounds were mingling in the various saunas, steam rooms, darkrooms and cabins of the extensive facility. Pulling each other into dark corners to share semi-private moments with strangers, making out in soft lighting the perpetual sundown hues of blue, orange, red and purple. Getting on their knees and exploring novel bodies with all of their senses deeply engaged. They were drifting apart and into new formations like cells in one big organism. Exchanging fluids but never so much as a name. Identity didn’t matter here, you were submerged into one mass of unrestricted sexual desire and liberation.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

#wip snippet from my new novel I didn't set out to write an ode to the bathhouse and gay cruising culture but if it happens, it happens

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

What is the opposite of writer's block because I have 18 different ideas for books I wanna write in the near to middle future rn.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

The scale of this new book is gonna be so much larger. In every way. More complex plot and themes. More locations. More characters. Many more sex scenes. It's a bit intimidating but I'm excited to get into it.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Currently coming up with a bath house location that will return multiple times for absolute DEBAUCHERY in my new book and may or may not loosely be based on a certain bath house in Berlin and my personal experiences there. I love me a bath house.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

For HIS PROTECTOR I just started typing (and then wrote out a loose plot outline after I had finished the first couple chapters to give it more structure), for book #2 I'm trying something more like a series bible with a much more structured approach. Let's see how this goes.

file structure from notion showing an overarching category called 002 UNTITLED followed by 4 documents called Text, Outline, Characters and Locations

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

I think I have a pretty solid grasp on who the love interest of my next book *is* and I'm excited to explore this character. And his hole.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

caught between despair and hope right now as my job looks set to be making me redundant in the coming months, maybe weeks, but also my experiment in running ads for my books performed so well that i see a path to profitably being an author there, which would be the absolute dream

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

I may have underestimated the long tail of KU reads from ads. Today I'm on track to have one of my best days in terms of pages read and ads have been off for over a week at this point. Maybe I will break even on this ad spend after all.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

I didn't know that Amazon automatically made a Goodreads page for your books. I just went to set it up and found HIS PROTECTOR already there sitting at a 4 star rating 🥺 Mind you, off two reviews, but that's still really fucking cool!

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

I'm excited to start on my second book next week. I have an outline and character bios more or less done. It's gonna be a different sub-genre, not the Drake Silver sequel. I've had a really rough time lately but I'm gonna take this weekend to relax and catch up on sleep and then I can get typing.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Some small author transparency and nerd math: I spent about 110€ on meta ads to promote HIS PROTECTOR and I made about 80€ off it in that time. Ads are paused now. I expect some more to come in off the long tail of Kindle Unlimited reading that is often time shifted, but may not break even.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

I have been inching up day by day and I can TASTE that top 100 position 🥺

rank 165 in the gay erotica category on amazon

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I've edged towards 1000 without crossing it a few times now. Finally made it past today for the first time. I know it's a tiny number to established authors, but people reading 1000 pages of my book in a day is a huge deal to me. Whew! Let's celebrate that!

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

You know writing has taken over your brain when you remember two dreams from the night and they are: - literally writing your next novella - waking up to new reviews on Amazon

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

The triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of high school football, and also anal sex in the locker rooms after the match.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Anyway buy my lovingly human made slop so I can feel less defeatist about watching AI slop perform so well. 💖 mybook.to/hisprotector...

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

A drum I will bang on forever. Studies consistently find that people who self describe as "porn addicts" have completely normal engagement with porn, they just feel shame about it. Porn is not addictive. It's not a diagnosis. No respectable psychologist treats it.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

I jinxed myself. It was 1000 pages read on Kindle Unlimited in a day (which would roughly equate to 8 people reading the book in full, though of course more likely more readers reading various amounts) but we ended just short of it.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

The most insidious thing about genAI is constantly seeing soulless, cynical AI creations outperform things put together lovingly by humans on social media everywhere around us. It makes you wonder what even the point is if everyone apparently wants the slop. And you gotta resist that feeling.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

I'm on track to hit an arbitrary but meaningful little goal with my book today. I don't wanna celebrate before it happens. But it's really affirming to see my metrics climbing there.

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Reposted by Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon.

Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

💥 OUT NOW 💥 HIS PROTECTOR, the first in a series of kinky, smutty, explicit gay biker books! Buy now on Amazon or read for free on Kindle Unlimited to meet Drake Silver and find out what makes him so wildly intoxicating. mybook.to/hisprotector... #gaysmut #gayromance #gayauthor #queerauthor #mlm

Cover art for HIS PROTECTOR by Richard Vein. The cover is placed on top of a dark mountainscape backdrop. The cover art features an extremely muscular man, his back turned partway to the viewer, sitting on his motorbike. He is in the desert, dust is thrown up all around him. The top text says "The Drake Silver Series #1", the middle text says "HIS PROTECTOR" and the bottom text says "from the naughty mind of richard vein"

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Trying to come up with another ridiculously stupid name for the love interest in my next novel and this shit is harder than the actual writing process because now I wanna one-up myself and come up with something better/more ridiculous than DRAKE SILVER.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

I definitely understand why genre authors swear by Amazon Kindle Unlimited. 3 people reading my very short book in full is roughly equivalent to the revenue from 1 sale, and it's a whole lot easier to get people to give your book a chance for "free" as part of their membership vs to sell a copy.

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

People “writing” with AI going into the text and purposely adding typos and grammatical mistakes so their text isn’t clocked as AI is crazy. I don’t need to add human stupidity to artificial intelligence. My jumping back and forth between US and UK spellings randomly is all natural. 😂

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Richard Vein | AFTERGLOW coming soon. @richardvein.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Hey babes! I’m aware my book can’t be found through Amazon search rn. Trying to figure out the issue and work it out - hoping it’s just search indexing delays! Until then, the link in my bio will take you to the listing for your local Amazon store ❤️

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