Afterword
AUTHOR YOMU MISHIMA here.
So, I'm the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire! Volume 3 is finally out,
and it's all thanks to your support, readers!
My afterwords are usually short, but they gave me a larger number of
pages than usual this time. I'm not very good at these and I'm never sure what to
write about. I don't think anyone wants to hear about my personal life though, so
this time I thought I'd talk a little about how this work came to be.
I've said these things online and on Twitter, but I'll write it here again for
readers who only see my published works. When I first started writing this
series, it actually had a different title. In the beginning, it was called I
Reincarnated into a World with an Intergalactic Empire, so I Tried Becoming an
Evil Lord! A title that captured the trends at the time, I guess.
To start out, I decided to just write one chapter and see what happened. At
first, I had no intention of continuing it and considered it complete at one
chapter. However, I started getting feedback from people who read it online and
wanted more. At that time, I was finishing up another series, so I decided to
continue with this one. I had other published works too, so I thought continuing
this would be a good advertisement for them. Typically, you get more readers
when you update web novels, so I thought I would say, "Please read my
published works too!" That's right; this series was originally just an
advertisement for my other series. It actually ended up being serialized to
advertise another book of mine that was being published, not because I was
trying to get this series published.
I changed the title in the middle of the story and wrote it rather casually. I
wanted it to just be a refreshing story as Liam solved more and more problems
by accident while he tried to become a terrible villain. I wanted to make it
something people could read quickly, just a story about a guy who was a good
person in his last life who curses his misfortune and tries to be a bad guy in
another world. Unfortunately for him, due to various circumstances, all the bad
deeds he tries to commit just cause people to misunderstand, and they think he's
a good guy.
It's a work full of misunderstandings, and it became popular enough on
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the Let's Be Novelists website to make it to the top of the daily rankings a few
times. But at the time, I wasn't even thinking about this getting published, since
I was publishing a few other works with another company. My previous
experiences had taught me that stories with robots in them tend to be a hard sell.
I'm sure some readers are thinking, "There are famous works with robots
in them, aren't there?" Trust me, it really is difficult to get them published. It'd
take a long time to explain why, so I won't get into it here. Just know that it's a
fact.
That's why, in the beginning, I never thought this would actually be
published, so I wrote it very casually and it was a good change of pace for me. I
just went into it thinking things like "What should I have Liam do next?" Or
"How would Liam solve this problem?" And "I want to write an even meaner
character!" I decided to make the setting really extreme, with battleships
thousands of meters long and fleets numbering in the tens of thousands. Like I
said, I was writing what I wanted without worrying about the book being
published.
Then OVERLAP approached me about turning the story into a novel. I
knew it wasn't really suited for it and that it had a lot of characters and
humanoid weapons. I thought it would be a lot of work to novelize it. At first, I
was like "Huh? Seriously?" but I eventually had to accept that it would become a
published novel.
OVERLAP's amazing, huh? They really made this into a proper novel.
And now it's even getting a manga! It's practically a miracle.
There were all sorts of interesting things that happened in the novelization
process, but I'm starting to run out of space, so I'll leave it at that. In any case,
what I wanted to say was that in the beginning, this work was only intended to
advertise my other works. That's all you really need to remember.
This ended up taking more space than I thought, but that's basically how
this series became published. This series is one that was once finished online and
might never have become published like this. It only came about because of the
comments I got from people who were eager to read more, so I ended up
continuing it. Stuff like that really does happen, huh?
I've had a lot of fun writing this series, so I want to keep working on it. I
plan on writing even more stories for my readers to enjoy, so please keep up
your support!
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