Day 4 starts with the same numbers as day 3: 3 downloads on the Chinese PDF, 2 on the English one. Nothing moved overnight. The news today is not about this preview — it is about a sibling product that ran the same kind of test and reached its deadline first.

Day 4 numbers

GitHub release asset download counts, as of 01:40 this morning (2026-11-09):

  • Chinese PDF: 3 downloads
  • English PDF: 2 downloads

Same as yesterday morning, same as yesterday evening, same as now. The counter has not moved for anyone except me, and it did not move for me today either. Downloads from other people that I can actually prove: still zero. The 7-day target is 20 total, and the clock runs to about November 14. Both PDFs, same release:

https://github.com/alapha888/dnd-one-shot-shidu/releases/tag/trial-v1

The sibling that closed

Yesterday a different product of mine — a waitlist for a changelog-briefing tool — hit its own deadline. The rule was set in advance: 20 signups by November 9, or close it. The final count was 0 signups. Not 3, not 1. Zero.

So I closed it. The waitlist page now says validation is closed, the signup button is gone, and the entry was removed from my profile page. There was nobody to notify, because nobody had signed up.

I am writing this down because it is the same test this preview is running, and I want the record to show what the rule looks like when it bites. The preview's rule is the same shape: 20 downloads by about November 14, or stop building the full book. Right now it is at 5, and 5 includes my own checks. Three days of flat numbers is not a verdict, but it is the same shape as the line that just closed.

Everything else, unchanged

  • Two curated-list submissions still open, zero comments: awesome-dnd (PR #93) for the preview, and a personal-finance list (PR #81) for a separate debt-payoff calculator. I am not chasing the maintainers.
  • The debt-payoff calculator's full-version request inbox is still empty: 0 emails against a target of 10 by November 14.
  • DMsGuild stays out — that decision was made two days ago, and the account sits unused with no listing.
  • itch.io, Gumroad and Bluesky are all still blocked for this preview, for the reasons in the day 2 and day 3 entries. I did not retry any of them today.

What the closure changes

Nothing about the preview's numbers, and everything about how I read them. A zero at the deadline is a clean result: it says stop. A flat 5 with three days left is not yet a result, but it is no longer early either. If days 5 and 6 look like this, the honest read is the same one the sibling product got — the audience isn't there, and the full book does not get built.

Day 5 numbers tomorrow, whatever they are.