Before proceeding any further, a good question to ask will be what success even means on Royal Road? The question is heavily dependent on who you are and what you wish to achieve from your own writing. If your goal is to have fun, and write a story for your entertainment, enjoy writing and share what you create, then your goals will be very different compared to someone aiming to earn a living off of writing.
This post will largely address success defined by gaining around 2000+ followers, and a decent income (Around $500) per month on Patreon. (This is not a full time income, please don’t jump into writing with hopes of going full time and no backup plan unless that’s the only option you have. It is NOT that easy to earn for a living from writing.)
The first step would be to learn how to write well, and consistently for long stories. But I’m assuming you are capable of that and going to skip that step.
Demographic and Target Audience
The second step would be to realise what to write. Realising what genre and trends and story types do well on the platform you are positng on and the audience you are trying to reach is the second important step. If you are posting on Wattpad, you’d want teen romances, YA stories and Vampires etc. On scribble hub anime-esque stories work a lot more (and other questionable stuff) and on Royal Road, well, we have a bit of a mess here.
On Royal Road, LitRPG is one of the most popular genre’s to write, followed closely by Isekai (usually combined with LitRPG) and then Cultivation/High Fantasy stories after that, and then Scifi. That is the general target audience of Royal Road. If you are writing a modern day teen romance, this is not the site for you. If you are writing a power fantasy, or a clever story that plays up on fantasy tropes and world building, or even a time loop fantasy story, or scifi, then Royal Road will provide a suitable platform for you to kickstart your career from.
Posting Schedule and Patreon
Now, once you have done some research and looked into what genre and target audience you’re going for, and gained an idea for your story. The next thing to do is to get a backlog. I cannot stress this point enough. Do NOT post as you write, not at first, keep a backlog and make it at least 10 chapters of around 2000 words per chapter. 2k words is the average word count that most authors aim for. The backlog will also help as you can put this on Patreon for 5 bucks etc.
The word count per week you will be aiming for lies between 6000 words to 12000 words a week. If you cannot write that quickly, then there is the more difficult way of writing a story that updates slowly, but is exciting enough to make people keep reading. In this case, I suggest having at least 3000 word chapters. But two 2000 chapters still work better due to how views and the followed story page works.
Frequent updates are the way to go. The standard few methods are a M-F upload schedule. That or M-W-F, or any other variation depending on how much you can write in a week.
Now for Patreon: The most common patreon tier system I’ve observed is a 3$ 5$ 10$ etc kind of escalation system. Where each tier above the previous one has a better money per chapter value. For example, you offer, 3 chapters for the 3$ tier. Then, you should offer 6 chapters for the 5$ tier, and 12 chapters for the 10$ tier. And so on and so forth. The specifics depend on how much you can write and your backlog once more.
Followers and where do they come from?
There are four sources for followers, which will be your primary ones. Only three of these can give you the 2000 follow count or above we are aiming for. They are Best Rated, Popular This Week, and Rising Stars.
The easiest list to get high on is Rising stars. For most new authors, it will take 21 days at the earliest before you can gain the follow count and rating required to get on to rising stars. The requirements are also quite decently high, but if you simply keep a consistent schedule and can post frequently (preferably Monday to Friday) then you will reach Rising eventually.
Before rising, the method to gain a following is Latest updates. On Royal Road, when you upload a chapter, for a brief period it gets to be on the front page among the newly updated stories, this is the main source of visibility before Rising stars, and this is where you will gain the early following that will get you to Rising stars.
Another method to get to Rising Stars, is by getting a shoutout from an already established fiction with a large following. This will most certainly get you to rising if you match your target audience and if the idea appeals to RR readers.
The Second method is to spam chapters, with a good idea and proper execution. By Spam I do not mean all chapters in a single day. But instead, something like daily uploads or two uploads everyday, for as long as your backlog will safely allow. This can get you enough visibility to get you high on Popular This Week, and the visibility will most likely feed into Best Rated rank, shooting you up, at least for a brief while.
The third method is to steadily keep posting and rise on Best Rated before Rising. And use the boost from there to reach Rising and grow explosively from there on out. You’d need a rank of under 200 on Best Rated, 100 is more accurate, and top 50 is where the real visibility is present. This is a really tough thing to aim for as you need a very high rating and a lot of ratings (around 50 at the very least) to get here, and a single 0.5 star can make you crash hard. Thus a non preferred method to grow.
Premise and Execution
A last section, in relation to the writing aspect. Due to how Royal Road works, your story will most likely be visible to 90% of it’s audience with only the first 20 or 30 chapters. And thus, getting the first 10 chapters, the synopsis and the premise right is key to doing well. It is all about finding the right idea, and executing well. The growth and success of a story is dependent on the first few chapters. So extra attention should be given to these aspects.
And that is about it, for my long rant on how to become a successful author on Royal Road, by my arbitrary standards of success.
Marketing and Networking
MARKETING. It is the thing, that you need to do, to get your story out there. It can include reddit posts, forums perhaps and or just knowing other authors.
RR has methods to gain visibility and if you don’t use those, and other platforms options then you are doing your story injustice. Know other authors, ask for shoutouts perhaps, help people out, be a positive to the writing community, etc etc. This is SO very important, more so than people ever realise. RR doesn’t exist in a vaccum, and neither do authors, it’s a community of people and knowing those people will help you in joining said community.
So, essentially, maybe get out of the writing caves, wander out into other author’s caves and have a chat. Perhaps you may get some inspiration from their efforts, or perhaps they may help you out and guide you in your endeavors. Just be a nice person, in the end, and try to reach out to people. Being shy about your work helps no one, be shameless and brazen as you boast about your amateur (or not amateur) attempts, and then get feedback from others on how to improve.
And here is our calling for author to post!
Before the launch of our platform, You could also have fun with our social media. And you would also free-ride our gorgeous ideas in our group and the link is as following:
Telegram: https://t.me/mesperyauthors
Contact: team@mespery.com
Let’s unlock the Mystery in Paper, Create Words, Make Money!
