Royal Road for Beginners: Answering Every Question about Launching Your Web Fiction

Among the popular outlets for publishing webfiction, Royal Road remains a top destination for its usability, popularity and supportive community of authors.

Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity of webfiction, particularly in the LitRPG genre, and readers in discussion spaces are always hungry for more. Progression Fantasy and GameLit also remain very popular among serial fiction readers.

Royal Road is by no means the only place where webfiction thrives, but it does have some specific genres that do well there.

Although these scenes are evolving over time, one thing is constant: new authors have questions. Every day on the Royal Road forums and subreddit, writers who are new to the platform or to publishing web fiction in general show up with questions. Much of the wisdom is buried within years-old forum posts or reddit comments.

So in an attempt to pull it all together into one easy-to-find place, here are all the questions I see time and time again for writers who are new to Royal Road. From specifics of the craft of writing serialized fiction to the nuances of the marketing and leveraging the platform, I hope this helps you as you begin your webfiction publishing journey.

Note: Some of these answers are from personal experience, some are from observation, and others are from the wisdom shared by successful writers on the platform. I have done my best to link sources wherever possible.

Q: What do I need to do to launch a story?

Here is a short checklist of considerations to have in order by the time you are ready to launch your story.

• Do you have a sizable “backlog” or queue of chapters to post? You should avoid publishing chapters the same day you wrote them, if possible. This gives you time to correct mistakes with fresh eyes, and helps you avoid plot holes.
• Do you have a blurb? The blurb, or fiction description, will make or break readers. You can edit and refine it to your heart’s content after you launch your story.
• For new writers starting from scratch with no base of followers on Royal Road or any other platform, consider participating in shout-out swaps and review swaps. These are organized on the forums and are not against the rules.
• Shout-outs are notes in the pre-chapter area that authors use to support one another, like a little commercial for another fiction. Typically these are reciprocated between two authors to drive their readers to one another’s fictions. If you have shoutout verbiage you want used, feel free to write it ahead of time and share it with authors who agree to shout you out — they’ll probably be happy that you have saved them some work. Shout-outs can also be HTML code. It is recommended that you have a canned block of shout-out code at the ready to share with other authors.
• Review Swaps are an agreement to read (some of) one another’s fictions, and leave a review. (Note: They are not necessarily an agreement to leave a 4 or 5 star review. Try to get an idea of how brutal of a critic someone is before agreeing to a review swap.) Having numerous reviews on your fiction add a sense of reach and visibility, which may benefit you even if they are mediocre or outright bad. When authors do review swaps, they are usually for Advanced Reviews, which need to be at least 200 words long to publish and have individual scores for Overall Score, Style, Story, Grammar, and Character. Conventionally, review swaps expect to read 10,000 words of one another’s fictions before reviewing. When going into a review swap, keep in mind that while your honest opinion is valuable to readers, the overall goal is not to drag one another down or lord mistakes over each other but to support one another mutually.

Q: Can I post a story to Royal Road if it is not LitRPG?

A: It’s true that the readership of Royal Road skews toward the LitRPG genre. However, as many commenters have said every time this is asked on the forums or subreddit, many of the top-rated and most wildly successful stories are not LitRPG stories. (Mother of Learning, Beware of Chicken, etc.)

Progression Fiction, GameLit, Cultivation, Xianxia and Wuxia, Isekai and other genres may share some DNA and overlap significantly, and can sometimes perform well with the LitRPG audience. But again, not everyone reading webfiction is looking for LitRPG stories. There is also plenty of demand for Romantic Fantasy, traditional Fantasy, Science Fiction, and other genres and subgenres.

Ultimately, growing your reader base is about getting in front of the right eyeballs, which takes patience and some active marketing work and self-promotion on your part.

Q: I have started publishing my story, but it doesn’t have many views. How do I get more views on my story?

A: The conventional wisdom on this question is that if your story is good, and you publish chapters on a consistent basis, you will accumulate readers over time. If you have just started, don’t worry if it is not skyrocketing to number one. Royal Road has a few discovery mechanisms that will get more eyeballs on your story via the website. For example, recent chapter posts will show up briefly on the Latest Updates page, which can be filtered by genre.

However, you do not have to leave it all up to chance and slow organic growth. Many Royal Road writers strive to appear on the Rising Stars list early on. More on this later down the page.

Q: Somebody gave me a bad rating! Why did they do that? Will my fiction ever recover?

A: There are a million reasons why someone might have rated your fiction 0.5 or 1 stars, but it’s not the end of the world. Maybe someone was having a bad day. Maybe they didn’t like your cover art. It’s possible they were a troll or a bot. You should expect some low ratings at some point as you gain more views, because your story isn’t for everyone. That’s normal.

However, it’s certainly not doing you any favors early on. If you don’t have many reviews, this rating will have an inordinate power and drag your average review down. (For example, if you have four 5-star ratings and someone drops a 0.5 rating on you, that sinks your average rating from 5 to 3.88, as the site rounds to two decimal places.) If, heaven forbid, it is your only review, then 0.5 is your overall average score.

If this happens, assume it is temporary until you get enough reviews to course-correct. That said, overall review scores may have some truth in them. If your writing is filled with grammatical and punctuational errors, this may affect your score as well.

Q: Can I ask friends and other authors to give me a good rating?

A: Generally, Royal Road’s rating system is intended to reflect what people think about your story. The website takes a hard stance against trying to manipulate their mechanics or game the review system, even if that activity happens offsite. For example, in 2023, the site moderation team caught wind of an expansive review manipulation effort and permanently banned offenders.

Review swaps are okay, but there is an expectation that these reviews are honest.

Q: I see a big dropoff in views after my first chapter. What am I doing wrong?

A: It is expected that there will always be the most views on early chapters. That’s normal, because people browse webfiction stories. Very few readers need more than one or two chapters to decide whether or not a story is for them.

That said, keep an eye out for sudden drops in views on specific chapters. There may be something on that chapter that readers do not like — a mistake, a typo, or in some cases a development that doesn’t sit well with them.

Q: What’s the best time of day to publish my chapters?

A: Time of day is much less important than having a good story. However, a small bump in your views may be gained by publishing just a few minutes after the top of the hour. The reasoning is that, since most scheduled updates go at the start of the hour, this affords you more time to be on the Latest Updates list. Although the chapter scheduler is a dropdown, you can also edit the publish time to exactly what time you want.

Q: Which day of the week should I publish chapters?

A: There is not a widely agreed-upon day that works better than other days. You should aim for whatever schedule you are able to maintain consistently, because that is more important to the readers you do have. Also, many authors display their posting schedule somewhere in their fiction description so that readers know how often to expect new chapters.

Q: What is Rising Stars? How can I be featured on Rising Stars?

A: Rising Stars is a list of fictions that have gotten a lot of activity, and are thus presumed by the algorithm as surging in popularity. Please be aware that, like Google and other proprietary discovery algorithms, this is a black box. The proprietors of Royal Road do not share its functional details, but the userbase has learned a lot about how it works — although that could change at any moment based on uncommunicated changes to the algorithm.

(You may not even know you’re on it. There is no notification built into the system to let you know — you just have to check yourself.)

At time of writing, here is what appears to give you the best chances of getting on Rising Stars.

• The Day 1 Protocol: Once your story is approved, begin a rapid posting of chapters — multiple per day for the first few days. It is believed that there is a minimum of 20,000 words to qualify for Rising Stars, or at least that there is a penalty to appearing there until you cross that threshold. So, try to reach 20,000 words published as soon as possible.
• The Month 1 Protocol: Continue posting at a pace of a chapter per day for at least a month before scaling back to your “cruising speed” chapter schedule.
• During this first month, focus on garnering reviews and comments, which tell the algorithm, “Hey, people are responding to this fiction! It must be important and popular!”
• Self-promote wherever you are allowed, such as the various subreddits like /r/royalroad, /r/litrpg, /r/progressionfantasy, and so on. An influx of users seeing your story will help.

Although it can be a stressful truth for creative writers who want to focus on story creation, the fact remains that if you get enough viewers, you can get more viewers. Hitting Rising Stars early on can set a very different level of activity for your story going forward.

If you don’t hit Rising Stars in your first weeks or months, it is not the end of the world. However, it seems to be rare for stories to reach the Rising Stars list later on in its shelf-life.

Q: Is it worth it to take out an ad on Royal Road?

A: Ads can be a good way to increase your views and awareness of your story, but they will not guarantee return readers. Before you run an ad, consider what people will see when they click through: Do you have a substantial number of chapters, and is the latest one recent? Do you have a compelling blurb / fiction description? Does your cover art give them an idea of what to expect?

The Royal Road subreddit regularly has authors reporting their results of running an ad.

Q: What art should I use for my ad?

A: Your ad’s art should give viewers an instant idea of what to expect. They will not realistically spend more than a second or two looking at it before they decide whether or not to click through.

You can create the art yourself if you have the skill, or commission a work on a social network or gig platform like Fiverr. It is probably safe to say that the vast majority of ads on Royal Road use AI-generated imagery, although this may be anecdotal. That said, there is some evidence that low-effort memes may work better, likely because they are funny and stand out.

Many ads also feature a small “word cloud” of what to expect, such as LitRPG, cultivation, slow burn, or other facets of the story that help set expectations.

Q: How often do I need to post chapters?

A: There is no set-in-stone answer to this. However, the gold standard is daily chapter publishing. If this seems like a tall order for you, find a posting cadence that you can keep up with and grow your audience at a natural pace. Many successful stories post three times a week.

Q: Where can I get good cover art for my webfiction?

A: If you have design or artistic skills, you can create your own art. If not, consider commissioning cover art from artists and designers on your social media platform of choice, or a gig work platform such as Fiverr. You might also look into using something like Canva to create covert art, although you may run into limitations to your creativity.

A brief session of clicking around Royal Road will show that an enormous amount of writers use AI to generate their book cover art (although this may not account for the title typography, and so on). Be sure that your prompt includes proper dimensions for the cover art, as Royal Road allows cover sizes of up to 400 x 600 pixels.

While the ethics of directly selling AI-generated art are dubious at best, leveraging it instead to attract new readers within the platform is widely accepted among users. Please note that many webfiction authors consider the use of AI a temporary measure until they have an actual budget to commission actual art.

Q: Can I make money publishing on Royal Road?

A: As long as it’s not fanfiction, Royal Road lets you monetize your work by adding a link to your PayPal or Patreon. Upon submitting your new fiction for approval, you will have to check a box indicating whether it is fanfiction. If checked, you will not have access to those links.

Q: How do I build a following of readers on Royal Road?

A: Establishing a readership involves some core responsibilities on your part, such as consistent publishing and having a good story. But the first key takeaway should be to manage expectations of those discovering your story. Have a compelling and accurate fiction description, tagged properly and with a clear posting schedule.

Shout-out swaps, review swaps, being present on the forums are important to drive engaged readers to your story as well. This is free, but takes time.

Additionally, you can do some marketing on social media. Certain genres such as LitRPG and Progression Fantasy have active communities on reddit. Facebook has yielded some benefits for some. However, the platform formerly known as Twitter is no longer a growth platform for free users. Although there are valid concerns about privacy practices, TikTok remains the platform with the most generous algorithm for reach, and has the highest viral potential for advertising your fiction, given compelling imagery and judicious use of hashtags. Note that you cannot include a link in your TikTok bio until you have at least 1,000 followers, but you can still make a call to action for people to search for your webfiction.

Q: How successful should I be after a month of posting?

A: This depends on so many things that it is not possible to answer quantitatively. If you follow the “Month 1 Protocol” for Royal Road growth, your success will come down to whether or not your fiction has appeared on the Rising Stars list (overall or for a specific genre). If you haven’t, don’t lose heart. Just keep publishing chapters consistently and keep up the good work.

Many find instant success in their first month. These are often a confluence of good writing, good cover art, good Day 1 / Month 1 algorithmic practices (a huge early chapter dump), and crucially having the exact written product that excels on Royal Road — a LitRPG or other Progression Fantasy story that embraces the tropes readers want to read while providing some kind of twist on the formula.

Q: How much of a backlog should I build up before I begin posting my webfiction?

A: Your “queue” or “backlog” of words or chapters depends on your writing speed and your chosen publishing speed. This can easily be calculated by answering this question: If you got sick and had to stop writing temporarily, how long could you go before you ran out of chapters to publish?

Before you go live with your story, be sure to give yourself a healthy backlog that accounts for both the Day 1 and Month 1 Protocols explained above (quickly dumping 20,000 words, then maintaining a chapter per day for a month). If you have a Patreon that allows readers to access advance chapters, factor that in as well — your free readers matter, but if you don’t deliver what is promised to your paid readers, you will lose them.

Q: How long should my chapters be?

A: This varies per author, but conventional wisdom seems to be that chapters should not be under 1,000 words or so.

Q: How long should my story run?

A: Some say forever, some say they won’t read a story until it is tagged “Completed.”

Q: Where is the Royal Road Discord server?

A: There was, and at some point it was made private for unknown reasons. There is no publically available, official Royal Road discord at this time.

Q: What are some other best practices for publishing on Royal Road?

A: In general, read other fictions and keep an eye out for shout-out and review swap requests. Support other writers and be present in the website forums. Publish chapters consistently and interact with comments on your fiction. There are many finer points to using Royal Road successfully that are beyond the scope of this Beginner’s Guide, but know that you can always reach out to the community for assistance, and there are no dumb questions. See the next question for some relevant information on this.

Q: Where is that post about running my story like a business?

A: It’s right here. This 2022 post by TheFirstDefier, author of Defiance of the Fall (which currently stands at over 5 million views) is chock full of usable insider information. Bookmark it and return to it frequently.

It’s always great to see those who have found success on the platform paying it forward to up-and-coming writers. While a discovery algorithm and strong popularity among certain niches benefit Royal Road greatly, its strongest feature is a community that supports and depends on one another.

Enjoy the community features of this website, and happy writing!

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William Flattener is writing the GameLit comedy Commander Z and the Game Fellows, an unhinged parody of a nostalgic 1980s cartoon. He is also building the Progression Fantasy, LitRPG and GameLit Alliance (PLAGA), a network of independent writers of webfiction who want to support one another from the start.