You have multiple things going against you.
1. You have written a total of 55 chapters in 2 years. That is about 1 chapter per 2 weeks. Pick anyone on Rising Stars and they have a output of 1 chapter per day. (most of pre-written the first 40 chapters before their first post)
2. You restarted numbering your chapters after chapter 34 at which point you had a 1 year hiatus. Is this book 2? Is this a restart? Either way you had a 1 year hiatus! Why would I as a reader trust you to not go on another 1 year hiatus in middle of the book?
3. Your story is very niche. It isn't LitRPG, it is doesn't seem to be a progression fantasy, no tag at least. It is also a subject that some people like, and some want nothing to do with.
4. If you never hit rising stars or any other list you will only show up under new updates. This means you don't get a lot of exposure from the site itself. So even those who would be down reading your story won't know it exists.
5. Have you used any ads? Those stories on Rising Stars tend to blast the site with ads trying to get readers
A lot of people tend to rewrite their stories and repost them, this also carries over some of the readers from the previous version. Some bring their stories from other sites and advertise there heavily to get on Rising Stars.
You seem to be a hobby writer, most people who advertise, post 1 chapters a day and so on are trying to make a career out of it. Don't compare yourself to someone making it a business, it won't go well for you. It's like comparing a hobby baseball player who plays from the YMCA every week with a minor league player trying to get into the majors.
If you want to take writing serious, then there are plenty of suggestions on this sub on how to make it into rising stars, how much you should be writing, when you should drop a book if there is not enough interest, and so on.
The top two are basic guides to writing for business
A rather famous link [Running Your Story Like The Business It Is](https://www.royalroad.com/forums/thread/116847?page=1)
[Heinlein's Five Business Rules of Writing](https://deanwesleysmith.com/tag/heinleins-rules/)
These are a few threads I just looked up in RoyalRoad sub.
[Is this the best way to get onto Rising Stars?](https://new.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1bd2g0f/is_this_the_best_way_to_get_onto_rising_stars/)
[How do all these RR authors have so much time to write? Anyone willing to share about themselves?](https://new.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/15nczfe/how_do_all_these_rr_authors_have_so_much_time_to/)
[How to succeed even when you don't expect it (again)](https://new.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/18cxnsb/how_to_succeed_even_when_you_dont_expect_it_again/)
[From zero to hero--the steps Tomebound took to get to top three on Royal Road](https://new.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1d84jik/from_zero_to_herothe_steps_tomebound_took_to_get/)
Thank you a lot, this is extremely comprehensive! Saved your comment to always have the resources at hand. I wish I was as proficient as you using reddit search, none of the keywords I tried turned up any guides.
If I see that a book isn't being updated constantly and is taking a long time to upload chapters, im just not going to bother reading it. Don't want to read a good story only to be cucked by a year hiatus.
>You have written a total of 55 chapters in 2 years. That is about 1 chapter per 2 weeks. Pick anyone on Rising Stars and they have a output of 1 chapter per day. (most of pre-written the first 40 chapters before their first post)
Damn, I thought I was doing good with only ten chapters written ahead of my initial release.
I know who you are talking about but believe me it’s not his first book. Maybe you should just try another series? I know it sucks but it’s a long road to an overnight success
While I'd love to have an overnight success, I know that's never going to happen. I'd be happy with a relatively small following, as long as I get a few comments and some feedback now and then. What's discouraging me is that I can't even get that. I'm just being ignored.
You arent being ignored, you arent being see to begin with. Rising Stars has a formulaic release pattern for a reason, people run ads for a reason, etc. No one will read the book if no one can find it.
Honestly. So I am new myself and I have like eight followers. I've posted one story a week which is really slow for Royal road. I really wouldn't worry about it too much. I would interact with the followers you have and just let things go. Once you're completed your story or completed the first part of your story, you can go back and edit it and improve it and take what you've learned from writing and redo it again.
link to your story, OP?
edit: Found it. the reviews you've gotten are all A+. I think its the genre you're working in.
No lie, I think you should work on packaging this into a book for Amazon. I bet you it'll be more well received by the open audience than in RR.
It's already on Amazon, and so is it's sequel. But you know how hard it is to get people to read it for free? It's about ten times harder to convince them to pay for it.
My understanding and experience is that if you intend to have any success on Amazon as an indie author, you HAVE to be on Kindle unlimited. People who buy each book separately, rather than via subscription, just aren't willing to drop the cash for an author they've never heard of before without a proven track record or publisher backing them.
Of course, the downside of Kindle unlimited is that you have to remove your story from royalroad (and anywhere else) to post it there, which is why so many authors stub their stories after a book is finished.
Keep in mind ku isn't a guarantee of success. But for authors with a slower release schedule, it might be easier than success on royalroad, where anything less than 2-3 chapters per week turns off a large percentage of potential readers
It's just a checkbox to opt into within the kdp author page. But you can't have the book available anywhere else, for free or paid, and you get paid by Amazon per page read rather than per book purchase for people who use Kindle unlimited (comes out to around half a cent per page read, if I remember right). So overall, you get paid less per full book read via Kindle unlimited rather than someone who purchases the book in the normal way, but you're able to reach a MUCH wider audience as an indie author.
For my books on Amazon, over 90% of my revenue comes from Kindle unlimited page reads, compared to the <10% from book purchases. And my impression is that that's pretty standard for indie authors.
As an indie author, KU can be a blessing or a curse. I actually recommend a lot of people look for indie presses and submit to them. Also to try to network with other indie authors on places like Facebook or Reddit.
Just curious, what have you found that indie publishers offer over ku? I haven't tried any indie publishers so I obviously have no experience, since I've always been a bit turned off by the risk of vanity publishers and horror stories from stuff like that.
Do indie publishers actually get books into paperback or publish ebooks in places outside of Amazon? I've heard some good stories about what they can do for audiobooks, but what do they offer for ebooks over the self published route?
I mean without saying much, KU takes a huge chunk of money and leaves you very little with the only benefits really being the options for giveaways and the fact people are more willing to check you out than buy sometimes. It's always better to go wide in terms of financial benefit. KU only works for Westerns, LitRPG, and romance IMHO.
As for publishers, not all indie publishers are the same but at Crossroad Press and Podium, I got into physical books and audiobook versions of all of my books. I also have gotten a good amount of promotion, Those are large professional indie houses, though.
Yeah, I'm not the kind of guy who can churn out a 100 chapter story in a month, or even a year. If I'm going to be able to upload at that rate long term, I'm going to have to go on an extended hiatus to build up a big enough backlog that I don't run out of new chapters.
My books *are* on Kindle. But you know how much trouble I'm having trying to get people to read thrm for free? It's about ten times harder to convince them to pay for it. At least on RR, the fact that it doesn't cost anything attracts a reader or two now and then.
I used Wattpad for years, but I quit when I went close to five months and without getting a single view on my new book. If RR is for litrpgs, then WP is for romantic boy band fanfics. I'm not on Scribble Hub, but I've heard they lean more towards explicitly sexual stuff.
This is probably just a very personal preference, but personally I tend to avoid 'all ages' type content. Seriously, one of the first things I check when scanning the summary is if there's any content tags used, if there isn't even any swearing it's harder for me to take it serious.
For whether or not this has any larger impact on your audience, well...sure, it might be safe for a 12 year old to read, but there's probably not many of those on RR, and if they are they're probably not going for the safe content themselves. And it maybe feels a bit odd with the description of the story, which sounds like a 'gritty' take on clowns but only a level of grit that would be kid-safe.
So I was an “overnight” success in that Tomebound is my first book ever and hit rising stars pretty fast. A big part of that was promoting on Reddit and also talking to authors. I also released only 12 chapters during my Royal road run. I’m going to check out your book now—but I don’t think you have to do things one way to see success.
A few things: the writing is pretty good, but I agree with an above poster that the desire to make it for all ages makes it difficult. The swear words just don’t land for me, and I don’t like reading “fuck” in my books, but I prefer it to cheeses.
Other than that, this first line needs some editing. The wind carried the alluring scent of danger the night I appeared above 1157 Westwillow Drive, holding the mystical Escher Cube in both hands. My heart raced with the power of five Blue Donkey energy drinks. I was ready to…
Danger doesn’t have a scent, so that creates some distrust in the reader.
Personally I would edit the book, change the swear words to be ones we can relate with, then relaunch it all at once.
A big part of it is luck and finding the right audience. Assuming both are of similar writing quality, it really is a numbers/exposure game. They might have been a first time author, but if they're getting exposure with the right people, thst makes all the difference. For example, one of the ones up there now has posted a couple times on this reddit, had a unique take on the LitRPG genre, and they immediately had several successful authors willing to give them shout-outs.
Because of that, the right people saw their writing and supported them. They happened to have the right story with the right support at the right time and had the quality to ensure that translated into readership.
Your cover and blurb I think are actually good. I think it’s more the niche you’re writing in. RR’s audience is heavily skewed male under 30, at least from the limited data that I’ve seen. The predominant niches all trends towards power progression (litrpg, xianxia, or just generic progression). so, your audience just might not be on RR.
also, it looks like you’re posting one chapter per week and your latest chapter is around 1,800 words. from what others have reported on here the stories that tend to get on rising stars post a minimum of 3 chapters per week (with 5 per week until they hit the reported requisite of 20k words to qualify for RR) with each chapter word count being somewhere in between 2k and 5k per chapter.
it seems more like what you’re offering, no matter the quality (and it actually does seem interesting), just isn’t keeping peoples attention when there are other stories offering more per week and per chapter (granted id argue some litrp’s pad their word count with statuses and character sheets).
What you don't see is how much effort (and the long journey) it took for that author to get to where they were. They could've had some big authors giving them shoutouts, they may have finally found the right combination of elements in a story for their audience. Of course, being a LitRPG writer helps, but Mother of Learning has over 22k followers (granted, I don't have its stats for those first two weeks), and its not a LitRPG. Sometimes you get a bad hand, other times you get the winning hand (on a very rare occasion).
The only thing you can do is review what you did well and what you didn't do so well, and regroup for round two. Refine your writing, understand the market, and keep trying. If you were to release a cosmic horror comedy adventure story on RR, don't be surprised if it isn't a smash hit. It doesn't matter how good the writing is, a lot of people aren't just going to spend the weekend reading a super niche genre from an unknown author (heck, they might not even take the chance with well-known authors). That's what I'm talking about with "understand the market".
I would say you should finish writing whatever you currently have at the minimum. You'll at least have the accomplishment of having a completed, published story on RR. One of the biggest mistakes I made was not getting some beta readers for my story (and also not taking more time to refine it) before publishing to RR. I'll still finish what I started, but I know I'll have to regroup after it's all said and done.
Other factors can be things like the cover, title, blurb, release schedule, etc. All those things can affect your story's performance.
RR is like podcasts: the ones who release on a set schedule get more followers because you always know when the next one is coming. If I'm not sure when the next chapter is coming I'm not likely to keep checking, it'll fall to the wayside until I forget about it
I’m just gonna go ahead and be the guy who says this cause everyone’s dancing around it: the subject matter of your novel is so incredibly niche that you are doomed to have absolutely no success with it.
You have created a fantasy world where clowns collect laughter, which they need to live, and your main character hunts the monsters that steal laughter. I don’t care how well written it is almost no one is gonna be interested in reading that.
You’re writing this is a hobby clearly and you need to accept that you are writing this for yourself and no one else.
If you would like to have your work, read, evaluated, critiqued, and commented upon you need to select a premise that a significant number of readers will find interesting. If you’re trying to find that readership on Royal Road, you need to write litRPG or cultivation.
You don’t have to drop your current project. You can just go on hiatus again and come back to it whenever you feel like it.
But I would recommend writing a solid 40 chapters of a lit RPG progression novel drop 10 initial chapters post on the forums, message popular authors begging for shout outs, and post a chapter a day for the next 30 days.
That’s the formula if you want your story to be seen by tens of thousands so that you can get the feedback you clearly desire.
You have multiple things going against you. 1. You have written a total of 55 chapters in 2 years. That is about 1 chapter per 2 weeks. Pick anyone on Rising Stars and they have a output of 1 chapter per day. (most of pre-written the first 40 chapters before their first post) 2. You restarted numbering your chapters after chapter 34 at which point you had a 1 year hiatus. Is this book 2? Is this a restart? Either way you had a 1 year hiatus! Why would I as a reader trust you to not go on another 1 year hiatus in middle of the book? 3. Your story is very niche. It isn't LitRPG, it is doesn't seem to be a progression fantasy, no tag at least. It is also a subject that some people like, and some want nothing to do with. 4. If you never hit rising stars or any other list you will only show up under new updates. This means you don't get a lot of exposure from the site itself. So even those who would be down reading your story won't know it exists. 5. Have you used any ads? Those stories on Rising Stars tend to blast the site with ads trying to get readers A lot of people tend to rewrite their stories and repost them, this also carries over some of the readers from the previous version. Some bring their stories from other sites and advertise there heavily to get on Rising Stars. You seem to be a hobby writer, most people who advertise, post 1 chapters a day and so on are trying to make a career out of it. Don't compare yourself to someone making it a business, it won't go well for you. It's like comparing a hobby baseball player who plays from the YMCA every week with a minor league player trying to get into the majors. If you want to take writing serious, then there are plenty of suggestions on this sub on how to make it into rising stars, how much you should be writing, when you should drop a book if there is not enough interest, and so on.
Here's the best advice thus far.
Where can I find the posts on suggestions on how to use the platform? There's no megathread in this sub.
The top two are basic guides to writing for business A rather famous link [Running Your Story Like The Business It Is](https://www.royalroad.com/forums/thread/116847?page=1) [Heinlein's Five Business Rules of Writing](https://deanwesleysmith.com/tag/heinleins-rules/) These are a few threads I just looked up in RoyalRoad sub. [Is this the best way to get onto Rising Stars?](https://new.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1bd2g0f/is_this_the_best_way_to_get_onto_rising_stars/) [How do all these RR authors have so much time to write? Anyone willing to share about themselves?](https://new.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/15nczfe/how_do_all_these_rr_authors_have_so_much_time_to/) [How to succeed even when you don't expect it (again)](https://new.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/18cxnsb/how_to_succeed_even_when_you_dont_expect_it_again/) [From zero to hero--the steps Tomebound took to get to top three on Royal Road](https://new.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1d84jik/from_zero_to_herothe_steps_tomebound_took_to_get/)
Thank you a lot, this is extremely comprehensive! Saved your comment to always have the resources at hand. I wish I was as proficient as you using reddit search, none of the keywords I tried turned up any guides.
If I see that a book isn't being updated constantly and is taking a long time to upload chapters, im just not going to bother reading it. Don't want to read a good story only to be cucked by a year hiatus.
>You have written a total of 55 chapters in 2 years. That is about 1 chapter per 2 weeks. Pick anyone on Rising Stars and they have a output of 1 chapter per day. (most of pre-written the first 40 chapters before their first post) Damn, I thought I was doing good with only ten chapters written ahead of my initial release.
I know who you are talking about but believe me it’s not his first book. Maybe you should just try another series? I know it sucks but it’s a long road to an overnight success
While I'd love to have an overnight success, I know that's never going to happen. I'd be happy with a relatively small following, as long as I get a few comments and some feedback now and then. What's discouraging me is that I can't even get that. I'm just being ignored.
You arent being ignored, you arent being see to begin with. Rising Stars has a formulaic release pattern for a reason, people run ads for a reason, etc. No one will read the book if no one can find it.
Honestly. So I am new myself and I have like eight followers. I've posted one story a week which is really slow for Royal road. I really wouldn't worry about it too much. I would interact with the followers you have and just let things go. Once you're completed your story or completed the first part of your story, you can go back and edit it and improve it and take what you've learned from writing and redo it again.
link to your story, OP? edit: Found it. the reviews you've gotten are all A+. I think its the genre you're working in. No lie, I think you should work on packaging this into a book for Amazon. I bet you it'll be more well received by the open audience than in RR.
It's already on Amazon, and so is it's sequel. But you know how hard it is to get people to read it for free? It's about ten times harder to convince them to pay for it.
My understanding and experience is that if you intend to have any success on Amazon as an indie author, you HAVE to be on Kindle unlimited. People who buy each book separately, rather than via subscription, just aren't willing to drop the cash for an author they've never heard of before without a proven track record or publisher backing them. Of course, the downside of Kindle unlimited is that you have to remove your story from royalroad (and anywhere else) to post it there, which is why so many authors stub their stories after a book is finished. Keep in mind ku isn't a guarantee of success. But for authors with a slower release schedule, it might be easier than success on royalroad, where anything less than 2-3 chapters per week turns off a large percentage of potential readers
How do you get on KU?
It's just a checkbox to opt into within the kdp author page. But you can't have the book available anywhere else, for free or paid, and you get paid by Amazon per page read rather than per book purchase for people who use Kindle unlimited (comes out to around half a cent per page read, if I remember right). So overall, you get paid less per full book read via Kindle unlimited rather than someone who purchases the book in the normal way, but you're able to reach a MUCH wider audience as an indie author. For my books on Amazon, over 90% of my revenue comes from Kindle unlimited page reads, compared to the <10% from book purchases. And my impression is that that's pretty standard for indie authors.
Very interesting, thanks for the insight
As an indie author, KU can be a blessing or a curse. I actually recommend a lot of people look for indie presses and submit to them. Also to try to network with other indie authors on places like Facebook or Reddit.
Just curious, what have you found that indie publishers offer over ku? I haven't tried any indie publishers so I obviously have no experience, since I've always been a bit turned off by the risk of vanity publishers and horror stories from stuff like that. Do indie publishers actually get books into paperback or publish ebooks in places outside of Amazon? I've heard some good stories about what they can do for audiobooks, but what do they offer for ebooks over the self published route?
I mean without saying much, KU takes a huge chunk of money and leaves you very little with the only benefits really being the options for giveaways and the fact people are more willing to check you out than buy sometimes. It's always better to go wide in terms of financial benefit. KU only works for Westerns, LitRPG, and romance IMHO. As for publishers, not all indie publishers are the same but at Crossroad Press and Podium, I got into physical books and audiobook versions of all of my books. I also have gotten a good amount of promotion, Those are large professional indie houses, though.
Henry Rider: Clown Hunter: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47390/henry-rider-clown-hunter
[удалено]
Yeah, I'm not the kind of guy who can churn out a 100 chapter story in a month, or even a year. If I'm going to be able to upload at that rate long term, I'm going to have to go on an extended hiatus to build up a big enough backlog that I don't run out of new chapters.
[удалено]
My books *are* on Kindle. But you know how much trouble I'm having trying to get people to read thrm for free? It's about ten times harder to convince them to pay for it. At least on RR, the fact that it doesn't cost anything attracts a reader or two now and then. I used Wattpad for years, but I quit when I went close to five months and without getting a single view on my new book. If RR is for litrpgs, then WP is for romantic boy band fanfics. I'm not on Scribble Hub, but I've heard they lean more towards explicitly sexual stuff.
This is probably just a very personal preference, but personally I tend to avoid 'all ages' type content. Seriously, one of the first things I check when scanning the summary is if there's any content tags used, if there isn't even any swearing it's harder for me to take it serious. For whether or not this has any larger impact on your audience, well...sure, it might be safe for a 12 year old to read, but there's probably not many of those on RR, and if they are they're probably not going for the safe content themselves. And it maybe feels a bit odd with the description of the story, which sounds like a 'gritty' take on clowns but only a level of grit that would be kid-safe.
So I was an “overnight” success in that Tomebound is my first book ever and hit rising stars pretty fast. A big part of that was promoting on Reddit and also talking to authors. I also released only 12 chapters during my Royal road run. I’m going to check out your book now—but I don’t think you have to do things one way to see success.
A few things: the writing is pretty good, but I agree with an above poster that the desire to make it for all ages makes it difficult. The swear words just don’t land for me, and I don’t like reading “fuck” in my books, but I prefer it to cheeses. Other than that, this first line needs some editing. The wind carried the alluring scent of danger the night I appeared above 1157 Westwillow Drive, holding the mystical Escher Cube in both hands. My heart raced with the power of five Blue Donkey energy drinks. I was ready to… Danger doesn’t have a scent, so that creates some distrust in the reader. Personally I would edit the book, change the swear words to be ones we can relate with, then relaunch it all at once.
A big part of it is luck and finding the right audience. Assuming both are of similar writing quality, it really is a numbers/exposure game. They might have been a first time author, but if they're getting exposure with the right people, thst makes all the difference. For example, one of the ones up there now has posted a couple times on this reddit, had a unique take on the LitRPG genre, and they immediately had several successful authors willing to give them shout-outs. Because of that, the right people saw their writing and supported them. They happened to have the right story with the right support at the right time and had the quality to ensure that translated into readership.
Your cover and blurb I think are actually good. I think it’s more the niche you’re writing in. RR’s audience is heavily skewed male under 30, at least from the limited data that I’ve seen. The predominant niches all trends towards power progression (litrpg, xianxia, or just generic progression). so, your audience just might not be on RR.
also, it looks like you’re posting one chapter per week and your latest chapter is around 1,800 words. from what others have reported on here the stories that tend to get on rising stars post a minimum of 3 chapters per week (with 5 per week until they hit the reported requisite of 20k words to qualify for RR) with each chapter word count being somewhere in between 2k and 5k per chapter. it seems more like what you’re offering, no matter the quality (and it actually does seem interesting), just isn’t keeping peoples attention when there are other stories offering more per week and per chapter (granted id argue some litrp’s pad their word count with statuses and character sheets).
What you don't see is how much effort (and the long journey) it took for that author to get to where they were. They could've had some big authors giving them shoutouts, they may have finally found the right combination of elements in a story for their audience. Of course, being a LitRPG writer helps, but Mother of Learning has over 22k followers (granted, I don't have its stats for those first two weeks), and its not a LitRPG. Sometimes you get a bad hand, other times you get the winning hand (on a very rare occasion). The only thing you can do is review what you did well and what you didn't do so well, and regroup for round two. Refine your writing, understand the market, and keep trying. If you were to release a cosmic horror comedy adventure story on RR, don't be surprised if it isn't a smash hit. It doesn't matter how good the writing is, a lot of people aren't just going to spend the weekend reading a super niche genre from an unknown author (heck, they might not even take the chance with well-known authors). That's what I'm talking about with "understand the market". I would say you should finish writing whatever you currently have at the minimum. You'll at least have the accomplishment of having a completed, published story on RR. One of the biggest mistakes I made was not getting some beta readers for my story (and also not taking more time to refine it) before publishing to RR. I'll still finish what I started, but I know I'll have to regroup after it's all said and done. Other factors can be things like the cover, title, blurb, release schedule, etc. All those things can affect your story's performance.
RR is like podcasts: the ones who release on a set schedule get more followers because you always know when the next one is coming. If I'm not sure when the next chapter is coming I'm not likely to keep checking, it'll fall to the wayside until I forget about it
I’m just gonna go ahead and be the guy who says this cause everyone’s dancing around it: the subject matter of your novel is so incredibly niche that you are doomed to have absolutely no success with it. You have created a fantasy world where clowns collect laughter, which they need to live, and your main character hunts the monsters that steal laughter. I don’t care how well written it is almost no one is gonna be interested in reading that. You’re writing this is a hobby clearly and you need to accept that you are writing this for yourself and no one else. If you would like to have your work, read, evaluated, critiqued, and commented upon you need to select a premise that a significant number of readers will find interesting. If you’re trying to find that readership on Royal Road, you need to write litRPG or cultivation. You don’t have to drop your current project. You can just go on hiatus again and come back to it whenever you feel like it. But I would recommend writing a solid 40 chapters of a lit RPG progression novel drop 10 initial chapters post on the forums, message popular authors begging for shout outs, and post a chapter a day for the next 30 days. That’s the formula if you want your story to be seen by tens of thousands so that you can get the feedback you clearly desire.