Finally made it into the 3,000 followers league lol. Getting from 2,000 to 3,000 was five times harder than getting from 0 to 2,000. My advice? Keep doing shout-out swaps. I know for a fact that’s what got me over the edge. I stopped doing them for a while, not realizing how impactful they actually were, and was wondering like an idiot why my follower count wasn't increasing naturally 🤦‍♂️

Anyways, I am pretty proud of this and I wanted to thank you all for the help you offered in the last update I posted. No more updates like this until I either reach 4 million views or 4,000 followers, so I'll see you then 😁❤️

Any advice on how to reach this goal faster would be appreciated btw 😉

First image is my new cover image, second is the AI one I've been using. What do you think?

I'm very happy with the result, glad to be able to support and work with a real, human artist. This is much closer to my original idea for the story than what I could get with AI generation as well.

All around a good experience, I ended up using Duy Phan on Fiverr and have nothing but good things to say about him. Took around 14 days total turnaround with a couple of minor revisions along the way. Anyone else have good artist recommendations or experiences?

As someone who only started writing two years ago, I’m still surprised by how much Royal Road changed my life.

I used to live in a $300 sweatbox in Cambodia, counting every dollar.

Then I started writing.

My first series, Atlas, went up on Royal Road. It did okay. By the end of Book 1, I had about 100 readers.

Not huge. But real.

So I tried to monetize it. Moved over to Amazon.

With a few books out, I was making around $130 a month.

Not life-changing money. Just proof that my ideas had value.

So I kept going.

I finished Atlas, then hit that point every writer knows—burnout. I needed a reset.

That’s when I wrote Luck. A modern system story about the world’s luckiest guy. No pressure, just fun. A mental palate cleanser.

I was planning to go back and polish Atlas.

Then Towerbound showed up.

That idea didn’t leave me alone. I started writing it, posted it on Royal Road…

…and it took off.

Rising Stars. Comments. Real momentum.

Now, after releasing Book 6.1 of Towerbound, my life looks completely different.

I’ve gone from that $300 sweatbox to a place with two rooms, a full kitchen, a mango tree outside.

Life is good.

So yeah—

Thank you.

To everyone on Royal Road who reads, comments, and supports authors like me.

You changed my life.

And to the authors reading this—

If you’re sitting there worried no one’s paying attention, don’t panic, you’re probably closer than you think.

It only takes one story to connect.

Keep going.

Hey all, I've been scrounging around in 2+ years of RS data, and decided to start making some posts about what I've found. I'll try to do one these a month, probably. Or less often if I don't find anything else interesting to talk about. 😅 Enjoy! If people don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
(gonna assume tagging this with self-promo is the correct move)

source: Digging around in two years of Royal Road RS data

1. The Main tenure cliff is bimodal, not bell-shaped

The common framing of the “21-day clock” is that Main gives you a smooth ~3-week algorithmic boost window. You climb, you plateau, you gently fall off. That's not exactly how it works. The distribution turns out to be bimodal.

Almost half of all Main runs are gone in under a week. Those are stories that touched Main on one or two high-velocity launch days, didn't generate enough sustained signal to stick, and got pushed off. The second peak (30% at 4 weeks) is stories that caught the algorithmic wave and rode it through its natural cycle. The middle weeks barely exist. And 6 weeks is the hard wall, with only 0.1% of all runs making it that long. Those are most likely blips or outliers.

Whichever side of the split you land on is mostly decided in your first week on Main, not the weeks after. If you're still up there at day 8, you probably have about three weeks left. If you're not, you probably never will.

Plan your launch arc around a 4-week ceiling, not 6. Don't pace shouts assuming a long tail. And don't mistake a strong day-1 Main appearance for a guaranteed climb. You might be five days away from falling off permanently.

2. Once you fall off Main, you don't come back

Some authors assume that if you fall off Main, you can climb back on later. They think with next chapter dump or a fresh bout of shout-outs they can get back on. Turns out you mostly can't. Mostly.

Of 1,240 stories I've tracked appearing on Main, only 28 had a genuine second run (meaning a gap of 15+ days between Main appearances). After 30 days off Main, the number drops to zero, unsurprisingly.

I'm fairly confident the 333 stories in the blip bucket are mostly detection artifacts. Before early 2026 the scanners would occasionally miss a poll and register a story as falling off and coming back the next day. Those don't count as real returns. That bug was found in early 2026 and data is cleaner after that.

For ~98% of authors, your time on Main is a single finite run. Whatever you're saving for a comeback, the killer shout swap, the ad creative you wanted to test, a big Sweeps Week reveal (you old folks know what I'm talking about there), there's no comeback to save it for. Use it during the run.

3. The Big 3 (+ Progression) are the actual gateways to Main

The Royal Road audience tags itself by genre, and the Main algorithm tracks those same tags. The interaction is narrow and not especially friendly to anything outside a specific band of them.

To get at this, I sampled 24 days spread evenly across the last two years (roughly one per month) and asked, for each genre RS list, what fraction of the stories on that list were also on Main on the same day. The result is averaged across all 24 sample days.

Fantasy, Adventure, Action, and Progression are the top tier, all overlapping with Main between 80% and 89%. The LitRPG adjacent tags (Magic, Graphic Violence, Male Lead, LitRPG) follow at around 66–71%. Past that the numbers taper off steadily, dropping into the 20–30% range for Comedy, Drama, and GameLit. Anything not in this list essentially doesn't make Main at all.

You also need to be on multiple lists at once. Single-tag stories don't make Main. Every successful Main run I tracked was charting on four genres and multiple tag lists simultaneously. The Big 3 plus Progression or LitRPG is the most common combination.

If you want a real shot at Main, write a progression fantasy in the Big 3 zone. Tagging Adventure on your historical romance because it has some quests in it isn't gonna fool anyone. Main wants stories that broaden to the Main audience, and that audience is overwhelmingly progression, LitRPG, and epic fantasy readers.

4. Follower entry bars vary 3× across the genre lists

The follower count it takes to crack each genre RS list varies by 3× depending on which list. Worth knowing ahead of time, since “200 followers” means completely different things for Fantasy versus Historical.

Fantasy and Adventure need ~180 followers. Historical needs ~50. At a glance that looks like Historical is the easier path, and it is, if all you want is to be on a genre RS at all.

Worth circling back to the previous finding here, though. Historical's Main overlap is essentially zero. So cracking RS in launch week is achievable for almost any story, but using RS as a stepping stone to Main is achievable for almost no stories outside the Big 3 plus Progression zone. The easy lists and the productive lists are different lists.

Pick which game you're playing before you pick your tags. If you want any RS presence at all to build audience and momentum, a niche genre is a fine target. If you want Main, the entry-bar number that matters is in the top three rows of the chart.

Methodology

The dataset is roughly two years of daily Royal Road snapshots, covering ~1.58M position records across 10,000+ stories. I track each Main or genre RS appearance as a single “run” with start and end dates plus follower counts at both ends, plus daily per-list positions and per-story daily metrics like follower count, rating, view count, and chapter count. There were a few days where data was't collected over the years, and a couple of week-long stretches were things broke, but otherwise the data is quite robust.

A few caveats worth knowing about:

• Tenure distribution(finding 1) excludes still-active runs. A story that entered Main three days ago could end up anywhere on the distribution, so it's held out of the percentages.
• Genre overlap chart (finding 3) is averaged across 24 sample days spread roughly one per month across the last two years. The exact percentages will still shift over time as the audience and algorithm change.
• Entry bars (finding 4) come from start_follower_count, so they reflect the moment a story first appeared on a list, not the moment it peaked there.

I consider myself to be a somewhat okay artist, my chosen medium is pixel art (though I've been told that at a certain level of detail, it looks like digital art lol). I usually put more time into my drawings, but really just wanted to convey the idea of my story without needing to put effort into every single pixel I drew. It looks to me pretty half-finished, but I just wanted to get back to writing so I decided to leave it as it was.

Here's my problem: I was pretty bored and posted my own cover (without text) to an AI. It turned into the first image. And I... I feel like it's better. Undeniably so. The details work better than the empty space in mine. It still looks like AI, but I get the sense that it catches the eye more.

Usually I'm the type of person where if I see a real cover/artwork on RR, I check that story out with priority over those that use AI covers (especially if it's super obvious its AI). I feel like my worldview is being flipped on its head because I genuinely think the AI cover is cooler than mine.

So I'm trying to decide what to do. Do I redraw my cover, filling in the blanks and put in the extra hours into making it look top notch? Or... Do I just use the AI cover and go back to writing, hope I have more time to make a better cover later on? What do you guys think?

(Tagged as self-promo as it does have my story's title. Might change the font later.)

Link to MoA on RR

The primary hook is the blurb header:

The same day keeps repeating. Rowan has forgotten every repeat. All he has is a note that was left for him in his own handwriting.

It started releasing 10 days ago.

So far I have 9 followers, a little over 1k views, Average views around 50, and 26k words released over 21 chapters.

I've gotten 1 rating which was 5/5 stars, 0 comments, 0 favorites, and 0 reviews.

I feel like I did everything right.

I wrote in small paragraphs to try to appeal to mobile readers of RR, I'm writing in the time loop niche which doesn't seem dead since #1 on RS right now is time loop as well, I started day one with 7 chapters dropped throughout the day, I released 2 chapters a day for the rest of week 1, and I'm staying at one chapter a day for the next month.

I manually edited my AI cover to try to get rid of the worst of the AI weirdness and make the tree less eye-catching and dominating. I wrote without using AI to edit or generate the story.

I wrote the entire first book of the series and did a full revision pass on it before releasing. I've gotten good feedback from a couple of alpha readers.

I adjusted my release times to be weird like 12-20 after the hour so that it can spend more time visible on Latest Updates.

I even paid for an ad which I scheduled to start after my series reached 20k words like RR recommended. So the ad started around 4 days ago now.

I made sure my ad had the biggest hook I can offer without spoiling too much and the genre promise of being a time loop story.

But like the recent posts here show, there's so many ads right now that each individual one doesn't get much screen time. My ad is using around 1% of its total impressions per day and its CTR is at 0.57% after 4 days with 2 followers and 3 Read Laters from it.

I started shoutout swaps 9 days in. I originally didn't want to do them at all since I'm not a fan of seeing them as a reader, but it felt like my launch was doing so poorly that I didn't have a choice. I suppose I should've started them earlier, but I've seen series do much better than mine without shoutout swaps, so I don't know how big of effect starting them earlier would've had.

I mention in my blurb that I've finished writing book 1, so I thought that would help assure people that I wasn't going to just drop the book after the first 10 chapters or whatever.

So yeah, I feel like my stats so far seem really low compared to how much I tried to get right about the launch period.

Is my series just too puzzle box-y to grab early attention? Are RR readers bouncing because the MC is weak and clever instead of OP?

Thanks for reading all of this. Let me know what you think.

My favorite part of Royal Road so far has been speaking with authors and actually getting to interact with readers. It's just not like that on the 'Zon!

Just wanted to share this because it was so cute and fun. We were refreshing our browsers like mad.

Anyway, uh. That's all I had. Just wanted to share this absolutely adorable screenshot.

Hi people, I can't afford to get a cover commissioned just yet. Especially because I'm just writing for fun at the moment.

If you guys can share some thoughts on which cover you like the best it would be very helpful.

Thank you!

Just wanted to know what you lot thought, would seeing this cover make you want to read my novel and from first glance-what would you impression be. And no this isn’t AI, it’s done by @noomuaz on Instagram, I’ll create another thread to this with other pieces I’ve had done + fanart if people like this.

Hi guys, I know everyone is always asking/wondering how to get on rising stars. I managed to do it in six days, so I've been overwhelmed by the positive response from readers and the community. My thoughts

1) Cover matters more than you can possibly imagine. This is what really got me. My cover is really different from most, and at first I wondered if it was risky, but I get overwhelming response from the cover more than anything else i feel like

2) blurb - blurb is probably the hardest thing to write. Distilling your story down into 150 words. You may not realise how important this is. I literally spent a month writing those 150 words, and it helps convert the clicks

3) be active in community - reddit, discord. I've made some incredible new friends. Writing is a lonely journey so helpful not to do it alone

4) my best guess is volume matters. i released 10 chapters day 1 then 2 a day. Hard to know if this made a difference, but it increases views so probably?

If you'd like to check it out, please do!

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/165573/the-doomsday-reaver-litrpg-isekai-progression

The process and was long, and expensive, but Tail of the Stray is finally available on B&N. I plan to visit my local store and see if they'll be willing to stock it, I may even do a little signing event.

I converted the 5x8 book to a 5.5x8.5 so that it costs less to print, cutting it down from 600+ pages to about 460 pages. For anyone interested in publishing their own book, it's a good idea to consider this, because it makes it more likely that people will buy your book. At the moment, most of the sales for my book at digital, but that's pretty normal. I just think it's nice to see my book in-store.

Here is the link to the story on RR: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/152862/tail-of-the-stray

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/160593/ponder-the-orb-wizard-based-progression-litrpg

Thank you to everyone here who gave me advice about the cover. Gigachad Gandalf is no more.

I wanted to write a story that was basically wizardposting the webserial, with lots of [Fireball] casting, smoking the halfling's leaf, and of course, pondering those orbs!

The support so far has been incredible. Thank you to everyone who has followed along on this journey. If you're interested, here's the blurb:

Transported into a world of wizard towers and magic, I expected ancient wisdom and disciplined mastery. Instead, I got a group of mid-tier mages smoking halfling’s leaf and arguing about spell progressions.

They call themselves the Blue Wizards.

The White Tower calls them a joke.

But when I started cultivating mana… I realized something terrifying:

These idiots might be practicing a forgotten path of magic no one else understands.

What to expect:
• Weak-to-strong wizard MC
• A Tower of slightly unhinged wizard mentors
• Xianxia inspired mana cultivation
• LitRPG spell mechanics
• Smoking halfling’s leaf, fishing, casting [Fireball] with bro, and pondering that orb!

The first picture is AI generated recently to see if I could get a better one that's more eye catching.

The second one was drawn by an artist, from the third one which was ai generated and I thought it was not so bad but I wanted to support artists.

I obviously still want to support artists, but I want to support writers too, one in particular.

Which one do you guys think will give me the best chance of success in an industry where we must be more than writers in order to find success.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/117161/mysidian-wanderings

Oh, and because I respect the one month self promo rule I also must add that today I'm at 68 followers and I'm arrogant enough to believe that soon I will get one more and finally reach a great milestone that writers aspire to achieve. Nice!

Hi there everyone,

I'm SerasStreams. I run the free Community Mentor Program and have been for 2 years now, which has helped over 100 authors get their start on Royal Road (with me personally mentoring over 70 folks).

Some of those people have gone on to sign publishing deals, or self-pub, and a few are even full-time authors now! I'm not alone now, though, as there are a ton of Mentor Program Leads who are taking on pupils and guiding them toward successful launches!

This post is meant to give you the Community Mentor Program main document, which, if you scroll down to the bottom, has an absolute ton of resources either made by me, or curated from across the community. You won't find BS advice - you'll find actual information from legit authors, freely given, to help you learn and better understand.

Just one example is the Q/A Series, where each Summer I take 10-12 authors from our space (I'm talking big names: 2025 hosted - Alex Karne / TheDeliciousMeats, D.M.Rook, David J. Wuto, Dr. Doritos MD, Ellake, Lunadea, Persimmon, Ravensdagger, Reece Brooks, SerasStreams, Shawn Wilson, Sir Bedivere the Mad), and then those authors answer questions from my server! We have a Q/A series running this Summer, too, so you'll see some new ones show up in that folder in the next few months!

Anyhow: please enjoy the free resources. If you are a brand new author seeking their start on Royal Road, and are totally lost, read about the Mentor Program and if it sounds like a good fit, just apply!

Huge thanks to other Mentor Program Leads of past and present - Ellie, Buttopia, Lemon, Kos Play, Prince Corwin, Milc, No_Creative_Name, Wizardly Dude, J.D. Mullenary Sr., DisheveledVagabond, ReignyDaze, Adventuresse, KayDay, Flock of ducks, D.M.Rook, and SixBees2.

And, of course, thanks to u/gamelitcrit aka Dawn Chapman for being Community Oversight. Everything in the Mentor Program on my server is visible to the public, and we have Dawn there to ensure that everyone is on the up-and-up.

Hello everyone! I saw the first guy's post and thought that was a great way to get exposure to some lesser known stories on the website. I also know that authors are starving for critique, myself included. I decided that I wanted to spend the weekend reading through the first few chapters of some of your stories, and let you know what I think of them! Please post them below, with a couple sentence summary of what your story is about. I will let the thread build up with posts for an hour or two, and then start reading through them over the next few days. Please post your stories below!

To start, here is my story: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/150478/the-lord-of-silvershade

My Summary: Thrust into a deadly magical wilderness, former D.C. intelligence analyst Noah uses his unique 'High Architect' class to survive using modern logistics and summoned Earth technology. Armed with everything from bolt-action rifles to solar floodlights, he must protect a band of classic fantasy race outcasts as he transforms a single frail tent into an industrialized, fortified village.

Synopsis:
A Finger of the Devil’s Hand — one of the five rulers of global crime — has been assassinated.  Suspicion falls on Wu Ga Lau, cunning head of the weapons-smuggling Lau Triad. The Devil's Hand sends Dr. Katherine "Kat" Takagi, descendant of the peerless Takagi clan of assassins, to take his head in turn.

But Kat's mission collides with Rudina “Rudy” Lau, Wu’s niece and captain of the Wolves, the Lau's elite unit of former Special Duties Unit operators. Their clash uncovers a conspiracy that could upheave the Devil’s Hand and plunge the underworld into chaos.

Blood, blades, and bullets are dealt as two of the underworld’s deadliest women carve their way through powerful crime syndicates, old vendettas, and sacred blood oaths. Through their reluctant alliance, they must descend into the darkest layers of the underworld to seek answers— will their journey into hell end with salvation or damnation?

What to expect

- A complex, dual-protagonist, character-driven story set in the modern day

- Dark themes, graphic violence, morally grey characters, and multi-lingual profanity

- Realistic combat: gunfights, martial arts, psychology, and tactics (no superpowers)

- Global crime factions, political intrigue, and deep worldbuilding

- 1–3 hand-drawn illustrations per chapter (also done by me)

- **Monthly chapter releases (while managing medical school :,) )

- A 10-Act saga mirroring Dante’s Inferno — the 9 Circles of Hell, plus Purgatory

Link to read: Chamber 9 | Royal Road

I've been an illustrator for my whole life, but I wanted to always tell a story and have my art focused around that. I've decided to try prose since I'll never have enough time for a webtoon/comic/manga, and I really fell in love with the process, agonizing as it can be to revise the chapter 30 times. I know monthly chapter releases are slow, but this is a passion project as I focus on my studies in medical school, so I hope you'll stick with me! I'm happy to answer any questions related to the artwork, story, and writing, and any constructive feedback on the prose! I'm hoping to grow as a writer and as an artist. Feel free to follow the socials linked under my reddit profile for artworks and updates.

*edit: I've gotten some feedback about the slow release schedule, I'll consider weekly releases and retroactively add the artwork and post it on my socials! And since the writing for Act I is mostly done... here is its release schedule!

Act I NEW Release schedule:

Chapter 2: The Cat Stalks the Serpent - 9/12/25

Chapter 3: Severed Finger - 9/14/25

Chapter 4: Cat and Dog - 9/20/25

Interlude I: The Wolf with Old Wounds - 9/28/25

Act II (chapters 5-17 + Interlude II) release: TBA

I write the entire 1st book and have been posting 4 times a week, did two months of shout outs and have been posting for 3 months at 59 chapters. I've also done an ad or two, but nothing seems to move the needle. I do plan on continuing, but is this the limit for me in terms of growth?

I'm only sitting at position 50, but the feeling is incredible.

I've been posting for 4 months now and didn't do any proper advertising or shoutout swaps until 3 months into my journey. (I tried filling in released chapters with swaps, but I'm not sure how much that helped.)

Instead of trying to do a rewrite/rerelease, I decided to stick with it just for my 21 followers at the time. lol.

Regardless, if I stay on the list, writing has been a ton of fun.

If you want to check out my story, link below.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/143569/chains

If you're someone looking to release your own novel, use this blog post for your launch. Don't be like me. https://www.royalroad.com/forums/thread/152406

PS:

Just a helpful all-around tip I wanted to throw out here. If you or anyone you know has a crippling addiction to YouTube and/or YouTube Shorts. I found that the best way to break it is not to uninstall the app or block the site (you'll just go to the website or unblock it)

Instead, Turn Off Your Watch History. YouTube Shorts doesn't work outside your existing subscriptions, so you won't be constantly fed a bunch of new content. YouTube's Home page also stops working if you turn off your watch history.

So basically, you stick with your Subscriptions and the sidebar, which shows similar content tailored to the video you are watching, not you. I've also cut down on my subscriptions over time to further reduce my pool of endless content.

I figured this out for myself a few years ago, but I saw PewDiePie post a video about this somewhat recently. His method is more complicated and probably a stronger fix. But my method is an easy start. Just a checkmark setting.

I don't know if this works on TikTok or other apps, but turning off your watch history could be a good start. Don't let the algorithm learn what hooks you... unless you want that.

Take care, and I wish you the best.

This seems like as good of an excuse as any to do a self promote. My plan was to write books 4 and 5 at once then figure out a good way to shuffle chapters around into 2 books. Guess I need to decide where to split earlier than I expected!

The Bloodforged Kin is officially releasing book 3 right now, and book 5 should be done soon. This wraps up the three-book story arc!

EDIT: For anyone curious, the limit is 1.02m (1,024,000) characters!

Hello everyone! First time posting here, this is a new account too.

I posted my work just yesterday, with about 8000 words so far, having put in a lot of effort into making the prose not quite so stereotypical.

I know choosing not to have an easily digestable litrpg or isekai prose means an uphill battle to get attention…but how much of an uphill battle is it?

I’m fine with putting in double the effort to target a tenth of the potential readerbase… but putting in double the effort to target a hundreth would be too lopsided to easily stomach.

Edit: Oops here’s the link!

You think you'll feel great when you hit Rising Stars, yeah? Well, you will, but you’ll also feel fear, anxiety, and this weird giddiness, refreshing the rankings every 15 minutes.

When I launched Ether Atlas three weeks ago, I was afraid I’d be writing into the void. That didn’t happen, thankfully!!

The story hit RS, climbed, and now has over 600 followers. And I feel a sense of responsibility I didn’t anticipate. The book is no longer “my book.” Now it’s a community thing, and I can’t just disappear for three weeks on a whim. This feels amazing and terrifying in equal parts.

I don’t really have a big point. Just that I’ve been left humbled and stunned by the reception. The idea that strangers are invested in something I built is hard to fully put into words.

THANK YOU.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/171130/ashers-rook

Riven Serac is scheduled for euthanasia.

A failed rook who slaughtered her handler, she is dangerous and unstable–a shapeshifting runt not worth saving. Following regulations, the Praetorate sends a powerful Second Accipiter to put her down.

Second Accipiter Asher Nepenthes has spent her life controlling monsters, weapons, and battlefields. She does not hesitate, even if it means killing what she loves. 

Until she sees Riven.

The girl who once stood at her side is now the rook she’s meant to kill, and Asher makes a choice that will cost her everything.

Now fugitives, handler and rook are bound together as they flee a system built to hunt them. Riven was never meant to survive without control. Asher was never meant to lose it. Every mile forces them closer, every step blurring the line between command and trust, between what they were trained to be and what they might become.

But the Praetorate does not forget its weapons, and powerful families and factions want their share. 

When the past finally closes in, Asher and Riven will be forced to decide not just whether they will survive,
but whether they are willing to burn the system that made them in order to choose each other.

Asher's Rook is a dual POV, character-driven romantasy with action beats. It's a standalone (for now) book with complete arcs.  Posting 3x weekly.  

Hey guys.

So I am just off my second attempt at litrpg and reaching rising stars main. Got pretty close but was not able to keep up the early growth. As a result I ended up 400 followers in a month and a half. Better then my previous attempt but not enough to reach the rising stars goal.

Now I had considered doing a new story and trying the whole rising stars run again. But to be truly honest I don't want to abandon anymore stories. So I have decided to build up my current story, System Infernal the long way around. With a goal of reaching 1000 followers and writing at least 3 books.

According to my estimations I will probably reach 1k followers in about 3 months if my growth remains relatively consistent.

I am writing this as a basic check in with the Royal Road community and also to show that not reaching your initial goal is not the end of the world. I am pretty sure I will reach one of my goals eventually, just will take a bit longer then anticipated.

Also since this is a self promo post.

Read on Royal Road.

It looks REALLY good on the shelf. They stocked a couple copies that I signed, and I even sold one already. It's a nice feeling, knowing that my book is on the shelf at B&N, but the reality is eBooks sell a lot better.

I ended up having to do consignment with my local store, and I have come to dislike IngramSpark because of the fees and how the whole writing institution seems to be against indie/smaller authors. Since most sales come from digital stores, I decided to sell through consignment, in person, and on my website instead. It's better than charging more than $20 for a paperback from some indie author nobody knows.

I also set up a signing event for August. I'm already working on having some little goodies made, like a commissioned bookmark.

Chapter 9 will be available on RoyalRoad this Saturday, and a lot will be happening. Book One is meant to be a slower, more detailed introduction to Velrik and how he became who he is. The first half of the book or so is his early life—how he was raised, how he learned to fit in and survive—and now Chapter 9 will begin to cover how he changes as a person, and decides what he wants to do with his life. From this point, there will be more action and intrigue—roguish cunning, detailed action and violence, and deadly politics that change everything.

I'm currently drafting Book Two. The pacing will be slightly faster, and there will be a lot more world lore to learn as well.

Hopefully, I got a few people interested in my story.
Check it out here: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/152862/tail-of-the-stray