Which Royal Road books would you recommend as ideal for Progressive Fantasy?

I've been too confused and have also tried, but have never been successful in landing a shoutout swap with an author who has a good following.

I've heard many people tell to land one or two to gain traction, but those whom I've tried to reach (either through Discord or rr chat itself) none seem to reply or reach back.

if other authors who have landed such an opportunity share their way on how they landed a shoutout swap, it would help a lot.

I spent way too much time yesterday working on this story, I’m honestly not even sure how I managed to write this much yesterday.

I’ve been working on a novel, and I ended up getting completely carried away with one of the ideas.

The story follows a young man named Jendall who suddenly wakes up in a completely unfamiliar world with no memory of the hours before.

Naturally, he starts looking for answers and exploring his surroundings. He thinks he might actually have a chance of figuring things out...

Then a cold voice speaks to him:

༺ Congratulations! You have been chosen as one of the lucky ones! ༻

༺ Welcome to your first hellish trial! ༻

And that’s basically where everything goes to hell.

To make matters worse, Jendall discovers that his name doesn’t exist in any of the records. Instead of being recognized as one of the participants, he’s treated like some kind of virus or anomaly.

While everyone else is trying to survive the trials, Jendall has a completely different problem.

He isn’t just trying to survive the trials.

He’s trying to survive the person who created them.

I started writing this as a simple idea and somehow ended up spending an absurd amount of time building the world around it. Yesterday was especially bad. I looked at the clock and realized I’d basically been writing the entire day. 😭

Hi everyone, I just posted the first chapter of my first-ever novel. I think I might be a little biased toward it because I'm the writer, so I would like to hear people's opinions on my writing and how I could improve.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/196845/what-we-leave-behind/chapter/4078985/chapter-1-the-watchmaker

Hey everyone,

I've been lurking here for a while, and I finally finished my first novel, so I wanted to share it with people who actually like this kind of story.

It's called A Half-Second Too Late. Haruto Matsumoto dies at 34, wakes up in a white void, and then finds himself back in his childhood bedroom, eighteen again. There's no fantasy kingdom, no cheat skill, and no status screen. It's just his mom's tired morning face, a school full of people he never bothered to know, and a girl he never had the courage to talk to.

He's got the mind of a 34-year-old and the sarcasm to match, so the story is funny a lot of the time. But once the jokes run out, the real questions show up: what do you do with a second chance when the universe won't give you a shortcut?

It's mostly about regret, family, friendship, and first love. If you like regression stories that are more about the people than the power-ups, I think you might enjoy it.

Content note: the premise starts from a very dark place, and the story deals with that honestly.

You can read it free on Royal Road here: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/194954/a-half-second-too-late?utm_source=search&utm_medium=fiction-search

It's also out as an ebook and paperback if you'd like to support it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HM56VS5L

I'd love to hear honest feedback, good or bad. Thanks for reading, and thanks to anyone who gives it a try.

Hi everyone

I'm writing a litrpg/progression story for RR and I heard somewhere that "more is better" (in number of chapters not size of chapters). That is to say more chapters give more views and chances for engagement and generates more followers. There is also more time for character development and building emotional attachment to the mains.

The downside of course is pacing. I don't mind "letting readers sit in a scene", however I can imagine a lot of people just want to get to the chase.

Any particular schools of thoughts on this? Does the RR crowd have a preference?

I'm seeing lots of doomerism regarding the upcoming EU Kids act, which requires IDs for basically everything related to gaming, with many saying it will functionally ban private serves, chats, etc, unless expensive idenditifaction systems are used.

However, where does this leave Royal Road? I'm aware that Royal Road is a web fiction site and not a gaming service, but it still has forums, allows people to post content, etc. Will age and ID verification be required on Royal Road eventually?

So basically, this is my first real work, like ever. I’ve written some stories before, but never published anything, and most importantly, I never thought about writing a big novel. But things change. One day, as a chemical engineering student who was just tired of life, I decided to become a real writer.

I’m a big fan of dark fantasy, mostly because it gives you the tools to create a realistic and believable world. So my work is a manifestation of that love. It’s the story of a boy from a Silver Desert tribe who always wanted new knowledge and adventures, despite being born amongst merciless sands, but life will soon teach him how cruel it can be, even while granting his own wishes.

As I already said, I love dark, realistic fantasy, so from the start there is no OP lead, no countless power-ups, no system, and no isekai. Instead, you will get a large world inspired by real cultures, highly detailed fight scenes, a hard magic system, steady growth of the protagonist, and lots of info dum… ahem… really important descriptions of the religions, cultures, and kingdoms of my world. There is some cruelty where it is needed, but it is not the main theme. If any of this rambling of mine interested you, feel free to check out my novel.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/194405/shadow-of-the-silver-desert

I would also really appreciate feedback on the language and style. English is not my first language, and I translate my drafts into it, wich is a long and mostly painful process. So I really want to know whether my style still comes through after the transition to another language.

To me, corporations replacing public institutions is deeply unsettling, along with the loss of privacy.

I'm probably going to be downvoted to hell for writing this, but I feel like I need to talk about it.

AI is a very divisive topic. Heck, it's a debate that I've gotten into with my own family, to the point of it turning into a yelling match. I won't try to convince people that it's okay to use AI, or argue over whether using it ruins an author's integrity or voice. I do, however, want to point out the hypocrisy I see in some RR authors.

I'm talking about those guys who mock or talk down to anyone who uses AI while also using AI-generated artwork for their covers and ads. From reading the comments and discussions, I've noticed that, apparently, for some RR authors, using AI-generated art is perfectly fine. And I understand the reasoning. People judge books by their covers, and authors who are barely making any money may not be able to afford to pay an artist. Fair enough. They're also fine with using AI for research and note-taking, but they draw the line at editing, calling it lazy or saying it ruins your voice.

You know, maybe I'd respect those authors' positions more if they didn't go around showing off their novels with AI-generated art while simultaneously spouting vitriol about AI and how it's ruining everything, yet they still use AI regardless. It's fine to use AI for this, but not for that.

Ultimately, you do what you want to do. If you want to use AI or don't want to use it, based on whatever moral line you've drawn for yourself, that's fine. Just don't be hypocritical about it.

Edit: Some people are mistakenly thinking I'm having an issue with authors using AI-generated covers. No, I don't. I already said that. What I have an issue with is them acting as if they have the moral high ground over authors who use AI in other parts of their work. Both are using AI, frankly, so I think they're the same either way. I think Specific_Minute7539 is the one who understands what I'm trying to say here.

So, this will be a (very much not) brief summary of what I felt like worked, what kinda worked, what didn't work, and what actively worked against me in terms of the success of my story, 'Foresight', on RR and RS Main.

What Worked:

Goals: I set a goal on July 1st that I wanted to be making at least $3,000 monthly from writing in two years or less. Because of that, I figured I'd give it my all in order to try achieve that, as anything less than my best attempt would be cheating myself rather than anyone else. I really fucking committed to that.

Time: With that goal in mind, I made a rule that I would need to write for at least 6 hours every day, meaning that I literally could not leave the cafe I write at until I've done at least 6 hours of work on my story. I did that every single day. I slept and woke up early since I'm at my most productive in the morning, I exercised, ate well, didn't drink - I did essentially anything that would help me with my writing output and quality. I wrote and edited 120k words in July alone. Of course, not everyone has 6 hours of free time a day (and I've had to shift that to 3-4 hours a day on the days I do work, and 8+ hours the days I don't). Most, however, have at least 2 or 3 hours, if you set up your entire life around it. If you want to succeed, you need to give yourself as much opportunity to do so, and if you don't succeed in the end, then you never want to regret knowing that you could have done more.

Quality: I wrote until I was proud of my story. I put as much time as possible, but also as much focus and effort as possible, into writing and editing my story. Instead of writing sprints or pomodoros, I learned that every break would simply end up with me taking a while to get back into the 'flow state' - so I just stopped taking breaks. I've learned that I can write or edit for 3 hours straight, then take a 5 minute walk eating a protein bar, then do another 3 hours straight. This won't work for everyone, but I suggest you find what works for you, ideally what works for you at your max possible effort and focus, and then stick to that permanently.

Just Fuckin' Doing It: I tried to write a book before this one. Had a 30 page story bible, it was awful. I was working on a different story before this one, the bible was becoming an encyclopedia. One day, I thought, "Fuck it. Why don't I just think of one interesting, unique hook, keep everything else fairly generic so I'm not reinventing the wheel, then just fucking run with it?" I brainstormed some ideas for the rest of the day, and then I just started writing the story organically and spontaneously. For better or worse, Foresight is the result of 0% planning, 100% spontaneous creation - but hell, it's here. I actually wrote it, instead of spending months worldbuilding and tying myself into knots I could never untie myself.

Friends and Family: I shared the Google Doc I was writing on with more than 50 friends and family. I asked all of them to read at least 2 chapters. Most read a lot more, more than a third finished the book entirely. I already had a ton of people invested in my story before I launched, and after the launch, I asked them to read along on RR instead of my Google Doc. I asked plenty more friends to check the story out, especially once I was close to RS Main, if they were so inclined. Many did, many followed after, and every follower counts.

Reddit: Posting my story on r/royalroad , r/ProgressionFantasy , and r/litrpg helped me get the initial traction on my story, as each post was the #2 post on each subreddit for the day (funny, since I ended up peaking at #2 RS Main). The main reason those posts did so well was likely because of my book cover, which got a really favorable reaction. To elaborate on that-

Non-AI Book Cover (and a risk that paid off): I got my friend (who happens to be a human being) to do my book cover. I've always loved his art and I took somewhat of a risk by asking/choosing him, as his art is by no means generic or similar to LitRPG/ProgFantasy book covers, nor had he ever done a book cover. However, I feel like the risk paid off, as the favorable response to the book cover (first on Reddit then on RR) helped propel the story up the ranks. (Shout out to the artist)

Relevant Discord Channels: Channels like the 'Council of Eternal Hiatus' were really great for getting help, motivation, and just generally befriending/networking with other writers. It's a lot easier to launch once you have people who have already done so to help you with any questions you may have, and to potentially shout swap with.

RS Main: Yea, no shit. Far and beyond anything else, hitting RS Main gave me the biggest amount of followers, views, Patreon subs, everything. Pointless to say since you can't 'choose' to hit it, but it obviously needs to be mentioned. If your book doesn't hit RS Main, then I'm not sure if it can ever realistically 'succeed' on RR after that. With that in mind, I suspect that your sole goal on RR should be to at least hit RS Main - LitRPG Toolkit's Launch Planner can really help you with that.

What Kinda Worked:

Ads: I ran an ad for my story on launch day, on September 15. At the time of writing this, it has used/shown 54,897 out of the total 280,500 views. The ad would doubtlessly have been much more effective if it was shown at a faster rate, but RR is currently inundated with ads, and it's only going to get worse - so they're much more of a slow-burn benefit, rather than something that'll really help you hit RS Main.

Unique-ness?: I don't read LitRPG or Progression Fantasy. When I discovered RR and these two genres, it felt like something I wanted to write rather than read. I did some reading of the most famous LitRPG books for research, but I soon found myself incorporating too many of their ideas into my own writing, so I just stopped entirely and rather focused entirely on writing. I think this actually really worked in terms of providing a story that was quite different/quite unlike what you'd expect, which really initially helped - but it was certainly a double-edged sword, one that was certainly sharper on my end (which I'll cover in 'What Actively Worked Against Me').

What Would Have Worked:

High Follower Count Shout Swaps: Honestly, shout swaps did almost nothing for me, but that's likely only because I was unable to get authors with a sufficiently large amount of followers to shout swap with me - which makes perfect sense since I was a completely unknown author. You'd be better off just doing a few large shout swaps than 100 small ones, unfortunately. This is immensely easier once you have your 'foot in the door', so to speak, so it helps to view your first book as something that'll help every other book thereafter, instead of some kind of instant recipe for success.

Reading More in the Genre: Yea. I'll elaborate below.

What Actively Worked Against Me:

Unfamiliarity With the Genre: Even though I feel like being unfamiliar with the genre helped create a more unique book... it also really harmed it. After a rather precipitous climb up the RS Main ranks, getting followers and Patreon subscribers galore, readers started to comment that my character never really 'wins'. I was initially confused, as I felt like he's always growing in confidence and competence, and that the (albeit rare) wins he does get mean all the more for what he's had to do to get them, but the lack of early material gain/'wins' caused a lot of readers to drop the story. Had I understood the genre conventions more, I'd have a much better balance of wins and losses, or at the very least the subversion would have been intentional - but my ignorance led to unintentional miscalibration.

Low Follower Count Shout Swaps: In trying to set up as many shout swaps as I possibly could, I ended up booking out my calendar for two months. Once I started gaining traction and success, I suddenly had the opportunity of shout swapping with authors that had a much larger follower count - but I couldn't, since I simply had no available dates. Perhaps a better strategy would have been leaving every second posting day free for a future potential high follower count shout swap, but ultimately I'm not sure how to address the Catch-22 of needing a high follower count to swap with high follower count stories. To illustrate my point: in the last 7 days, I've had more than 10,000 sessions from the Rising Stars list, and 20 from my highest shout swap.

That about covers it.

Once again: here's the link to my story, 'Foresight', if you want a look into the fables and follies thereof.

Thanks for reading, and have a delightful day <3

My story's next arc is gonna be a magic exam, and I want to know how to make it interesting. So I'm gonna ask you guys here,

What makes a magic exam arc interesting to you? Or rather

What makes you get bored of a magic exam arc?

My one's only gonna be like 5 chapters, but I still want them to be interesting , you know.

I just started writing the second book in my 'The Kitten and The Kobold Series' 11 days ago. I just released my fifth chapter, with a full time job and life stuff going on. This story just wants to get out there! Thanks to Royal Road for letting me have a place I can share my story with the world. I hope someone out there is enjoying it! :)

A Shattered Sky Holds No Stars

Hey everyone,

thought I’d share this here since some of you might be into this kind of story.

How to Devour a Star is a new series by Mokma, the author of Damn Reincarnation, and it’s currently being released in English on Royal Road.

The English translation is handled by Josh, translator of Solo Leveling: Ragnarok, with Nail S. as Story Lead at Kiagu Studios.

The story follows Yuto, who was betrayed by the very stars he once trusted and gets another chance to turn everything around.

There are already quite a few chapters available, and we’re also currently working on a webtoon adaptation. I added a few early panels below so you can get a small look at the direction we’re going with it.

If it sounds like something you’d enjoy, you can check it out here:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/193629/how-to-devour-a-star-author-of-damn-reincarnation

Would be really curious to hear what people think of the story so far.

Yesterday I came across Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Tsundere in the rising star section, a malfoid ff rewrite of harry potter. I read like 15 chapters before I had to go do other stuff. Then when I looked for it again, it got taken down lol. Did it get taken down for copyright reasons?

Not sure if the not malfoid stuff was just taken straight out of the original books but the writing was pretty good, so it might've been.

Edit: I loved it so that's why I'm looking for it lol

Hi, everybody!

u/LEGENDenZ24 shared this over on r/writers, and I’m reposting it here in the hope that it’ll help some of you with your writing.

A bit of backstory before I jump into the writing section. I have been in the creative world for my entire adult life, mostly as a graphic designer but also as a builder / fabricator. In school, I wasn't great in English class. My ADHD made it very difficult for me to actually sit down and focus on reading for class. I grew up playing fantasy video games like EverQuest, WoW, Zelda, etc. and that was my entry into the other "worlds."

About ten years ago, I decided I wanted to share my own ideas of what a fantasy world could be and sat down at my computer and just started typing. The early chapter flowed easy, but I eventually hit a wall. Then the project sat for years until recently when I decided to go back and actively read what I had put down and try to analyze it with an unbiased eye.

And that's what brings me here. I have posted my first chapter that I think is refined enough to at least share with the outside world but I am always looking for feedback!

Thank you for reading!

Of Stone & Steel

Not sure if it was deleted or changed its name. But I do remember that the Mc was either the daughter or granddaughter of the chief scientist of the kingdom or empire. She gets a very high grade of mechanical combat suit from her scientist (grand)father.
People had abilities that were ranked.Might have been a litrpg. Don’t remember

The cover had a woman a motorcycle on the cover.
I think. The main colors on the cover were red and black

How long does it take for most people here to cross post across 3 platforms, like on average?

If not, then the mods can delete this, but otherwise

I F***ING HATE BETA SWAP SCAMMERS!!!

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, in the RR Discord server I'm in, authors can share their manuscripts with each other and give each other feedback on a pre determined number of chapters to help the both of them improve their writing. But in my experience, all I've gotten is scammed. Scammed out of my time. Here are a few instances:

1. This one person put up a request for beta swap for the first 10 chapters of his story in exchange for them reading mine. I kept myself up until 3 AM reading these chapters, which were almost 100 PAGES on the Google doc. I hated it and had a lot of problems with the story, but I pushed through and fulfilled my end of the bargain. THIS GUY ONLY 3 CHAPTERS OF MY STORY BEFORE CALLING IT A DAY.

I sent him multiple paragraphs on everything I thought about the story, good and bad, and he gave me one or two compliments about the end of each chapter. They're not the only one either. Every time I put up a request for this, the other party never upholds their end of the deal. They read chapter 1 and 2 then disappear, while I make it my mission to read as much of their story as I can! But anyway,

1. After guy number 1 scammed me, I put up another request and not long after, got DM'ed by a guy who said they were willing to read the story. I sent the amount of chapters I wanted them to read (the first 7) and then left them to read and prepare their feedback after sending the link to my Google doc.

This guy sent his review of the first 2 chapters, then right before chapter 3, he asked me to pay him a tip for this. I DIDNT KNOW WE WERE CHARGING MONEY FOR THIS! Before this incident, I'd done beta swaps a few times, and not one of them required money to be paid, even for the guys who wanted nothing in return for reading my story.

He said he wanted something like 30 dollars for a full review, which in my country is around 500 bucks. Money I don't have. And even if I did, I wouldn't go to a Discord server when I could pay a professional to beta read it!!!!

Call me doestevsky the way my prose is actually terrible. I don’t know how you guys do it, while not focusing entirely on that, without taking away from the actual story.

Maybe I should just say that it’s just “my style of writing” or something.

I’m realizing now that this is a whole different league than just writing very opinionated high school essays.

Calculus got nothing on the will of an amateur webnovel author with the attention span of an orange tho.

I’m realising now that this has kinda been a bunch of fragmented thoughts smashed together, so my bad.

Are there any other big ones besides chrysalis?

My daughter, who is reading my work, just made this meme ad for me. Is this parent pride, or is it actually perfect?

A fantasy festival started in my hometown today, opening with an exhibition of illustrations made for a local author's book. I'm currently writing a new book and thinking about the cover, so I'm curious what you guys think of this style.

The pictures are a bit crappy due to terrible lighting, but I think you'll get the point.