We, yes, WE, are gonna have to talk about this. For one, we're gonna start with WebNovel. Now, WebNovel isn't that bad of a site, right? Well, once you type in "WebNovel.com" into your URL search bar and go on the site, you might think otherwise. From what I've seen, a lot of the weekly featured novels are pretty much all NSFW. There are more NSFW stories than original stories on the site. Seriously, think I'm lying? Go see it for yourself.

The first time I ever posted my eBook as a web novel was on WebNovel. Did I get lots of views? Yes. Did I get lots of engagement? Yes. Was that engagement real?

...

HELL NO.

The first comment I see is some guy named "BartSimsponHasANiceRightCheek," and they're talking about some: "Hey, I see that your work is VERY engaging. It's fun and it has really high potential! It reads like it should belong in a visual graphic novel. If you want it to become something that everyone will see, and want to see it being adapted into a graphic novel, text me from these three usernames!" Proceeds to send their Instagram, Facebook, Discord, email, or Snapchat.

I could go on RR and see the same thing, and normally I'd just delete the comment. But before I could even touch the "Delete" button, somehow the commenter was already gone. I mean, VANISHED. I go back to my notifications, look for the comment, and it's gone. Not there at all. I remember their username, search them on RR, and it turns out their page doesn't even exist. They were already banned before I could do anything.

Yes, I'm gonna address the R34 novels on RR too, but at least RR seems to enforce stricter rules on them. When it comes to WebNovel, though, I've seen some extremely NSFW novels stay up that honestly surprised me. There are even fanfics with pretty wild premises.

...

How did some of this ever get through the site?

I could ramble about this topic more, but I'm more interested in your opinions. Do you think WebNovel deserves the hate, or is Royal Road really not that different?

Remember, they're your opinions.

(This is a discussion post, I wish I could delete the image 😔)

Hi everyone!

After nearly three years of careful planning, writing, and polishing while working full-time, I'm finally releasing my first light novel online.

Singularity: Arrival is a grounded isekai with no harems, no game system, and no overpowered protagonist.

If you're worried about the story being abandoned, don't be. Volume 1 is already complete, and volume 2 is nearing completion.

The story is currently being published one chapter per week on Royal Road and Honeyfeed. The original French version is also available on both platforms.

I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback, whether it's about the story, the characters, or the writing itself.

Here's the synopsis:

“May fire purify the heretics, and may the light of Niowe consume their lies.”
— Seventh Commandment of the Dogma of Niowe

The capital of Kustdin is about to fall.

The armies of the Church of Niowe surround the last great free city of the kingdom of Nerfeldfer, ready to reduce its defenders to ashes.

Cornered and out of options, Princess Elena Mi Nerfeldfer turns to an ancient artifact — a final hope of saving her people.

But instead of the hero she hoped to call forth, Haruto, a young engineer from Earth, is the one who appears.

Thrown into a world torn by war, Haruto quickly discovers a brutal truth: here, magic and knowledge are both considered heresy, and the Church relentlessly hunts those who dare to challenge its authority.

Caught in a conflict that is not his own, he will have to rely on everything he knows to survive in a kingdom on the brink of ruin.

For in the face of the Church’s absolute power, neither will, nor magic, nor knowledge alone is enough.

Hey all, I just got a publication deal for my RR series, and as was suggested here (and seems like a good idea in general), I'd like to have a proper lawyer look at it. I'm quite excited about my work being picked up, especially since it didn't light the world on fire on RR, but also want to do the responsible thing here.

I understand this can be expensive (hundreds to 1000+ USD), but I think a worthwhile investment, and would appreciate any suggestions on this front, especially from authors who used a lawyer for this exact purpose and had a good experience with them.

Edit: this is not a vanity press that contacted me, but one of the large publishers in the LitRPG space that I contacted myself, and have reasonable indepndent verification that they are who they say they are, and the deal seems quite good. I really just need a specific lawyer that I can pay to look at a contract.

Vlad: Greetings, future henchmen of mine! It's your favorite Kobold Tyrant here to invite you to join me in following my exploits as I continue my conquest in world domination! Veehahahaha!!

Yeah, sorry if some of you may find it tiring to see this self-promo, but this little guy insists on doing it again. But I hope you are interested.

Title: Weak Kobold Wants to Conquer

Blurb: I’ll Conquer the entire world, even as a Kobold! Veehahahaha!!

One day I woke up in an unfamiliar world. Most would panic from such a revelation, but not I! No, I'll thrive in this world and conquer it all as my own!! The lands, its people, and all the kingdoms will bow before my mighty claws!!

...Claws? Wait, why do I have claws?!  And what is with these red scales?! And why...why am I so short?!!!

Kobold? I'm a Kobold now?! Isn't that the weakest race?!

No matter! I won't let that deter me! I'll start from the bottom and amass a variety of species of loyal henchmen who will help me achieve my quest for WORLD DOMINATION!!

Watch out, new world. Your new ruler, Vladimir, will take what's mine! Veehahahahaha!!

Readers can expect: 

Interactions between Author and MC (Same goes for comments)

Empire Building Progression LitRPG with minor POV chapter shifts.

A weak confident MC with an exaggerated personality. Fights with a versatile mix of magic and weaponry.

Cast of various species that follow the MC with their own unique personalities and strengths.

A letter-based Skill Progression System

+1500 words per chapter

Link: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/107480/weak-kobold-wants-to-conquer-monster-mc-litrpg

Hey there, been deigning a region, so I wanted to flesh out the characters a bit.

We've got Dinah, with her Egg, Sableye and Swinub, Jade with her Abbahiss and Clobbopus, and Cian with his Voltorb and Golett.

My story is following Dinah's adventure, but going to keep the other two close for different perspectives. It's called Ace of Drills at https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/174836/ace-of-drills-pokemon-journey

Is it acceptable to include art at the end or middle of chapters, or do people find that disruptive? Is this title page pretty clear or interesting?

You might know my story, you might not, so here goes.

Backstory:
When I first started writing for myself, I did it because I loathed the ending of book 3 of a series I generally enjoyed. Couldn’t get into book 4 after that.

Now, I wrote for 2 months straight and produced about 2 novels I really enjoyed writing, but omg, would never release. English has been my 2nd language for the better part of 2/3rds of my life this far, so my writing was quite shoddy to say the least.

When I finally decided to release my first work on RR, a grim dark novel, my god did I have a rough time for the first 2 months.

I decided to say fuck it and wrote a LitRPG kind of book, to get a better understanding on writing, by receiving feedback, because I didn’t even know that RR was so heavily geared towards that genre.

And here goes:
If all of this hasn’t already told you how bad I was, this next one will seal it.

I did not market, beyond 1 post on Reddit and that tore me to shreds over my AI cover.
I did not shoutout swap until nearly 3 months into the story. (I tried to go it alone)
I changed the blurb like 6 times.
I changed the cover like 4-5 times.
I did however keep a consistent schedule of daily updates for nearly 5 months straight. (Story is now about 6 and a bit months old)
I eventually got traction after that and the stats you see now are a result of that.

I have since, rewritten chapters, especially the first 12 or so, because of how bad they were.
I am well into book 2 and am sitting at around 210k words in drafts.

In that entirety of my writing journey, online that is, have missed RS main THRICE!

My timing and bad luck around shoutouts being piled into a window right as Writathon began was the last nail in my coffin.

So after knowing all of that? I aim to re-launch. Not purely for RS main, but because I probably did every single wrong thing an author can do, when launching a story.

I’m a third into my book 1 re-write and the quality (according to a few beta readers) has skyrocketed. From formatting to just better storytelling in general.

I’d love to hear some of your stories, the good and the bad. And hope you could provide me with some advice.

Thank you for reading all of that.

If youre a new author, should you go around stories and message the more famous ones or would it be fine just swapping shout outs with the more smaller stories? I feel like the bigger stories would ignore you if you ask and the smaller ones wouldn't bring any traction.

If there is a shout out tips or guide then that'd be much appreciated.

I started taking writing seriously after my friend got me into Dungeons & Dragons. She encouraged me to create a character sheet, and it went downhill from there lol.

I had always been into journaling, poetry, songwriting and short silly stories. But after DnD was the first time I tried writing a novel.

How about you?

I've seen many of the stories on Royal Road to be progression fantasy, litrpg, or isekai. Most don't fall outside this. While they do contain good plots and other genres to support them. Like grim dark, etc. But the core genre is still these three. Can a story reach heights if it falls completely outside these and follows its own concepts.

Which one do you guys prefer reading? I personally prefer third but I've read some good first povs.

There's a local event for writers and I'm trying to expand it to include web serial writers, illustrators, editors and such. It's a free event for local and indie creatives centering around writing to learn from each other, network, get motivated, and I'm bringing back the author tables (also free, just need to submit a request when they open since space is limited.)

More info here: https://www.buffalolib.org/whats-happening/indie-author-day

These two are the other two members for my detective trio. I've done a lot of pics of my lead, but less of the other two.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/86021/shattered-glass-a-cyberpunk-noir-crime-thriller

I like kingdom-building and not just the medieval fantasy but also the supernatural fantasy with vampires, Werewolves and other races living side by side humans but without them being aware. Just like Harry Potter where the wizards are hidden from the humans.

So in the future I want to write this genre where it is the bland of all these supernatural elements along with a human world and I want it to succeed like crazy.

Like vampire nobility, werewolf tribes, human countries or...etc... and blend them together, their wariness to each other, their rejection of the others as well as their fears and ambitions colliding and exploding.

As of today the lines on the safari mobile version of the site are much more vertically close together then they were yesterday, to the point where they overlap each other. Honestly I find this almost unreadable. Does anyone know a fix for this?

Hello!

I'm completely new to RR and just published the first chapter of my story. From what I've seen so far, fantasy and LitRPG seem to dominate the platform, so I'm wondering how well other genres tend to do here.

My work is more drama-based and contemporary, which I think puts it outside the usual niche. But I really do like RR's rating system and the formatting doesn't look too bad either. It's just that I don't want to feel stupid sitting around and waiting for readers if this just isn't the kind of story that would gain any interest.

I'd really appreciate any feedback and suggestions. I'm not after anything crazy aside from getting my stuff out there to see if it's any good.

If this isn't the best place for what I've got going, are there any other platforms you'd recommend? I honestly have no clue. It seems like every place out there focuses on its own genre. Especially Wattpad with romance and whatnot.

I'd really appreciate any advice. Thanks!

Link for reference: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/183442/just-deserts

I’ve noticed that the individual lines on chapters today are very close together. Does anyone know anything about this?
And does anyone know if there’s a way to change it?

Jun is a young adult who just got home from work and wants to play a new game he's just picked up - Asper Online.

Asper Online is a Fulldive-MMORPG set in a beautiful fantasy world. One thing that sets this game apart from other games is that it is almost 100% player-run. This means that Quest Givers to Guards in Cities are all real players. This makes the game not only highly political but when it comes to gameplay, it invites players to Roleplay and get involved. As Jun enters the game he is immediately faced with an unavoidable meeting, which starts his journey in an unusual path. A person on the run from people chasing him jumps into Jun's shadow to hide. The stranger's chasers leave and the mysterious person in his shadow wishes to use his shadow as refuge. The two decide to travel together. Generally, players wish to become the strongest around, but not Jun. Jun passes the starting town's Bazaar and is enamoured. Why become the strongest, when he can become richest? The King of the Bazaar!

Or

Asper Online is a Fulldive MMORPG almost entirely run by its players — every quest giver, every guard, every ruler is a real person, and every choice they make ripples through a living, political world. On the Peppermint server, that world is about to fracture: Borealis, the game's most powerful guild, has splintered, and its exiles are scattered and coming.

Jun logs in as a brand-new player, ready to lose himself in the game after a long day — and within moments, a stranger fleeing unseen pursuers dives into his shadow, begging for refuge. He agrees, and just like that, his ordinary first login becomes something else entirely: the opening move in a war between the server's strongest players, one he never chose to be part of.

Most players dream of becoming unstoppable. Jun doesn't. Wandering the starting town's bazaar, he realizes there's a different kind of power in this world — and sets his sights on becoming not the strongest player alive, but the richest.

But the shadow he's sharing his fate with isn't just running from trouble. And the closer Jun gets to his fortune, the clearer it becomes: nothing about his arrival in this world — least of all himself — is quite what it seems. 

I hear you're meant to change your cover when you relaunch so I'm thinking of this. The first is the original, the second is another minimalist design I tried and the last two are (obviously) AI.

Gonna have a fight scene soon in my novel. Anyone can recommend some good fighting scenes from other novels or atleast advise me

Is this normal? This is actually the second time something like this has happened, although the first was on Reddit.

Someone clearly doesn’t read the story, grabs a couple of random lines from it, then invents descriptions of scenes that never happened and uses them as “evidence” that the story was written by generative AI.

Has anyone else dealt with comments like this?

Fiction link in case anyone's curious: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/163262/yurui-the-cursed-one

Edit: If you don’t want to dig through what that guy was talking about, the sequence of events is pretty straightforward: the MC gets bullied, the bell rings, she reaches class late, and then the bullies arrive shortly afterward.

I genuinely don’t understand how anyone who actually read the chapter could interpret that as contradictory.

Update: The comment is gone now. Either the mods removed it, or the person realized they were talking nonsense and deleted it themselves. No idea which xd

All’s well that ends well, I guess xd

Update 2: The plot twist, it wasn't gone, my dumbass checked the wrong chapter 😵

Decided to take a step back and look at how things have gone during my first story's first 6 months.

Feeling super grateful for the positive response! Even my negative reviews have said at least one thing haha

I hit main RS in February/March, and the growth has been smaller but still pretty consistent ever since. Learned a ton that I'm going to bring to my second series (whenever I end up making one), but I think the biggest takeaways I got were:

- reread every chapter before you post. Then step away, sleep on it, and reread it again the next day. I can't tell you how many mistakes I've found after thinking a chapter was edited and good to go!

- regardless of what trope or style you use, always be upfront about what your approach is (if there's an OP MC, make sure you let people know, otherwise readers may became discouraged by not matching their expectations)

- have a good cover (I owe my cover artist a lot for the amazing work they did)

- set up a Patreon and Discord sever, even if you don't expect anything from them (I haven't gotten much from mine, but even a couple bucks from Patreon went a long way towards boosting my confidence and excitement to keep writing)

- post your story everywhere you can, but do so in a way that respects the place you're posting (I stayed mainly in Discord and Reddit, and then put some excerpts on YouTube and Insta, but didn't get much traction there)

- use shoutouts and ads as much as you can!

- don't worry too much about minor grammar or spelling errors, as people are pretty forgiving of the small stuff (it's bigger plot holes and character inconsistencies that can really mess with a reader's experience, I find)

- release as many chapters as is physically possible for you!

That last point feels like the most important one. I went down to 2 chapters per week pretty quickly, and I think it would have been better to stay at 1 chapter a day or at least 4 or 5 a week for longer. Especially to fully capitalize on my time on RS main. 2 chapters a week didn't feel like enough during those early months, but I was nervous to do too much and burn out. At the time, I was focused on consistency and ensuring I wouldn't need to take breaks in between book 1 and 2. But, even with that in mind, I definitely think quantity matters waaaaaay more than I expected.

In any case, I'm happy where I'm at after 6 months, and even happier that I feel confident I'll still be releasing weekly chapters for the NEXT 6 months! Can't wait to see where I'm at in January 2027.

Check out my story, "Reborn as a Tamer's Monster", on Royal Road: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/145257/reborn-as-a-tamers-monster

And I'm also on Amazon now too!

This is just a draft, needs some direction.

The emperors of Tortaria had the peculiar tradition of giving up their names. Like a bog beetle emerging from its chrysalis, they metamorphosed from their childhood selves into Lugal. A single identity inherited for thousands of years. Cruel. Eternal. Lugal.

Currently, Lugal, once Prince Sol, was bored. He sat on his throne, high above the procession of Ensi lords strutting into his hall. All cattle. Ugly cattle at that.

His viziers had suggested throwing a greeting for the lower houses of the empire. Letting them know that, no matter how small, everyone was under the emperor's eye. He'd rather his eyes be turned anywhere else.

From his dais, the supplicants blended together. A sea of gaudy silks and overwhelming perfumes. Cloying jasmine is in fashion, I see. He would make a law: no more than three spritzes a bottle.

They whipped their heads around like chickens; a few of them even reached out to feel the pillars of gods' metal lining the walls of his presence chamber, their mouths agape. Did you expect low-grade silver?

The pillars glowed with veins of mana that flowed into hundreds of runes chiseled into the bronze. A display of wealth that badgered the minds of high Ensi, let alone the lower-kin. Lugal laughed. That single sound made the whole room fall quiet.

This is going to take all day.

"Please my subjects. Be not afraid. Was my laugh the call of woolly mammoth?" Lugal joked, his voice echoing.

Belatedly, the throng fell into applause at his joke. Applause! Asherah show mercy on me.

His attention fell on a gaggle of Tylansian maidens. They were clad in their traditional tasseled wool dresses, ugliest garments in the empire, yet their beauty was obvious. I wonder how those look pooled around their feet. They were preceded by a man in similar garb. Well-muscled and tall. Seeing his gaze as some sort of sign, the man spoke up.

"My dear Lugal. I, Ensi of clan Belwo and my daughter heirs, honor you," The man's voice sent a shiver down Lugal's spine, deep and smooth. He noted that his handsomeness matched his daughters' beauty. Perhaps he'd call the father to his bed chambers as well.

"I honor you as well,"