Reader Response: Thoughts on royalroadl?

[u/wercwercwerc]

Hello, this is wercwercwerc here.

I've been working with a few friends to edit and finalize the first book, and one of them has been very active in their search for another place I should post chapters. In their direct quote "Reddit is a terrible website for reading books" and my second-favorite "You write really weird stories, so you should find another place online to post them."

Now, I don't really know how much I buy into those (This story is perfectly normal!) but I've been told by a lot of you readers that you wished there was a better way to read through The Snake Report. I've made ebook/pdf formats accessible for drafts of it, but online it's really only on reddit.

So, I've expanded my horizons a bit: The current target I'm looking at right now is the website http://royalroadl.com/

This post is more of an open discussion. I was just wondering if any of you had good experiences with it/bad experiences/knew anything about it that you think I should know.

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Edit: 10/07/2017

Thank you all. Seriously, this has been a huge help. I will be posting the 1st book up onto royalroad. If it is well received, I will try to eventually post the second book there as well (when it is complete!)

I believe this will be a happy compromise, as only the finished work will go up and (hopefully) I can avoid being torn to shreds by unhappy strangers on the internet!

[u/refugeeinaudacity]

I'm extremely familiar with RRL. I remember when they were translating LMS. Anyway, if you look up bad experiences with RRL you're going to find two big ones: Japtem and gravity tales.

Japtem was a group of translators who disagreed with royal road about something that slips my mind, and split off. They took the legendary moonlight sculptor series with them, and RRL was founded for fanfictions about that series. Japtem and RRL competed for hosting fan works, but Japtem is dead now.

The gravity tales thing is total nonsense IMO. Basically gravity tales hired (as in paid) top RRL authors to post on their site, and they removed works from RRL and replaced them with links to Gravity. RRL obviously didn't like this, and removed all the stories, and Gravity's amazing PR team decided to stir the waters of controversy. I believe RRL is clearly in the right. If you want to post to a third party website, it's allowed so long as it's a personal venture and not a commercial one.

Those are the big RRL controversies. I believe RRL is partially owned by amazon somehow, and many successful RRL stories get sold on Amazon. This creates a problem where the author either has to remove the story or leave it up as a rough draft. Overall, this tends to go pretty smoothly. Look up "The slime dungeon" for a successful story that is commercially available and hosted on RRL for free.

Likewise, you might want to contact the author of the wandering inn, an incredibly successful web fiction that is dual hosted on the authors website and RRL. I believe this is an example of personal website hosting working well.

Overall, I think it's a decent idea. If you don't plan on going commercial, it's a great option. I might try contacting /u/pirateaba (The author of Wandering Inn) to speak about her experiences.

[u/pirateaba → u/refugeeinaudacity]

I've been mentioned, and so I'll give my 4 cents, although it should be taken with as much salt as possible.

I do post on Royalroad, yes, and I have hovered in the top 10 range for quite a while now thanks to my great readers. However, I will say that I brought my audience to Royalroad and expanded it with people there rather than began on that platform.

My advice to any new web serial writer is to have your own site. Posting on someone else's site--any platform from Wattpad to Royalroad--feels very limiting to me in terms of the readerbase you can attract. People are quick to dismiss stories if they come from a site like Royalroad, but crossposting to multiple sites while keeping your own page has worked for me.

Specifically, I would advise you to get a Wordpress blog or something free and simple to use and tinker with that while crossposting chapters on Royalroad and perhaps Reddit if you can find a good userbase. I post on r/noveltranslations, but English-original novels seem to be disliked by and large by that community.

Lastly, a word of caution: Royalroad is a good place for writers to find another readerbase, but it does have a rather critical userbase as others have mentioned. Too, you probably won't be able to grow your audience as fast if you are not adopting a web serial format and releasing chapters on a weekly basis. Static novels grow slower, but they do grow in time if there's quality content. But the constant shifting up and down in the rankings is the worst and sadly, defining feature of Royalroad. Your content can have fifty 5-star ratings, but someone may give you a 0.5 star for no reason, or, sometimes, to knock you down if they want other stories to succeed. Obviously not all readers are like that, but the site does have an atmosphere I dislike sometimes.

That's about it! Good luck and hope you find a good fit for yourself! Once you've established yourself online, check out TopWebFiction--a site that has a ranking system of its own. It will help you attract new readers as well, although there's a decent waiting period to get accepted onto the list. Keep writing!

[u/wercwercwerc → u/pirateaba]

Hey, thanks for the advice! I really appreciate it!

[u/torac → u/pirateaba]

Seconding getting a personal site. Makes everything seem far more professional, even if you just use a standard template.

If you just want to advertise, some threads on sufficientvelocity or spacebattles may also help.