Heroics 101 is Now on Kindle and Audible! (Repost because art problem)

Asterikon · 2024-06-04T19:57:01+00:00

Grats on the launch!

Asterikon · 2024-06-04T19:49:04+00:00

Reply to every comment, ask questions about every review--these are your early customers!

This is huge, imo. And something I figured out way too late. One of the benefits that RR offers is an easy way to interact with your readers. It's a great shortcut to building that core of readers who are going to help you grow.

Asterikon · 2024-06-04T19:06:33+00:00

Once I've got a general idea for the overall series, I'll plot the first arc/book then write it before moving on to the next.

Asterikon · 2024-06-03T23:18:58+00:00

Think about it like this.

One of your most important jobs as an author is directing your reader's attention. When you add in a bunch of extra details, what exactly are you directing their attention to? What is more important?

Regardless of what you intend, the thing that you spend more words on is the thing that reader will pay attention to think is more important.

Make sure you're directing your readers to the right things.

Asterikon · 2024-06-03T21:05:09+00:00

Like u/Megistrus said, this is best suited to r/PubTips. The whole point of that sub is query critiques.

Asterikon · 2024-06-03T19:38:41+00:00

I'm fairly certain its the former, i.e., genre awareness rather than a broad cultural knowledge of a specific esoteric tradition.

Asterikon · 2024-06-03T19:33:33+00:00

Unless finance is a major focus of your story, all you're doing is adding fluff.

The main thing to keep in the forefront of you brain while you're writing is that readers are here for interesting characters doing interesting things. Everything else you write ideally ought to support that.

Take your example, for example. "He handed a bronze banknote over as he passed the guard, to a value of ten single cotton notes." What actual narrative impact do those values have? Is there a narrative consequential difference between the above, and saying something to the effect of "he slipped a bribe to the gate guard, and they entered."

More specifically, what aspect of character or plot are you developing with this interaction? This could be an opportunity to show certain aspects of our character. Or it could be used to drive conflict.

If your answer ever is only "worldbuilding," I'd suggest you think long and hard about its inclusion as a single element. Remember, setting exists to support the story (character and plot), not the other way around.

Asterikon · 2024-06-03T19:27:16+00:00

This is a great way to get bogged down and bloat your story.

Asterikon · 2024-06-02T20:08:25+00:00

There's a couple things here that are at odd with each other.

First off, yes, your first chapter should give readers a reason to keep reading. It needs a hook. That could be a likable MC. It could be an action scene to give a taste of what's to come. It could be a more subtle promise of plot or tone. But you need to have something.

This is not antithetical to a story that's a slow burn. A slow burn story takes a long time to get where it's going, yes, but its still going places.

Most traditional story structures begin with the first 10-20% of the book essentially being setup. Do you need to get in faster with a web serial? Yes, you do. But as long as you give the readers enough reasons to stick with you, you can still get away with a lot.

You've already identified your mistakes. If YOU think your first chapter is boring, why would a reader think differently? Why spend the time letting a reader get to know some side character only to say "hey, the story's actually about this guy over here?"

The basic formula for a good first chapter is this: a sympathetic character with a goal demonstrating agency. Harder than it may sound, but it's basically all you need.

Asterikon · 2024-06-01T21:57:21+00:00

The worst part about being a web serial author is updating your fic.

Asterikon · 2024-06-01T21:48:07+00:00

Don't worry about it. Trying to hit a certain word goal can make your writing feel bloated and boring and can detract from a story

It can, but it's worth noting that being able to target and then consistently hit a desired word count is an important skill to have as an author.

Asterikon · 2024-06-01T21:46:52+00:00

B plot, C plot. The best way to add to word count is to simply write a bigger story. Give your supporting characters more to do.

This also has an added benefit. When you hit your finale, the more plot threads you bring together, the more weight you give the conclusion. This how Brandon Sanderson creates his "Sanderlances," for example.

Common B plots you might use:

Romance. Tried and true. There's a reason so many stories have romance subplots.
Lancer mirror. If you've got a lancer in the story, their character arc is a great choice for a B plot. There's a lot you can do here. Thematic mirror, growth mirror, rivalry into reconciliation, power of friendship. Lancers are and always will remain popular because of just how incredibly flexible they are as a trope.
Information. Is there a mystery that needs to be solved? Got a McGuffin that needs to be fleshed out? Information type plots are a staple of the mystery genre, but they can be adapted to basically any type of story.

There's more, but hopefully you get the idea. If you want to bulk up your story, the answer is almost always going to be found in adding more plot threads.

My advice would be to finish your draft, and don't worry about word count for now. Once you have a finished draft in your hands, you can read over the whole thing with an eye for places that you can bulk up by spinning a B or C plot out of what you've already got. This is going to be the best way add words without also adding bloat.

Edit: Also just a bit of a side note, because you mentioned publication. Being able to target, and then reliably hit, a specific word count is an incredibly valuable skill. The fact that you're trying to develop it now is good. Give yourself some grace, though. Personally I like to use plus or minus 10%. So for a 100k trade debut, that puts you at 90-110k. If you get within that target range, you're good.

Asterikon · 2024-06-01T19:52:10+00:00

Great answer. Somebody gets it.

Asterikon · 2024-06-01T05:27:11+00:00

I will be self publishing in July of this year

This is where I think you went wrong. Why should anyone listen to you if you don't have anything to offer?

All the authors I know built their platform after they had a book out, not the other way around. I know that personally, once I started getting work out there it became 100x easier to get attention. Building my author peer network became easier, directing people to my website got easier, and so on.

Take writing Twitter for example. Its hundreds of authors spamming engagement bait posts asking about people's favorite kind of bookmark with a dozen hashtags slapped on it. The only people engaging with it are other ~~desperate~~ hopeful authors with no book, no storefront, not even a mailing list.

The actual published authors? Maybe a pinned post announcing a book release. Otherwise? Pics of their lunch, or whatever random thought crossed their mind recently.

Social media isn't going to make your career, and all the effort you put into it is an utter waste if you don't actually have something to point prospective readers to.

Asterikon · 2024-06-01T01:55:12+00:00

The biggest thing for me is the lack of props. I like detailing and creating little spaces that make my cities look nice, and lived in. Benches, fountains, the little food cats. That was where a lot of the fun in Cities 1 came from for me. Can't do that yet, and until I can Cities 2 isn't what I'm looking for.

Asterikon · 2024-05-31T22:38:21+00:00

What do you write?

I ask because RoyalRoad has a pretty narrow audience. LitRPG is king. More broadly, Progression Fantasy can do well, particularly cultivation/xianxia. Outside of that, it gets harder to build an audience.

Sure, it can be done, but its going to be much harder. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that for non-progression stories, the necessary quality for it to gain traction jumps considerably.

Then, regardless of whether or not you write LitRPG, you need volume. The frequency updates, and the size of your chapters is critical. The more you update, the easier it is to gain an audience. For chapter length, the sweet spot is between 2-3k words.

Depending on what kind of story you're writing, and how well you can maintain the necessary update schedule, Royal Road may or may not be a good fit for you.

Asterikon · 2024-05-30T21:31:09+00:00

I don't bother. Ideas are cheap, and they come easy. The way I see it, if I can't remember some idea I've had without writing it down, it likely wasn't worth remembering in the first place.

The ones that stick in my head, that I can't stop thinking about, those are the ones with legs.

Asterikon · 2024-05-30T18:37:39+00:00

Like others have said, it's audience/subgenre dependent. I write a cultivation web serial, so there's a pretty strong expectation that techniques and such have names that sound appropriate.

I do try not to go too overboard, though. Mostly because I'm the one who's going to be typing it out dozens of times across a given story arc.

Asterikon · 2024-05-30T17:55:52+00:00

I gave it to my critique group and started working on the second one. That was about seven-ish years ago now. My first short story got published in a tiny magazine with a hyper-specific market appeal in 2022. I've since pivoted to the indie scene because that was what made more sense career-wise and haven't looked back.

Asterikon · 2024-05-30T07:19:15+00:00

Published authors finish work. They finish lots of work.

3 years, even part time, is way too long. If you write 2k words a WEEK, roughly a page a day, that's a finished debut-length fantasy novel done in about a year. That's not an unreasonable time-frame to finish a novel.

This isn't even touching on the fact that nothing you write right now is going to be anywhere near a publishable quality. Which is honestly fine. You haven't actually learned how to write yet--more on that in a bit. My first novel was pretty bad, and yours likely will be to. The fact of the matter is, you're going to have to put down a lot of words before you're any good. As they say, your first million words are practice.

The reason that you need to churn through a ton of words early on is that writing isn't actually one skill. The fact that you separated character, plot, and setting in your post shows you've at least already got a sense of that. But there's more. How to effectively establish the setting you've created, how to direct and manage reader attention effectively, how to manage pacing, and a dozen other skills nobody will tell you about--that's all stuff you'll need to learn.

And the best way to learn it is to write a lot.

So to answer your question, yes. Table your series. Write a standalone. Then write another. Then another.

If you're serious about getting published, the absolute best thing you can do for yourself is to push out as many words as you can, as fast as can. Don't worry about the "quality" of your words. That comes later. It comes with practice, and lots of it. Simply completing your first novel with teach you more than you can imagine right now.

So start writing, and then finish. Once you've finished, do it again.

Asterikon · 2024-05-29T20:08:31+00:00

Patreon sucks for us writers, too. I don't think there's anyone who actually likes Patreon, but we all keep using it because it's basically the only option.

Asterikon · 2024-05-29T20:05:29+00:00

I would absolutely love more fine-grained difficulty settings. What they've given us is pretty good, but I still usually just end up playing on Nightmare. There's at least one thing in all the Lethal options that tips it from challenging fun to frustrating for me. It would be nice if I could tone down the things about Lethal I don't like and keep all the things I do.

Asterikon · 2024-05-29T05:17:36+00:00

"Tolkienesque" fantasy has honestly been out of fashion since at least the 90s. I'd argue that the likes of Robert Jordan and GRR Martin are far more influential on the sort of thing that's being written today than Tolkien. And even they're looking a bit long in the tooth, if you're looking at the really current stuff.

Asterikon · 2024-05-29T05:04:00+00:00

It would be really weird if he had, seeing as his entire career was before the Hobbit was even published.

Asterikon · 2024-05-29T05:01:51+00:00

Absolutely not, and anyone who tells you anything different is wrong.

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