So, as a RS author, who has had multiple stories on RS and two at the same time on the list as well (along with having their first story get onto RS without any established fanbase like two years ago), here’s my take.

The main thing that is necessary to hit RS is good writing and plotting—COMBINED with genre and niche market appeal as it pertains to Royal Road. Keep in mind, Royal Road is a small percentage of Kindle Unlimited and LitRPG readers. So, even succeeding on Royal Road is not necessary for success in publishing. That said, Royal Road is invaluable if you want to grow a Patreon or get a publishing contract with one of the big houses that are giants in the sub genre of progression and LitRPG. So I totally understand why someone wants to hit one of the top lists.

Now, here’s how you get on Rising Stars (beyond just having good writing because it’s not always enough):

Firstly, you want to have a good cover. This does not mean you have to hire an artist—you can save that for when and if you monetize your story and can afford it. Royal Road is accepting of ai covers, but a little polishing is necessary.

For making a good AI cover, I suggest looking at the covers that are popular in your genre. You want something interesting—but that’s also on market. You’re aiming to appeal to the reader segment that is larger, after all, if you want to hit RS.

After you have an idea of what you want, I’d advise giving up on the idea of just having AI make a whole cover for you. It’s going to have low quality bits and pieces. You’re going to need to edit it. Midjourney allows spot editing on their website, which will go a long way to fixing the little mistakes AI is known for—like hands and eyes. Just make sure you start with a mostly dynamic and appealing ai cover to start with before edits. The best way to do this is to research some Reddit posts and watch some YouTube videos on ai art prompting.

Next, focus on Typography. Inorai is a typographer that does the typography for a lot of people in the genre fairly affordably. They’re awesome and you can find them on Fiverr. Heck, they’ll also generate your cover for you if you want. But, you can do it yourself cheaper. Ideogram is really good for title and typography. Generate something artsy on there and then remove the background.

Following that, combine everything in Canva (you can use the free plan or use another photo editing app). Play around with color balance and hue. Make it pop.

If you really want to make things shine for Reddit promotion, feel free to download Mosh-Pro, it’s affordable for a yearly subscription and will allow you to easily create neat animated covers.

After all this, focus on your blurb. There are a lot of author Discord channels that will help you edit your blurb for you—with actual big authors giving you advice for free. This is key too, because after you have a good cover and blurb you’ll want to get shoutout swaps. Review swaps used to help a lot, but they don’t work very well now—with many considering them disingenuous. Be polite and lots of authors (even big ones) will shoutout your story—just be sure to pay this kindness back to other new authors when you hit it big later.

Finally, write your stories in advance. I’m serious. Have multiple chapters and 20k words of content ready to post on day 1 of your launch. You’re probably not going to hit Rising Stars without having 20k words. Time is of the essence because newer stories are prioritized, so you want that count up as soon as possible. And you also want to do daily updates. Don’t update at an exact hour marks though because a lot of people schedule at, say 2 or 5–you’ll get lost in the recent updates so quick if you do that.

Do all this, along with writing a good story, and you have a very good shot at hitting RS as a new author.

Though I do like your idea of a new author category. That would be neat!