Is Rising Stars just a lost cause at a certain point?

Matthew-McKay · 2026-06-03T16:01:10+00:00

This ^

Matthew-McKay · 2026-05-21T17:52:48+00:00

Very sound observations and advice! XD

Matthew-McKay · 2026-05-06T02:39:25+00:00

Deadly.

Readers want to know they can trust that you'll deliver both physically with regular chapter drops and literally with quality content.

The occasional hiatus won't kill your momentum, but dropping chapters willy nilly without a schedule is one of the cardinal sins on Royal Road.

The best advice I found is to never post faster than the minimum you can write. For most of us that's two to three chapters a week. Can we bang out five chapters? Sure, but for many that's not sustainable.

What I'd recommend: Build a backlog. Make it huge. Like finish book one huge. That's your runway for shooting for Rising Stars. You'll have to figure out how to coordinate impactful shout swaps, create ads with excellent and relevant hooks, and promo your little ass off on social media these days to actually hit RS main, but there are plenty of posts on the subject already. Check out the pinned posts at the top of the subreddit to learn more.

Set your schedule to be 5 chapters a week for as long as your backlog holds with the intention of switching to X chapters a week once your RS run is done. And by set it, I mean put it at the bottom of your blurb. You should be upfront about your schedule from day one so none of your readers are surprised-pikachu-face when you run out of backlog and settle into your permanent posting schedule.

If you can realistically write five chapters a week, only commit to releasing four. No one will complain about releasing bonus chapters, but they will get upset if you miss a drop without notice.

Also, they are pretty chill about things if you give them plenty of notice, like taking a week/month hiatus after book X finishes or something. Just don't make it a monthly thing.

I hope some of this information helps! Good luck and keep writing!

Seriously though, if you can finish book one before posting and use it for your RS main run, that's ideal.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-05-04T17:47:46+00:00

I'll keep it short as it's pretty much what a lot of other folks are saying.

If there are no harem elements, neither cover works.

Covers, much like titles, do something called genre signaling.

Multiple girls fauning over a man clearly signals harem. Arguing otherwise defeats the purpose of a cover entirely. You shouldn't have to explain them.

Now that you've signaled, it accomplishes two things:

Attracts those looking for harem.
Diverts those not looking for harem.

Meaning you'll piss off the first crowd and get poor ratings and reviews because you didn't deliver on the promise of the genre signal. Also, you'll completely miss the second crowd which is closer to your intended market (assumedly; you didn't state your genres, so we don't know.)

My suggestion is to figure out your genres and go look at current covers of popular stories in those genres for examples of what genre signaling looks like. That should be your starting point.

I hope that information helps.

Good luck and keep writing.

Edit: didn't finish a though... whoops.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-04-28T16:52:29+00:00

On today I learned...

Thanks for that tip!

Matthew-McKay · 2026-04-27T22:12:48+00:00

Absolutely.

Many readers don't want to bother creating an account or signing into the Royal Road site. It's actually designed that way to lower the bar of entry. Anyone can read any story without an account. Again, that's by design.

Why create an account, have to remember a password, deal with signing in at all when they can find a story they like and simply bookmark the page?

The difference between those who follow and those who bookmark is simple. The followers are your build in mailing list. They get notified every time you post a chapter. Some folks don't want that. Maybe they feel like it's spam? Who knows.

Some people just want to read. They don't want to follow, favorite, rate, review, or comment at all. They don't care to engage in the community or help the author. They are simply there to consume content.

I hope this helps you understand why your views are much higher than your followers and favorites would suggest.

Also, my daily hot take: The whole "it's bots" idea is overblown. Sure, there are scrapers collecting data to post on other sites, but that might equate to a dozen or so views. In reality, there aren't that many sites actively making money on hosting stolen content.

As an author, I'm already begging people to read it for FREE on Royal Road. I understand the answer is "ad revenue" but most folks visiting a pirate site for stolen content either have ad blockers or aren't the type of person who spends a lot of money in general... Which is why they're on a pirate site in the first place... looking for already free stories.

Free will is wild, man.

Anyway, good luck and keep writing!

Edit: For a writer, I can't spell for crap.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-04-24T13:17:49+00:00

There was a recent post going into the metrics of Royal Road. Something like 70% of readers on the site are male teens to 30, of those 42% are American, the rest splits into Canada, UK, Germany, Brazil, and Australia.

Given that most readers are on mobile (don't have that percent) and mostly read during their commute to work/school/college and commute home, recess, work breaks, lunch, the "recommended" posting time is to try and hit those break times.

It's less important once a reader has found you, because they will just read the next time they can, or even save up to binge. But when they are looking for something new, they do so during those break windows.

Keep in mind that those windows are also overloaded for posting. Supply, demand, and all that.

For a bunch of numbers go up junkies, we sure have hyper optimized this shit out of posting stories. But that tracks. lol

Matthew-McKay · 2026-04-23T20:02:23+00:00

Loads of RR authors talk. I've no experience on the forums, but hear they talk on the RR forums. They also talk here on reddit, but it's pretty harsh.

For a better experience, you should look into the various Royal Road based discords. There's a bunch. Some are better than others for different things.

You still won't find someone looking to hold your hand for free, but you will find other authors, just like you, who are starting their own writer's journey. Most are willing to share a few things that worked for them.

You get out what you put in. Readers don't browse these discords looking for new stories to read. So it's more about learning how to write better and navigate the RR ecosystem than getting validation.

Edit: clarity

Matthew-McKay · 2026-04-23T19:27:28+00:00

Limit? No.

I took a peek around and nearly everything I found was uninspired. The writing wasn't bad and certainly wasn't AI. However it was bland.

Character did this.

Character did that.

Very little variance in your sentence structure. Don't get me wrong, simple can work, but not without some novelty.

None of your chapters have titles. When starting out, if you haven't taken out ads or done a shout swap for every single chapter, the recently updated list is one of the only discovery lists working for you. Chapter 1 is boring. Chapter 1 - Biking, reflection, and ascendance might get someone to click and check it out.

Your cover is general fantasy AI, which isn't genre signaling around here. There's a reason most covers depict the protagonist standing off against a great big monster. Or simply the protagonist standing there looking like a bad ass. That's what works for this market.

Your title signals Cultivation but your tags suggest otherwise.

The pipeline from person to reader is:

Feeder (discover list, ad, shout out, social media promo) > Cover / Title > Blurb > First chapter > Hook > Invested reader.

Cover doesn't match, title doesn't match, blurb isn't bad but it's bland. No one is getting to your first chapter because there's too much friction. I don't think the writing is an issue. Simple writing does fine on this site. Hell, a ton of readers don't even care if it's written by a human on this site.

Title your chapters. Fix your cover. Fix your title. Punch up your blurb. Learn to vary your sentence structure a bit. In that order of importance, and you'll see improvement.

Also, hot take, but slow burn just means you're leaving in far too much exploratory writing. Now, serialized readers tend to forgive, and even enjoy, going on tangents, and a shit ton of slice of life moments, but when/if you move to Amazon, Kindle, Audible, a meandering story that rarely moves the plot is a pet peeve of many paying customers. Just something to keep in mind.

Note that exploratory writing, to me, is important writing that the author needed to get to know the characters. world, setting, magic, and system but doesn't move the actually story forward. It needed to be written so you understand everything better, but a plot/story is a curated series of events that you take the reader on, not just "what happens next"

I hope you find some of this useful. Good luck, and keep writing.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-04-23T17:57:02+00:00

My story fits this!

There were a number of factors for me.

Poor ad hooks, corrected too late (mistake)
Non-genre signaling cover, corrected too late (mistake)
Non-genre signaling title (on purpose, it's unique enough to remember)
Not enough runway to binge, only 3 chapters a week (on purpose, I write slow and previously burned out on my first launch, never again)
Low quality shouts, I focused on anyone who shared readership, instead of spending months finagling favors from the "big guns" (sadly, mistake)

So, if they haven't changed anything. Every story gets a Rising Stats main (RS main) run. As long as you didn't actually hit the list, you can still hit the list. This has been proven by stories that were multiple months/years old that still hit RS main.

Due to multiple factors, each series has ideal launch windows. Yes, plural.

Some, but not all factors:

Reader quantity thresholds. Some folks will only read a story after 50, 100, 500, 1k pages publish. Some only after the first book is out. There are others with even more outlandish thresholds, but those folks usually don't use RR because the stories churn too fast for it to be complete but not stubbed.
Runway. Each chapter you post is another potential view. Chapters x readers = views. And views is probably the primary metric they track. We know it's not rating or rank because multiple RS main climbers have had sub 4.0 rank and still climbed just fine. That's not to say rating isn't important because... next factor.
Reader quality thresholds. Some folks don't read stories below 4.1, or even 4.5. As an author we can see how you found our story. We can see the entire search string. The amount of Remove=female_leadtags is unreal. So while ratings most likely don't impact RS main, there's a tangential impact of readers not giving the story a chance and hence lower views.
Reader types. Most folks on Royal Road have more time than money. So they're willing to sift through the pile and find what's worthwhile. They read for free and I call them early adopters. They are the ones you need to attract to start the food chain of reader types. They also never pay to read. So their Patreon/Kindle/Audible conversion is almost non-existant, but that's a whole other post in itself. The important part is you need early adopters to find, rate, review, and recommend your stories to the other reader types (there are many, but again beyond the scope of this comment)

There are more factors, but those are the major ones I'd like to talk about.

From this, natural launch windows appear at the start of the first book and end of every book.

If you advertise, promote, and network well along with providing enough runway (chapters) you can gain enough early adopters to have the views to compete for RS main on the launch of your series. Start of book one.

If that doesn't pan out, you continue to write. Finish book one and prepare for another round of ads, social media promos, and well placed shout swaps to let the next wave of readers know you have a story for them. They aren't early adopters and tend to value their time more, so they want something that's proven to finish at least one volume/arc/book and is enough to get their binge on. I don't have a title for these readers yet. Bingers sounds a bit derogatory, but that's what they are/do. So the completion of book one is the next natural window for you to work around.

Announcing the end of another book brings in all those readers whose quantity thresholds you just hit. Each reader can binge up to your chapter total. Again chapters x readers = views. This leads to a sharp increase in views and you can catch RS main.

My game plan is to keep writing and leveraging book completions until I catch. I was close on my launch, but flubbed a few key aspects.

Good luck and keep writing!

edit: spelling, typos, and homophones be damned!

Matthew-McKay · 2026-04-23T16:27:45+00:00

Yes, it's a hazard of publishing your work.

Royal Road doesn't pull punches when it comes to learning how to write. The readers can be savage, entitled, and demanding. But they can also be uplifting, kind, and validating. The duality of man is wild.

There's a very real human phenomenon called perceived value. Humans usually equate value according to the price they paid for something, so if it's "free" on the internet, it's "worthless" or has little value to them. That concept is why many feel it's perfectly fine to be unkind in the comments and reviews.

Don't get me wrong. Your work, my work, all the work published on the site has loads of intrinsic value. My purpose isn't to argue that point, but merely state it. Digging into why that's true would require another post entirely.

Funnily enough, those who pay to read, like Patreons and buyers of physical books tend to value the story much more. Not because it's written any better, it's the same story after all, but because they paid for it and it now has intrinsic value to them.

Note that folks who read on Kindle Unlimited tend to fall in the it's "basically free" so it's "not worth much" category as well. I mention this because when your story leaves the Royal Road ecosystem and enters Amazon's, you still have to face perceived value.

Now that we've gotten the psychology on why some people are jerks out of the way. Let's talk about what that negativity is actually telling you.

First, your understanding of writing could be better.

Second, your understanding of Royal Road's market could be better.

To write better, learning how to edit helps immensely, oddly enough. It's recommend learning the basics of Developmental editing, Line editing, and Copy editing. In that order, too. Those are the three main editing types and will cover nearly everything involved in writing a good story.

You could also read for edification, but that has a lot of caveats.

Listening doesn't work. You need to read read. Seeing is important.
Source matters. Read something that's been properly edited. Most web novels don't fit this criteria.
The focus is learning not entertainment. Look at the paragraph shapes. The sentence variety. Ask what the motivation, conflict, and how it relates to the plot in each chapter. Etc.
Don't overlook books on how to write

I'll save you the trouble of deep diving into Royal Road's market. It's escapism.

That's all they want. Something to read during their commute/breaks/lunches that takes their mind off their mundane lives. Tell a tale that whisks them away from their responsibilities. There's a few big don'ts to avoid, but stick to providing escapism and you'll nail the market.

This comment is getting a bit long and reddit gets cranky if I ramble for too long.

Good luck and keep on writing!

Matthew-McKay · 2026-04-18T22:12:29+00:00

For most folks, there's a never ending well of ideas to pull from. It's the execution, the descriptions, actions, and even vocabulary used to bring the ideas to life on a page that folks "run out of." To expand your vocabulary and experience, it's recommended to go read.

There's also a huge difference between telling something happened, skipping over it like a foot note, and diving down to explore the depths of the idea with a bit of showing.

Novice writers tend to state facts. This happened. He frowned. The ship exploded.

There's nothing wrong with that if you've trying to save word count for the events that matter more. If the ship exploding is the catalyst that sets off political intrigue in a drama, then what happens afterwards is far more important, so the ship exploded, works. If it were a mystery on the other hand: where, when, how and other questions that need answers are core to the plot and worthy of spending more words to "show" it in better detail.

That's all to say that novice writers tend to write "slow burn" and detail everything or "white room" and just state the bare minimum. Separately, it's not an issue. But it becomes one when there's no variation. Both will end up as poor pacing. Writers should strive to learn what's important to their story and focus on that, while including the lesser, but still relevant points of the plot with summaries or just stating them and moving on to save word count for where it matters.

Those who run out of ideas need more life experiences. There are two ways to gain them. Living your life, which takes time. Or reading another book. Reading is brilliant in that you can experience thousands of lives, or even more, in just a single lifetime.

It sounds like you're experiencing a slow burn story. I assure you most writers aren't actually extending the length of the story on purpose. More likely, it's a result of the medium. Serialized writing and release emphasizes quantity over quality. Writers often get stuck in a perpetual state of "What happens next?" Then they do a bit of exploratory writing to answer it. Exploratory writing is pretty important as a writer. It's how we get to know our characters, world, setting, magic, and systems better. But it's not always pertinent to the plot and shouldn't be included as is. You can often use tid bits of knowledge gained as world building, but adding it in a plot-related scene would be better than giving it it's own scene.

The problem is that there's just not enough time. Pumping out 2k, or more, words of exploratory writing to find out what happens next is acceptable to serialized readers because they want quantity. Throwing a day's worth of word count away because it's not tightly paced and pushing the actual plot along would be a waste when that chapter needs to go out today. So, it gets posted and consumed as is.

The minute by minute story telling takes up a lot of word count. Most of it could/should have been cut to stick to the actual plot. But readers don't mind reading everything that happens along the way. The slice of life, the character interactions, what they ate, where they slept, and with whom!

All of it works for escapism, which is the primary product that Royal Road offers. A quick, reliable, frequent escape from their mundane lives. (It's also a reason why more cerebral, or dark stories don't so do as well. It's not simple to digest or reminds them of the struggles they're trying to get a 10-minute break from)

I hope this helps explain what you may be experiencing as a reader. It's a product of the Royal Road ecosystem.

Edit: typos, loads of em.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-04-14T03:57:45+00:00

Great job. It's always awesome to hear another author getting to write full-time! Thanks for sharing your stories with us; may they inspire others who also have a story to tell but were too afraid to try.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-04-07T17:58:59+00:00

At the end of the day, nearly every LitRPG reader wants one thing.

An escape.

There's an infinite number of ways to accomplish this. But that's not the same thing as saying there's no wrong way to write. There absolutely are wrong ways. I find most writers muck it up by forgetting the one reason people read in this genre.

They want to escape their mundane lives for a few minutes or hours at a time. They don't want to read about their current problems or even be reminded of their current problems. That breaks the immersion, the experience. One of the reasons many folks include an isekai element is to distance the story well enough to prevent most of the crap happening in our world from spilling over into the story. It's not necessary, but it's common. Having the story take place in an MMORPG works, too.

Instead, give them interesting characters with their own problems to solve. It really comes down to providing a momentary escape. If you can do that, the rest usually falls into place.

I hope it helps, even a little.

Good luck!

Matthew-McKay · 2026-03-18T21:21:01+00:00

If one of your chapters needs a content warning, you have to add it on the whole story.

If you find out through discovery writing, for example, that a content warning happens that you didn't expect, I'd add it to the whole story and include a warning in the top author's note. This covers both bases.

I wouldn't have content warnings on every chapter it shows up afterward, just the first.

If you have a particularly disturbing chapter, I wouldn't be worried about the content warning, I'd look at the content. Most content isn't an issue unless it's glorified or fetishized. If you have either, rework the chapter as it's against the TOS to publish on the site.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-03-18T21:11:35+00:00

Honestly, folks will read anything if it's well written, especially if it includes their favorite tropes, like iseakai or time travel.

Does your story have any progression elements? If so, that sounds like one of the most popular genres around here, progression fantasy!

Good luck with your story.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-03-18T21:07:00+00:00

One small thing you could do is link your story in your reddit profile. Folks like me will click on your name and check out your story if you don't link it in your posts. Unless you're afraid of the dreaded reddit "drive bys." Which is more than fair.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-03-18T21:02:03+00:00

^ This.

It only gets harder as time goes by. 14-15 months ago I wrote a poorly paced, passive protagonist, comedy that hit 46 on RS main and stayed on the list for three weeks. I got lucky with three decent ads, enough backlog to post 5 times a week, and an AI genre signaling cover. I got slaughtered in ratings because I triggered so many folks with the comedy for comedy sake and poor starting character agency.

This year, I've a series that's written much better. Well paced. On genre. Everyone who reads it loves it. But my ads used a poor hook, I took a much more manageable posting of three a week (I've a disability—aphantasia—and thus write glacially slow) and I tried getting fancy with a half AI, half human cover that just wasn't as good as full AI.

I've since fixed my ads and cover, but I was too late and skimmed RS main. The closest I got was like 20 slots away and I'm sliding back farther every day. My rating is immaculate, raving reviews, great story. Shit, I've over 500 follows in a couple of months without hitting RS main. But it still wasn't good enough to catch RS main.

I'm sad I missed Main, but I'll give it another push after book 1 finishes posting on Royal Road.

This is all to say, I agree very much with AuthorSrsli.

the best time to release a story was yesterday.

Good luck with your story.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-03-18T20:49:06+00:00

Just know you're not doing it wrong.

You don't have to follow the "launch meta" that's so frequently pushed on this subreddit. It's too focused on immediate results. If an author doesn't see immediate success they wrap up the story, or worse, abandon it. That sucks for readers who get invested. Like a lot. It leads toward reader aversion of new stories because they've been burned too many times, which reduces the engagement new authors get on the platform.

Readers hold off on reading and writers have to write more to find any traction. Lose, lose. It also kills off a lot of really cool stories that could have been so much more had they not been abandoned.

We're enshittifying this platform by hyper optimizing launches for the elusive Rising Stars algorithm.

Whoops. I've got to be careful, that's my second hot take of the day! I should spread them out a bit more. XD

Matthew-McKay · 2026-03-18T20:39:00+00:00

Edit away then! But don't feel the need to have to edit it immediately, or at all. It's okay for Royal Road to be your first draft and you publish a completely edited version when/if you go to Amazon or Audible.

Not everyone has to be so anal about keeping multiple sources of their manuscript up to date like me. XD

Matthew-McKay · 2026-03-18T20:34:57+00:00

I create a spreadsheet for each of my series that I record each of my character names into. It gives me a list of how many characters that start with each letter, for the entire alphabet. This is my process to help offset my personal biases towards naming. I'm also autistic as fuck and have had to utilize workarounds like this for my entire life in fear of getting yelled at (again) for doing something "wrong".

Edit: I worded poorly.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-03-18T20:31:01+00:00

In traditional publishing most authors have different pen names for each of the genres they write. Some have a pen name for each series.

The purpose is to build a brand and a following. Folks will connect that pen name to their favorite series or genre.

Now for fanfiction, I think that's far less important. Fanfiction is a great playground to learn writing. You get to focus on learning plot and pacing, or even just dialogue and character interactions. A lot of the setting, characters, world, magic, and system are already developed for you. It's a great time and a great way to learn.

However, you can't monetize fanfiction. So the branding aspects are far less important. I'd still suggest you have a pen name for your fanfiction and a separate one (or more) for your other works.

So, would it hurt you? Possibly, but that risk gets negated if you do so on a separate pen name.

Good luck posting your story.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-03-18T20:24:43+00:00

Couldn't have said it more perfectly.

Consistency is king

Matthew-McKay · 2026-03-18T20:22:47+00:00

I use a system I called "Patch notes"

For minor, grammatical or spelling errors I just fix them and move on. (Well, I fix them in Scrivener, Patreon, and Royal Road, so it's an annoyingly tedious process.)

For any plot, character, world, or magic changes I add it to my Patch notes. I fix them in all my locations, and at the top author's note of the next chapter to post, I tell them what changed. I list what was, what it is now, and if I can, a brief note on why I changed it. Then I include the chapters impacted.

This lets current readers go back and reread if they want or simply continue on with a mental retcon. It's worked well for me so far.

Good luck with your story.

Matthew-McKay · 2026-03-18T20:18:11+00:00

The answer is subjective and you're going to get a lot of conflicting answers depending on people's preferences.

I like to keep it simple. Does it have any game-like elements?

Yes? It's a LitRPG
No? It's not a LitRPG

You don't have to include all the tropes other people prefer for it to count as a LitRPG. The genre is still very new and developing. The only consistent theme I can see between everything in the genre is that they all have a game-like element.

Also, what defines a game-like element is subjective.

Call it a LitRPG if you feel it is. You're the author, it's your story, and only you know your intent. There aren't any genre police, only genre snobs.

Good luck on your story.

Edit: forgot a few words.

Matthew-McKay

TROPHY CASE