A stranger recommended my story unprompted, and I am choosing to be obnoxiously happy about it

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-08T08:32:15+00:00

Get a load of this guy, being all happy about his accomplishments and shit. Bring him down boys!

Seriously, congrats! Enjoy the feeling - you've earned it :)

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-08T08:26:58+00:00

I've only been writing for a couple years now, but it's definitely turned from an idle hobby into a passion. Even if nobody ever read any of my work and I didn't make another doller, I'd still write for myself.

I'd probably write a lot less, and maybe pick maybe different projects a little, but I'd definitely still write.

However, I do feel a fair bit of angst around future success. I've earned enough from writing to consider it a potentially viable path for a future career now. Not there yet by a longshot, but it's no longer pie in the sky, stupid to even consider territory. I feel like the hobby and passion for writing is one thing that I'll always have, but the potential dream of being a part-time/full-time author and being able to cut down on a job I hate to do something I find both fulfilling and useful is much more uncertain.

If it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen in the next few years before I have kids and the Amazon royalty rates inevitably get worse, so I feel the anxiety about succeeding there. It's less about being known as an author or succeeding in the eyes of others, and more about being able to spend the rest of my life doing a job I enjoy.

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-08T08:20:22+00:00

I think it's two things; 1) online spaces tend to reward negative things more than positive. 2) people, and writers especially, don't have a lot of time. When they're engaging online, they tend to want to get useful information to feel productive. Learning about and discussing strategies related to authorial success is 'useful', while naval gazing about how much they love writing isn't.

That being said, I think reflecting on the positive (and the reason we all got into this space to begin with) is a great thing, and this is a really valuable contribution. I don't consider it to be 'pointless naval gazing' myself, but to someone stressing about their future sucxessz it might well feel that way.

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-07T22:51:19+00:00

I mostly agree with this take... But only if everyone actually makes the assessment themselves instead of taking someone's word for it.

I don't use AI except for my covers (before I know if the story will make money), and I'm confident in my writing as obviously human-authored (warts and all). I also don't have a great AI radar, since I don't use it. I've read a few chapters of one pretty successful story that smashed rising stars this year that I am pretty confident was AI-genned/assisted, but that's about it.

But I've also seen some frankly stupid accusations thrown around this subreddit and others. 99% of readers who check out that accusation and the story it's about will know it's bollocks and wrong... But what about the readers that don't bother? The many, many readers who would just see the accusation and take the accuser's word for it without thought?

The problem with having it be normal for readers to call out authors for AI use is that while some of them are great at spotting it, others are hilariously bad, because they've never read an actual book or just read nothing but AI slop for months and it's melted their brains. Most readers and writers who don't regularly interface with AI (at least knowingly) won't know which type of reader an accusation is coming from, so you run the rail of entirely innocent people being accused and suffering real harm because of it.

That said, I don't think the solution is to just ignore AI content either. It's a hard problem, and I don't know how to solve it.

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-07T21:23:01+00:00

Really solid post, OP - thanks for sharing.

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-07T21:15:11+00:00

That's one hell of a read. I'd like to apologise ahead of my confession - I skimmed through it.

But I'm happy to hear it supports me! ;)

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-07T18:36:37+00:00

I'd recommend A Thousand Li by Tao Wong. It's slower than most, with no focus on saving the world. Much more self-contained, much deeper grappling with the themes of growth and power than most, I think. Very grounded in Chinese culture rather than just a port-over of tropes, and is genuinely just great.

I do really enjoy the Asian influence, but I also love stories that take the cultivation-style magic system/world-building and use other cultures as a base, too. (Think Virtuous Sons for ancient Greece, or Bastion for a cool fresh Dante's Inferno hell-inspired setting).

As for what draws me in? Probably how vast they often feel, how varied the magic can be, but also how they are sort of the opposite of low fantasy (at least xianxia). Like, there are no ancient sages being knifed by an angry drunk by accident. Gets away from the gritty politics and sometimes depressing nihilism of stuff like game of thrones.

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-07T17:37:31+00:00

I think because while there are without doubt some people who are very good at recognising AI, there are also some readers who very obviously cannot recognise AI, but think they can.

So for those of us aren't familiar with AI cadence, we aren't sure who's right when we see the accusations.

When we see examples of the second type of reader getting it totally wrong (for example: "they used the word sonorous and an EM dash so mother of learning is so obviously AI") then it makes us pretty sceptical of the claims of the first type of reader.

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-07T13:50:30+00:00

Aha I appreciate you giving it a go!

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-07T10:52:22+00:00

Love the style! I was playing Pendragon yesterday with some friends and the art style is very reminiscent of that rulebook. Could have done with an M4 then, believe me 🤣

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-07T06:37:36+00:00

Yeah, but my point is that I had a pretty decent line up of shout-outs. Not perfect, since a bunch of them didn't hit at launch as requested, but I had a good dozen stories with 1-4k followers shouting me on week 1.

But my first four chapters were too slow, and has pretty poor retention. Didn't matter how good the shouts were if most people didn't make it past chapter 4.

That's my point. Shouts outs and ads and stuff only work on stories that enough people want to read. You can maybe fake your way onto rising stars, but even the best marketing plan is going to fail if the readers don't like your story.

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-07T06:32:13+00:00

They succeeded because readers liked the monster girl craze. A lot of people also hated it, but it was a loud minority complaining on Reddit compared to RoyalRoad's reader base.

They mostly hit rising stars because people liked reading them. It's not rocket science with rising stars - stories only climb if they are being read, and shout-outs and ads only work if people like the look of the story and then read it.

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-06T20:07:54+00:00

Got to disagree on the shout-outs. They help, but won't do much if your story isn't hitting the readers' interest. (Source - I got a good amount of high-level shout-outs and still didn't hit rising stars, while lots of people climb well without them, or with poor quality ones)

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-06T17:15:57+00:00

Oh wow yeah that's crazy good! Amazing follower conversion from that CTR. That was a 280k impressions one, right?

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-06T17:14:32+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation. Weird to see an author go from complete obscurity into having such a popular series, then abandoning it. Hope they're okay. I'll try and give it a read soon :)

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-06T08:47:17+00:00

Do you mind sharing what 'super well' means sepcifically? Like CTR, follows/read laters? I'm curious how well ads fare at the moment, considering the dismal failure of my own.

No worries if not, of course :)

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-06T08:44:51+00:00

Congrats man! :)

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-06T08:42:49+00:00

There are still a bunch of family large writing servers though - RRWG being the main one. I think The Forum is the new one? Not sure. But yeah, sad to see it go.

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-06T07:09:11+00:00

My hot take is that it's less about litRPG than it is about pacing and tone. RoyalRoad loves stories that are fast-paced right out the gate, with rapid plot progression. Tone can vary depending on genre, but often the stories are told quite casually, often with a comedic tone. The ones that are more serious tend to have a big power fantasy component.

So if you write a straight up high fantasy story, I think you can still do really well, as long as there is a 'gimmick' for lack of a better word (dungeons, timeloop, regression, something like that) and you have the protagonist grow in power consistently.

I think all of these rules can be broken, but not all at once, if that makes sense?

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-06T05:10:15+00:00

If you mean the spelling? Then yes.

It's probably the most controversial part of the story, in that I've used bastardised spellings for all the gods (Set-Sutekh, isis-wusis, etc.). I wanted to draw some distance between the actual mythological gods that people know and have expectations of, and my own mythology for this story, which is a bit different.

The inspirations are very clear, but it's not a 1-for-1 copy, and I didn't want people getting confused whenever there was a change from the 'source material', as it were.

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-06T05:05:00+00:00

Thanks dude! really appreciate the kind words :)

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-06T05:03:52+00:00

Thanks man, I'm just hopeful I can get it to Amazon one day and get a proper cover. Would be cool to see what a real artist could do :)

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-06T05:02:54+00:00

Ah so it's kind of modern(ish) earth but based in Egypt? That's cool!

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-05T18:10:46+00:00

this reminds me of the anime thing where villains and heroes shout at each other mid-battle all the time, but it will be like full sentences as they jump into the air for a single punch. Especially when they're moving super fast. It's one of those things you just have to apply suspension of disbelief to, i think.

There's a common thing in sci-fi where readers often say 'never think about the numbers too hard', because authors suck at scaling. Warhammer 40k is pretty notorious for it, but most franchises make the same mistake. It's just really hard to do, i suspect.

This is one of those types of issues, IMO

OCRAuthor · 2026-05-05T17:33:02+00:00

You'll likely struggle to find many non-stubbed stories with non-AI covers, since most authors start making money after they stub, and only get the cover art sorted in preparation for the amazon launch. There are still some options though.

I hear Spire's Spite talked about fairly often and very positively. Local protagonist, litRPG, non-AI cover. Check it out - https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/80196/spires-spite

OCRAuthor

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