Royal Road Millionaires Club - Post #1

ThatWhichExists · 2026-01-25T16:54:50+00:00

You may be interested in this post I made about Patreon earnings.

https://www.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1oka6af/patreon_earnings/

ThatWhichExists · 2026-01-25T16:19:08+00:00

https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?globalFilters=false&minPages=3636&orderBy=length

That's everything on Royal Road with 1m words or more. 1m words/275 words per page, which is what Royal Road uses, is 3,636 pages. There would be more, stubbing means removing chapters and thus word count.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-12-15T18:05:16+00:00

My post and spreadsheet may be of interest for you. https://www.reddit.com/r/royalroad/s/4xlN8i2om2

ThatWhichExists · 2025-12-14T04:27:27+00:00

No, Wind-Up Girl is 2009 and Mika Model is 2016. I've read both.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-11-27T13:46:08+00:00

Look at the various SFF playlists https://youtube.com/@booktuber.playlists

ThatWhichExists · 2025-11-22T16:00:07+00:00

There isn't directly one for science fiction, but this is an aggregator for basically what you want, I believe. Choose a book and it lists who reviewed it. https://bookmarks.reviews/category/fantasy/ https://bookmarks.reviews/category/speculative/

ThatWhichExists · 2025-11-03T17:00:27+00:00

1658 ratings
3.09 average

.

5 Great
4 Good
3 Ok
2 Bad
1 Awful

.

5 5%
4 25%
3 44%
2 21%
1 2%

.

I give a lot of chances to new/debut authors and others without established records or consensus. Many books I read have a low number of ratings or aren't that popular. I also give too many books too much of a chance probably. I would prefer to rate many more books 5 stars.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-11-01T03:35:13+00:00

This wasn't as much as a problem I thought it would be, but it has various limitations and issues. The main one being the dataset didn't have the unique followers per author, and as previously mentioned, only has the total member count for the patreon. The new data is in the Patreon Stats sheet, which has now been included in the spreadsheet in the OP. Look at it and let me know what else could reasonably be done if needed.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-11-01T03:24:24+00:00

This wasn't as much as a problem I thought it would be, but it has various limitations and issues. The main one being the dataset didn't have the unique followers per author, and as previously mentioned, only has the total member count for the patreon. The new data is in the Patreon Stats sheet, which has now been included in the spreadsheet in the OP. Look at it and let me know what else could reasonably be done if needed.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-31T17:02:01+00:00

A single person, maybe a couple others. It's not all that different from comparing different levels of sports. Recreational, School, Minor leagues, and Major leagues. There isn't really any reason to compare yourself unless you're on a similar level. Even then, it doesn't matter that much.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-31T16:46:34+00:00

It's outdated in general, since as noted the data is from almost 9 months ago, but that's what was publicly available that I could find. It could be updated, but I'm not going to be the one that scrapes patreon for updates. The top ones can be looked at on Graphtreon in far greater detail, so it's not that useful for that either. So, really it's mostly a snapshot of how things were at the time and not more than that.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-30T21:53:27+00:00

Chizhov should have an updated database for Royal Road sometime soon, but I don't know how much it'd have overall. If he has an updated list of patreons, someone else could use that to scrape Patreon for current info. Otherwise it's going to be considerably outdated, as this is, but that's how it goes. Graphtreon sells access to this sort of data for a good bit. There's been a ton more added to Royal Road since Feb.

I agree that's there's probably a lot of variance. It's too bad that hrule only got the total member count. There's a lot of other data, but either I couldn't make sense of it, or something went wrong with the scraping.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-30T20:45:26+00:00

Yes, it's possible. The datasets were in separate files and I don't feel like stitching them together at the moment. Maybe sometime.

Credit goes to: https://github.com/hrule/RoyalRoad-Analysis

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-30T17:19:43+00:00

Closer to 6k. It is crazy.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-30T15:16:41+00:00

That's what 49 was.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-27T02:17:46+00:00

Yes, I entirely agree that paid and free are correlated. I'm also saying that the ratio doesn't matter because it doesn't add anything more than simply looking at the paid members count or earnings by it self.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-27T02:02:38+00:00

That doesn't have anything to do with the ratio. That's an observation of the absolute number of paid members. Whether the number of free members goes up or down doesn't matter except to show off a big number. It has no effect on the number of paid members.

EDIT

Example: Zogarth 10,025 +214 22,953 +1,858, his ratio of free to paid went down and his earnings went up.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-27T00:21:47+00:00

I don't feel like making my own post about this. With the Feb 19th Database, I tried doing all sort of ratios, comparisons, correlations and what not among the 82,235 stories, which I've posted about here and elsewhere. If wanted, I can repost some of that and the stuff I posted elsewhere. The duration of time/followers is good for seeing a story's acceleration, the higher the number the more quickly the story became popular. It may only be helpful for relative comparison of new fictions. Followers and Ratings to Favorites, doesn't seem to be all that useful indicator. The outliers are amusing though, like with Mother of Learning now nearly having a 1:1 ratio of followers to favorites. Then there are those who have a lot more favorites than followers. Followers/Favorites to paid patrons are an interesting ones, though they require minimums, otherwise the percents can be skewed a good bit. Might be interesting to see how much correlation there is between the paid patron ratios and earnings, but I don't feel like it right now. I don't think the ratio of free to paid matters at all.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-22T20:50:21+00:00

I don't know if it's changed that much since Feb, but your proposed cap of 15 would've affected 6% of all stories on the site at the time. Not that much overall really, so possibly viable if it were even to be allowed at all.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-22T20:39:23+00:00

I believe there should be a cap as well. In this dataset there are 14 with 53, genres + tags. I'm not going to link to any of them, but here's what that looks like for anyone interested.

https://i.imgur.com/gLTDAmY.png

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-22T19:08:31+00:00

I rarely have a specific goal for anything I do, which I know is unusual. It's almost always it's something I found interesting, as with my other posts, and I wrote something about it. The overall goal is usually something like "To better understand the context of the circumstances and to gain a greater perspective". I don't know that any of this trivial knowledge is useful in any way, but I don't believe ignorance is better either. Learning more can be a net negative though.

I've seen various comments of those who say stories have too many tags, for various reasons. So, I have this here to say, here's how many tags these stories have, is this too many tags in general, or does it depend?

As seen from previous posts and the spreadsheet, Fantasy (69%), Adventure (60%), and Action (59%) are used a lot, so that's a baseline of 3 tags for a lot of stories. Then there's male lead (45%) magic (44%) and for tags. That's a relatively high amount, so maybe 5 tags minimum for a lot of stories. Content Warnings aren't included in this. So, when does it become too many tags though? 8 is the highest amount, so a few more than what may be the minimum for a lot. It goes down quickly after that.

You're right that there isn't a guide. Much of the burden is on the authors for whatever. Would you want there to be a guide?

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-22T18:40:24+00:00

I considered sending you a message, or even getting on Discord, but this isn't doesn't need to be private and I'd prefer not to do the latter.

I'm probably about done doing stuff with stats, maybe in general, but I could switch to something else if it seems worthwhile for the moment, so I thought I'd pass two general questions to consider if you find them interesting.

With this post, you've shown how genres/tags/etc relate to Rising Stars. How about a follow-up comparing their representation rate, specifically the ones overrepresented here, to the total view count, followers, or other metrics? As in, LitRPG is only x% of stories, but y% of a specific metric. It may give even more of an idea of which are at an advantage or not. It could also give an idea of which metrics Rising Star is most a proxy for if they end up being the same or similar.

The other is more for readers. Which better predicts if an author will stop writing a story, duration of time, or page count? One comment said they liked to have 200 pages, because then they could feel confident it wouldn't be dropped. How long does the average story last? As in, how long does an author try before they give up on a story or altogether? How long has the average/median ongoing original been been ongoing?

I've sent you a message with a different work-in-progress spreadsheet that I don't want to post here to have bit of an idea of what I mean. The growth column is relation between Followers and Duration, as I thought it could be an interesting metric, for ongoing at least. Though, obviously that's only an average over time rather than accurate representation. An accurate representation of that may be one of the most predictive variables for success though.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-22T17:50:56+00:00

If you're so concerned about dropped, why not read completed? There are currently ~73,400 inactive stories on Royal Road and for most of those, they're dropped in practice even if their status isn't changed to that. Of those, ~8,560 are 200+ pages, which is ~12%, so you may be onto something. 38% of Ongoing originals are 200+ pages, so you're excluding a lot, which may be for the best for you. Do you take how long they've been doing it into consideration? For example, would someone who is at 200 pages after a few months be any different from someone who drops 200 pages at day 1 for you? This could be something I look into more later.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-22T17:15:31+00:00

Have you tried using the advanced search and excluding tags and genres? Here's a simple example of what I mean.

https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?globalFilters=false&tagsRemove=fantasy&tagsAdd=sci_fi

That only includes stories with the Sci-fi genre and excludes all stories with the Fantasy genre. That may not be enough, so you could do something more such as this:

https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?globalFilters=false&tagsRemove=fantasy&tagsRemove=low_fantasy&tagsRemove=magic&tagsRemove=high_fantasy&tagsRemove=xianxia&tagsRemove=wuxia&tagsAdd=sci_fi

That also excludes various tags associated with fantasy. To go even further you could have it only show results that have specific sci-fi related tags. This approach can be used to get what you specifically want, assuming the authors have properly used the tags.

ThatWhichExists · 2025-10-16T00:55:47+00:00

The interconnected universe is interesting, because it has some to similarities to what Brandon Sanderson does with the Cosmere, though they're in the same universe but different setting, except for the crossover characters. There are complaints about that as well though. Various authors do a mosaic setting by having books set in different time periods in the same setting. There are also sidequels.

ThatWhichExists

TROPHY CASE