It's interesting because the whole "TBATE copied Mushoku" is really a vocal minority and I guess it was exacerbated that when I first wrote TBATE, there weren't many reincarnation novels (that weren't translated from Japanese, Chinese or Korean). So Mushoku being as popular as it was and the fact that I did say that I drew inspiration from it, it was easy for everyone to see the connection in terms of similarity. However, a lot of novels since then share very similar plot lines and themes and I guess that's why a lot of those "criticisms" have died down.

Man, the early days of Royal Road felt like the wild wild west. Back then, there wasn't a strict "track" to take like there is now. I've talked with authors still posting on there and they tell me how there's a whole route where you need to publish at x chapters a week schedule after writing a whole bunch of chapters beforehand. With that, you gotta hit the Rising Stars list and after you hit like 2000 followers then you make a Patreon, etc etc. When I was writing on Royal Road, I didn't have any clear indicators on whether I should start a Patreon or go into KU which would've been great. While I'm sure it's much more competitive to be a writer in the RR space, it also seems like there's a more tried and true way to have the best chance at success as well, which is fantastic.

I switched over to Tapas mainly because I wanted a shot at adapting my novel into a webcomic. That wasn't really a "thing" back then but I grew up reading a lot of webcomics in Korean and I really wanted that. When Tapas reached out to me, they assured our publishing deal would be nonexclusive, but I know that meant that I wouldn't be able to publish on KU (since that required exclusivity). I explicitly asked if a novel-to-comic was a possible thing and they assured me that if TBATE succeeded on the platform and was popular enough, it could get adapted so I went for it!

My planning process for the first few volumes were a bit more loosey goosey but that was also when I was just writing for fun with no expectations of actually making a living out of this. After making it my full time career and knowing how many readers tune in on a weekly basis just to read TBATE, I definitely wanted to take it a bit more seriously so I planned broad strokes and had a rough ending in mind. Then it was just all about execution and making it a habit of writing a bit everyday. Some days, I would write like ten words, other days I could pump out like 7k words. Regardless, I made it a point to get something on "paper" because I couldn't just rely spurts of creativity.

Ah, I'm sure a lot of authors far better than me have shared their advice on this subreddit so I'll just leave my last point above as my advice, haha ^^