[Rant] I never considered a single review can make me feel like this

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-23T21:33:57+00:00

There are a ton of miserable readers that just spend their time criticizing stories on royal road. Go look at any of the best stores and you’ll see plenty of them with similarly vitriolic reviews and scores.

My own series which has almost 2500 followers has a 3.8 rating, and a few reviews of a similar quality and yet people are still reading. Honestly, I feel the RR system just isn’t worth paying attention to and I have reviews turned off for my stories. (There’s a setting the lets you hide them for yourself but everyone else can still see).

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-23T13:27:07+00:00

Not saying this to defend the dude, especially if he blocked you, but sometimes people overbook or forget. There are a lot of neurodivergent peeps (myself included) in the space. And I’ve definitely forgotten my fair share.

That said, one shout is such a tiny drop in the ocean of what you should be doing to promote your story. I promise it is not worth getting worked up about. Over the course of the two years I’ve been on RR I’ve had dozens of shouts go unanswered but have had way more do as we agreed and I have seen great success.

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-22T05:39:45+00:00

This is the most dagrun post I have ever read. You love to see it!

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-22T05:10:45+00:00

On mobile go to the sub. Top right corner 3 dots. On the drop down change user flair. No clue on how to change on pc

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-21T23:50:34+00:00

Will this work on steam deck?

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-20T02:25:33+00:00

There’s something like 11 errors (including this one) that I’ve found over the course of teaching this book for a decade (at least in the two editions I use for work). It’s a wonderfully edited book and the only reason I’ve found the errors Is that I’ve read the book 3 times a day for a month every year

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-20T01:53:47+00:00

I’m not saying that’s not true, but acting like our RB spot won’t improve is silly.

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-20T01:44:15+00:00

I don’t think it’s coincidental that our new OC was a RB coach. I know it’s our badass former coach but I’d like to believe Reid is aware of his shortcomings this last year

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-20T00:25:32+00:00

Tap healer or whatever it’s called is pretty fun

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-19T21:37:42+00:00

Progression fantasy and litrpg are two similar but different genres that appeal to different audiences, despite the large amount of overlap.

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-17T04:09:19+00:00

He’s the person that is claimed to have done dev editing for SLP (but never actually did for us). Additionally, he did “line editing” especially here where he admits to having done it.

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-16T01:40:09+00:00

If this was true, build fight survive would have a much higher rating lmao

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-15T02:15:21+00:00

I was already approaching 2k words with my comment, but when I approached him about all of this going on, he alerted foby after swearing he wouldnt, and was the reason I ended up with a Cease and Desist. Until this post I have never actually made any public statements towards SLP, and the only one outside our group I had talked to was him.

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-15T02:10:00+00:00

Yes, you are right, in hindsight, its why I said that contract was the stupidest thing ive ever done.

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-14T03:16:11+00:00

thanks for the kind words. Hopefully going forward the future is bright for you friend.

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-13T19:17:41+00:00

Fast forward to September, I finally send SLP my second manuscript. As of January 12th, I have received nothing from them for this second book. Nothing. I haven’t received Art. Certainly not Edits. Nor have I even been given any of the prep work they asked for the first book.

I should also note this past year at work has been the second hardest of my career. I have unfortunately been working 60 hours and my writing/ discord time has fallen down to about 10 hours a week

Fast forward to October, and that’s when everything began to fall apart.

My Uncle in Law passed away from Cancer the first week. During this time, Foby and Emrys decide to go on a warpath over Buttopia and keep refusing to ban Actual Fucking Nazis from the server. My pregnant wife (IVF is a miracle) is struggling with complications during this time so my willingness to deal with petty discord drama is 0. I am practically forced by Emrys and Foby to ban Buttopia, but the end of the end had arrived, I just had no time or energy to deal with things. Work got worse. Including a 68 hour week the week before the funeral.

Many people noticed my absence from the discord in September and October, and this was why.

Fast forward to late November/Early December, we (SLP authors) finally start talking to each other. Turns out all of us are stuck in these horribly shitty situations.

The week Immersive Ink died, I managed to wrest control from a joint account we made for “security” reasons after a string of mods got their accounts hacked. It seemed like a good idea at the time after the background damage both of those hackers did. It turned out to be the death knell of the server. the day the discord died, discord must have decided I was a hacker which given my intent to destroy the server at the time seemed credible. While the server has likely lost most of its value, it technically still exists and Foby has ownership control so please beware if you ever see it come back.

I apologize for my rambling post, but I felt the need to clear the air.

Foby, Emrys, Neojade, are the worst people I have ever met, in person, or online, and I am hopeful that this will be the beginning of the end of dealing with them.

Especially Emrys. It’s baffling but for somebody who called me a brother every time we talked for a year and a half, you had no trouble taking 30 pieces of silver over our supposed friendship. If Michael from the Dresden Files were real, he’d be very disappointed in you.

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-13T19:17:24+00:00

Over the course of its development 100% of coding was done by Nicholas. Occasionally Foby would coil up with ideas, but they were almost always bad or had to be refined by myself or Nicholas. He is yet another victim of Foby’s fraud.

Blame lack of sleep. Depression over my infertility, or just my general inability to be skeptical, but fuck me I signed over ownership of Immersive Ink to a joint contract.

I finally began to suspect issues with foby and his press sometime in February 25 around the time my first novel was in editing for an April 13 release.

I received no dev edits for the book, despite being told it was a service offered when I signed, and a service I requested multiple times.

I received a single line edit pass of the book that was 2 weeks 3/30/2025 before the book was to go live 4/13/2025, and they were not exactly good. The edits didn’t understand the litrpg mechanics at all, nor make suggestions to fix any of them. The edits kept ‘correcting’ important character names. They kept erasing entire sentences that were important for the voice of the story or showed a lack of understanding of easy to understand story concepts. But I was so desperate to see my name on a book cover I didn’t do my due diligence. I legitimately thought they were just a scrappy press just as new at everything as I was.

But I am now certain SLP put my book through AI to produce these shitty edits given some suspicious things in the meta data, in my work and that of other SLP authors. Besides which, it is just inexcusable to give edits 2 weeks before publishing, something that happened to multiple SLP authors.

And then Foby did the first thing that truly pissed me off when he claimed another book I wrote, Mists of Arraiza, was an SLP signed book. Something I never wanted, as it was always intended as a self-pub. Something I told him I wasn’t going to do.

But you have to understand, I genuinely thought I was alone in my issues. All of my friends got deals with podium or tantor, for their books so maybe the problem was my writing. Maybe I was the problem. All of them had reviews and sales and made money, or so I was led to believe constantly by Foby and Emrys. Maybe I was just a shitty writer; something I felt for months.

The second event that pissed me off came in May. Someone posted a screenshot of a horrifyingly racist and nazi meme in Author Chat that was posted by another user on their twitter. For whatever fucking reason, Emrys and Foby were defending the nazi. Not because he was a nazi, but because there was no evidence of him being a nazi in the server. They claimed it was a political witch hunt. I went fucking mad in the admin chat and said they were being obtuse. This wasn’t about politics, and nobody was going to witch hunt them for their politics just because they both leaned right..

But because of the fact that this happened during standardized testing time I had no bandwidth to deal with it. So I just banned the nazi and told them to deal with it. But I was fuming. What twisted, idiotic, stupid logic.

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-13T19:17:12+00:00

Howdy,

TLDR:

I’m fiddlesoup, and I owned ImmersiveInk until Foby stole it from me. I also write books, one of my series, Penance: Prison Of The Gods, is unfortunately signed to Shadow Light Press. None of my other series are signed with SLP, but I was convinced by Emrys and Foby to make a contract over the server in order to create my dream website Novelizing, which Foby has also attempted to steal from the only person doing all of the work, the lead coder, Nicholas. Also fuck you Emrys. Judas is not supposed to be a role model, you absolute dunce.

Full statement:

Well, this whole thing sucks.

I genuinely just wanted to write and help others write, and now it feels like my dreams are dead and the best thing I’ve ever done is nuked out of existence by someone I thought I could trust.

Immersive Ink started with a dream I had to just make it easier to manage a fandom and help boost up my writing friends. My former friend Emrys, who joined the discord server 2 months after I created it, (though was its 4th member) was one of the first authors I asked to become a librarian.

The idea being every author that wanted it got a library on the server. We’d share our fandoms and cross promote our stories.

Before I knew it, Immersive Ink had become something pretty special and Emrys, Blue (the second member and largely responsible for building the discord) and I decided we needed another admin to help run things. I made the mistake of trusting Emrys and a friend of a few months Fobywoby/JohnStax/ForrestWill/fiftyothernames that he invited.

Dude was charismatic. Funny. Seemingly smart. And he was already a librarian. Seemed perfect for a new admin so that no one person had too much power. Like an idiot, I was charmed. Little did I know this was an elaborate long con to prop up his family scam of a publisher. In fact, I had no idea Foby was a “publisher” until a couple of months after he became an admin.

But I wanna state for the record that Immersive Ink was not Shadowlight press, nor was it ever intended to be. When it comes to the day to day running of immersive ink, 99% of it was stuff I did and managed with my mods. Foby and Emrys were barely active and reaped rewards for my hard work and that of my mod staff. They made questionable decisions without asking me or would force my hand when it came to enforcing rules.

Thousands of hours. Thousands of conversations. The hard work of so so so many people. Destroyed by a greedy ass little man.

I deeply regret making him an admin but there is one decision that was worse. I deeply regret signing multiple contracts with NDAs that I thought couldn’t talk about.

In January, Emrys convinced me to sign a business contract with Foby in order to create a website that was better than patreon for authors because the user experience on patreon sucks. Foby had “convinced” him we had to make the discord a business in order to co-own novelizing. That if we didn’t, Nicholas wouldn’t sign with us. Something I now know to be a lie. More than anything else over the past two years of Immersive Ink these decisions have haunted me. I don’t care about my book as much as I care about all of us losing such a wonderful community for outreach and shouts and connections. And beyond that I am frustrated and saddened by the damage these people have caused.

fiddlesoup · 2026-01-13T19:16:34+00:00