r/royalroad

So, as most of you guys know that on our royal road novel page there is the Others Also Liked section. It is a completely self regulated mechanism and pairs up similar types of novels with close ratings and reader base. But if you add a plethora of tags then it will reduce your Others Also Liked occurrences. Use four major and only 7 to 8 extra tags initially.

I have been publishing for nearly three months and only got to know about this today. My OAL count was literally 0 and selected tags were around 17.😉 And join discord if you want to check your count.

Hope your writing journey goes well.

Looking for a new story to read and review (both on RR and Goodreads/Amazon if available).

Not looking for:
- Harems
- Farming
- cultivation
- OP MCs from the start (I want them to work for it)

Looking for:
-something not too popular
-at least one finished book in the series with plans to finish it
- smart MCs that aren’t perfect

I got this idea from somebody else a few weeks ago and really liked it. I don’t expect anything in return and I am fully expecting self promotion so please feel free to promote your stories.

The reading/writing community where I come from sucks so I’m trying to make one of my own here.

I'm specifically interested in the Harem tag. I'm busy writing a series. I know the beginning, middle and end of the first book in a broad sense. The MC only ends up with a single character by the end, but the first three chapters give an impression that the series might be a harem. There is an important reason for this. What I'm worried about is that when I start publishing to RR that people will read the first three chapters and get turned off because I didn't use the tag or get to the end of the first book and then get pissed off that it obviously isn't a harem when I used the tag. What is the best way to approach this to avoid alienating potential readers?

Chapter 1 - locked

I am not someone who likes to write. While I have a fixation on history and mysteries, writing never clicked for me.

However, that all changed on May 21st, 2020.

I must inform you that the lockdown has been put in place due to a new virus. I had a lot of free time, so I was rotting in my room. 

I was quite angry when my phone’s battery died. I stood up and started scrambling to find the charger.

Ah, forgive me for my English, it is my second language, but the most comfortable to write in.

Anyway, while throwing my clothes around, I found something which was certainly not mine. My first instinct was that it was of a friend who left it here, but it was too peculiar to be that.

A chest of sorts with a stupidly bland design. I stared at it for a good handful of seconds before touching it.

I spent the next few minutes trying to open it. In the end, it opened in a bizarre style. I do not even know how to write about it.

Inside it were stacks of books.

When I curiously opened one, it was written with weird symbols.

That is why I am writing this. 

I found a few books meant to teach me this language, and in a few months, I could roughly translate the mysterious books. Sure, I did question it, and I did try to find any answers.

But I soon gave up, amounting it to something God gave me to cure my boredom and be cheerful or something.

Now I will be translating it as well as I can. I’ll use ‘*’ and ‘ **’ to write translation notes.

Since the books I found were seemingly a story, and I am not the writer, I will just be the translator.

The title of the book was GREED.

But I will call this OTHERWORLDLY GREED for obvious reasons.

I write a novel about Yuri Xianxia world hopping. The core idea was for the MC to travel between different worlds and they'll have self contained stories and progression in each of them, just like in Chinese Quick Transmigration. And here lies the biggest problem of mine.

Since my first arc was nearly halfway through and the plot was completely laid out, I thought about initial prepping for the second arc. And for some god knows what reason, I got too excited and wrote a dozen chapters and made the few chapters too deep to use in my current novel. Now I am stuck with a novel that I can't continue writing due to needing to do the first one and also can't publish due to not having enough chapters. 😭 And I also have to prep for the second arc

> "If you do X, I'll kill you." It wasn't a threat, it was a promise.

My brother, that is literally a threat.

Bonus sentence I just read:

> "He would have to defeat them. Alone, with nothing more than his Ancient Power."

Let me preface this by saying this is my own personal opinions, and obviously there are people who won't share them and haven't had similar experiences to me. This is just from what I observed from my own experience. When I initially launched my novel about four or five months ago, I spent a lot of time networking and doing a lot of shout-outs. I got shout-outs from everybody from five followers to 10,000. In fact, I had three or four 6,000-plus follower shout-outs. And I even got shout-outs from people who had really successful launches.

But in my case, those shout-outs basically did nothing. Now, it's possible that my story just doesn't mesh well with a lot of the other stories, and the audience wasn't interested, or my shoutout wasn't interesting enough. I found a lot more success with ads, personally. I was talking with some other authors on Royal Road about shoutouts, and a lot of them had to say that the reason why shoutouts aren't as effective as they used to be is because everyone is doing them now, and so readers don't really pay attention to shoutouts. They're kind of like mandatory ads in a video. I was just curious what your opinions and experiences with shoutouts were.

I’ve heard a bunch of people say to have your patreon linked from the very first chapter and I’ve heard others say you need to time it perfectly. What’s the right one?

Also my writing device and device with my bank account are two completely separate ones so I would appreciate some help on how to link them.

I'm starting to imagine a fight scene where my protagonist just beats down on a group of people and speed blitzes them with nothing but a pair of chopsticks in his hand. I really want to make this happen. How can j make my protagonist train to become that strong in the most realistic way possible?

It appears that I have not been reading enough LITRPG because when I saw the ranks for the author flair my brain automatically defaulted to F->D->C for grades and completely passed over E. It was only when I saw a comment mentioning D rank being mod assigned that I double checked the rankings and realized I had put the wrong one on.

So to any of my fellow small authors, I recommend looking over the rankings in case you've forgotten that E is a letter. Or I could be the only one, in which case I'm sorry for the unnecessary post.

I am brainstorming two different Farm Life / Farm Sim LitRPG concepts.

One would be your standard Harvest Moon scenario but with incredibly dark, disturbing stuff going on in the town behind the scenes (think Persona 4, Twin Peaks, Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees stuff).

The other would be a more traditional approach to the Harvest Moon formula with a move towards more Macro-focused SimFarm mechanics but it takes place on Mars (i.e., Sci-Fi).

Which would be more interesting? I may never write either, but just feeling inspired at the moment.

I am unsure if this should need a second post, so please remove it if it violates any rules I am not seeing here.

To those who found my post from yesterday, the issue has been resolved. Some of you have rightfully pointed out I was too heated and that I should approach this with a more calm and collected manner. Unfortunately, I had already sent an indignant reply by then. I have also raised a separate ticket later on with what I hope is a more measured reply.

Thankfully, Moderator John(is it against the rules to name the Moderator?) was understanding enough to ignore my outburst and hostility here and on the support ticket reply. Additionally, there weren't aware of my communication with the other joke maker to stop this joke in bad faith. I am still not sure how I thought they can read DMs, that is my fault. As of now, the issue has been cleared and the ban was lifted. I had also changed the original post to reflect that.

If you guys want to take anything from this ordeal, please, PLEASE inform the person you are about to report that what they are doing is wrong. In my case, the community was actively spurring the joke on and I wasn't aware some were put-off by the joke. The comment the reporting user posted(on RR chapter) was the first strong kickback I got on this 2 week new joke. What could easily be someone playing leisurely jokes and can be similarly stopped with simple message(on comment/personal message) shouldn't need reporting and months long bans.

Looking for some urban fantasy stories that are similar to JJK, Bleach, or Gachiakuta. Ideally they should have good fights, entertaining characters, and mysteries that keep the reader interested. Also, NO SELF RECS. I’m looking for established stories to see what they’re doing right.

Immune to what? Author confidence issues caused by watching my follows like a hawk.

Not even dealing with criticism, or impostor syndrome per se, I know can write to a standard I’m happy with, it’s just the roller coaster of getting follows and then getting none, makes me wonder if the story is just not a good idea, only to get a splash of hope again.

The annoying thing is I would be fine not even watching follows and views as much, the only reason I am is because I had some early success which put me in reach of rising stars. Then I started second guessing everything about the book. Trying to optimise what shouldn’t be touched and just getting stressed for no reason at all.

Anyone else have these issues? I can’t be the only one going insane during the first few weeks of launch!