u/SolomonHZAbraham

I constantly watch new authors make various mistakes when trying to market their fiction and grow their audience. I’ve been on the Royal Road platform for fifteen months, and I’m self-publishing my first book next week. I’m by no means one of the big authors but all four of my fictions have hit RS (2 were deleted later), and the latest 2 fictions made top 20 and top 10 with 1k+ followers (both now at ~1600+).

What I see is a lot of new authors seem to have no clue how to bring attention to their story (and I did the same thing at the beginning), or are using the wrong places to market. So I want to detail some things that I believe will damage your fiction/not bring you any discernible following and then I’ll detail some things you should be doing.

THE DON’Ts

1. r/royalroad is more-or-less useless for your marketing efforts. It has 18k weekly visitors, the vast majority of whom will be other RR authors and the vast majority of those will be in the same boat as you. They are not interested in reading your tiny new fiction. They might encourage you, help you, point out issues with blurbs and covers. A couple might even give you a pity follow, favourite, rating. They will not form any kind of foundation for your audience growth.

2. The “I found this story by someone and wanted to recommend it” or other such self-promo posts disguised as ‘discussion’ or ‘recommendations’. You will immediately mark your story out as something people will put into the ‘Not Interested’ bucket on RR. Please do not insult the intelligence of the audience of the subreddit/forum you are posting in.

3. Linking your fiction (with or without a blurb), but nothing else, like the audience owes it to you to go and check it out. If you can’t be bothered to sell the story, or your journey as a writer, or why the audience should read your story over the thousands of others. Guess what? The audience will care about it exactly as much as you do.

4. Displaying no confidence in your writing and almost pleading for the audience to read it. I am guilty of this one. Here’s some advice I got on my very promo post in the litrpg subreddit 15 months ago.

>Sell us on it, that post title makes you seem unsure about its quality IMO. Not to be overly harsh but it comes off like "Look I wrote things, they aren't shit, right?!"

And then I left the commenter a wall of text, like a jilted lover trying to get back with their ex and further enforcing their view. I was unconfident in my writing then. I was scared about posting. I was unsure if anyone wanted to read it. And I still suffer with imposter syndrome every day, but if you display no confidence in your writing, and provide no reason for the audience to read it other than “Please make me happy.” - guess what? They’re not going to make you happy.

THE DO’s

1. Author’s are a lonely bunch. We spend copious amounts of time in front of a screen, with little images in our heads, trying to figure out how to translate the image into words that people will not only understand, but will enjoy reading. The only people who are going to understand that peculiar motivation are other authors. Those authors will also be the ones who will encourage you, help you, motivate you and provide you with all the advice that they have learned.

Join discord servers, do due diligence on other authors, especially those who ‘could’ provide you a lot of benefit, both from the knowledge and advice they can give, and some with the bigger audiences they have to help market your story. And all this takes is to join some discord servers and not be a dick. Nobody is going to sell your fiction for you - the writing is the easy part. The time spent on the marketing, and becoming part of the community is the hard part.

Also, when on spaces like reddit and facebook, do not be a dick. Every second statement of yours does not need to be controversial, or a rant, or a moan. Nobody likes these sorts in real life. We do not like them online either. Unless you want to be known as a troll, try to keep all of that to a minimum, no matter how much the vein in your forehead wants to pop because somebody accused you of AI. (This is also advice I need to take more of!)

2. The biggest places to post to try and gain an audience for your RR fiction is r/litrpg (135k weekly visitors) and r/progressionfantasy (115k weekly visitors). Both are ten times bigger than the royal road sub and the majority of those subs are readers, not authors. But in order to promo to those places, it requires effort on your part. Be engaged with the community, including the readers. Get involved in discussions. Make interesting posts. Maybe you put something out there that makes you memorable and maybe it doesn’t translate immediately, but some of the people who saw it remember you, and will go check out your work just because of that. But if you only use those subs for promo, people will see that and ignore you.

3. SHOUT-OUTS. Shoutouts are by far going to be your biggest FREE tool, unless you hit Rising Stars, but in 98% of cases, hitting RS requires shout-outs. I guarantee 100% of getting onto RS requires ads, or some in-built large audience already. ArcaneCadence could release a story tomorrow and is guaranteed to hit RS. You are not. Engage and interact in the discord servers, and look for people to shoutswap with. Most authors display their stories in their discord bios. Do some research on them and find the ones who will give you the biggest boost.

ALSO, VERY IMPORTANT: Stop trying to only find identical/similar stories. Yes, overlap in stories leads to better referrals, but any referral is better than none. If you swap with 100, 100 follower stories that have overlap with yours and results in 20% referral (very high - doubt you’d get this kind of referral rate). Then you will get 2,000 followers check you out, and it cost you 100 chapters. You could do 10, 2,000 follower stories with little overlap, and 1% referral and it’s exactly the same amount of followers on a per chapter shout basis. Be smart. Wanting to swap only with similar stories is just some weird fetish in my opinion. Fiction is fiction. I write litrpg, I read thrillers, and I love rom-com movies. Everybody is like this.

4. Finally - BE CONFIDENT IN WHAT YOU’RE SELLING. If you’re giving the vibe that your story’s not very good, or you’re not a good writer, or you feel unworthy of other people’s time/efforts…then guess what…those people aren’t going to give you their time or effort.

I think that about covers what I wanted to say! If anyone else wants to chime in, do so in the comments!