asking cause I think I've been sitting on 8 chapters for two months too scared to post, worried nobody follows something with less than a buffer of 15+.
what's your real threshold and would you follow at chapter 1 if the premise grabs you or do you wait to see if the author has staying power first
my last two non-isekai projects got maybe 200 views combined across both posted an isekai teaser as a joke three weeks ago, no real plan behind it, already at 1,200 views and climbing
I don't even mind writing isekai, some of my favorite stories in the genre are genuinely doing interesting things with the trope. it's more that I feel a little cornered into writing the thing that performs instead of the thing I actually wanted to write next. anyone figure out how to have both, or do you just accept the genre you're good at feeding and write your passion projects on the side with no expectation anyone reads them, gonna make a blend of new genre if this goes on lol
Started posting a litRPG serial on RoyalRoad in December, moved advance chapters to Patreon in feb once I had a following built up
here's where I'm actually at, not the survivorship bias version
patrons: 61
monthly revenue: roughly $210 after patreon's cut
royalroad followers: 1,840
average views per chapter on the free tier is 380 to 450, dropping off sharply after chapter 40 or so
rising stars: hit it once for four days in feb then fell, never got back on
61 patrons took about four months to accumulate and growth has mostly flattened the last six weeks post 3 chapters a week free, patrons get access 5 chapters ahead. I know some serials do 5 or 6 chapters a week which apparently matters a lot for royalroad's algorithm, I just can't sustain that pace with a day job
what actually moved the needle was getting featured in a royalroad weekly rec thread bumped follows noticeably for about a week. a tiktok video someone else made about the story, completely unprompted, brought in maybe 15 patrons in two days, more than four months of my own effort. I have no idea how to replicate that and I don't think you can
def not quitting the day job anytime soon obviously but it covers my editor now which feels like a real milestone
I've read manga my whole life and almost no prose fiction until a couple years ago, so when I started writing my own progression fantasy web serial I just naturally tried to pace it the way my favorite manga paces things. Big fight, aftermath, a training arc, a tournament arc, escalate the power ceiling, repeat
what I didn't account for is that manga gets an entire visual language to do a lot of that work for free. splash page then two page spread of the villain's silhouette and panel of just the protagonist's eyes narrowing yet none of that translates to prose and I spent probably three months writing chapters that felt hollow because I was trying to hit the same emotional beats a splash page hits, using only words, and words alone don't create that kind of impact without a totally different toolkit
The thing I'm slowly figuring out is that prose has to do with interiority and rhythm what manga does with paneling and white space one line paragraph on its own can do some of what a splash page does, if you've built the tension right beforehand. but you can't just chop your sentences short and expect the manga effect, the way I was doing at first. It has to be earned the way a splash page is earned by everything before it.
I've been going back through my early chapters and honestly a lot of them read like someone describing manga panels instead of writing prose, which in hindsight is exactly what I was doing and rewriting now with an actual prose pacing sensibility instead of a paneling one. much slower, I think, but it's finally starting to feel like a real story and not a storyboard with the art missing
genuinely asking cause I'm writing one and halfway through I started resenting the whole trope because the bond does so much heavy lifting that I stopped having to earn the romance they're drawn together because Magic Says So. cool. but now when they fall for each other it doesn't feel like they chose it, it feels like the plot assigned it
is there a way to write fated mates where the fate is the start of the problem and not the answer to it? everything I love (acotar, serpent and dove kind of) seems to make them fight the bond for ages. is that the trick, just make them hate that it's happening
Yk the ones "Your writing is lovely and clearly accomplished, but I didn't connect with the project the way I'd need to in order to represent it effectively in a competitive market."
Translation: the sentences are fine, the book didn't grab me, good luck
I think I preferred the form rejections, honestly. At least those don't make you sit there going like okay so if the prose is good and you still don't want it, what's wrong with the BOOK
a form rejection you can blame on volume, on luck, on the agent having a full list. A personalized one that praises the writing and passes anyway points straight at the thing you can't see, which is that the story itself isn't doing what it needs to do, and now you have to figure out what that is with basically no information.
Thirty one queries in. Four of these "lovely prose" passes now. I'm starting to think my problem isn't the writing line by line, it's something structural in the premise or the stakes that isn't landing in the pages, and a polished query plus polished sample pages is actually hiding the problem instead of revealing it.
any suggestions are honored, busy much but still gonna read em all
man had a deadline. man liked going out. man could not be trusted. so his solution was to order his servant to take away ALL his clothing, leaving him only a big grey shawl, so that he physically could not go outside and had nothing to do but write. self-imprisonment by nudity they say but the things is it worked, he finished the book tbh the more I learn about famous writers the more I realize they were all just elaborately managing their own inability to focus, same as us, they just didn't have phones to blame Agatha Christie plotted her murders in the bathtub eating apples, specifically requested a tub with a ledge for the apples when renovating. Dan Brown hangs upside down in gravity boots when he's stuck. Nabokov wrote Lolita on index cards in the back of his parked car. Schiller could only write with rotting apples in his desk drawer, the smell did something for him atp i too need to find the dumb trick to use to force myself to actually write
seriously people info-dumping is the eternal problem, especially in fantasy where you have a whole world to explain. and the usual advice is "weave it in naturally" which is useless because nobody tells you HOW here's the actual move (from a self proclaimed semi-pro) put the information inside a disagreement when two characters are arguing about something, you can deliver enormous amounts of backstory and worldbuilding and the reader will eat it up, because they're not reading exposition cause you’re narrating a conflict. one character says the old king was a tyrant. the other snaps that he held the realm together for forty years. now you've delivered the political history of your world and it doesn't feel like a lecture because there's heat in it, two people who care about this are pushing against each other compare that to a paragraph calmly explaining the old king's reign. dead on the page. the same facts, inside a fight, are alive, because the reader is tracking the tension between the people, and the information comes in as ammunition rather than as a textbook when you've got a chunk of world to convey and it's sitting there like a brick, find two characters who'd disagree about it and let them go at each other. exposition delivered as conflict stops being exposition. it becomes scene voila!
can someone here suggest a book that's genuinely witty, something that makes me laugh out loud, but is still a real story with real stakes, not a spoof. discworld is the obvious answer and I've read most of it. I want the others the line I'm looking for is humor that comes from character and sharp writing winking at fantasy tropes the whole time is a no no. a book that's funny the way real life is funny, while still being a proper adventure. who does this well besides pratchett, i’m bored!!
noticed this pattern and it bugs me, so many fantasy books, especially lately, the strong female character demonstrates her strength almost entirely through cruelty. she's cold and ruthless.
she threatens people and kills without hesitation and we're meant to find this empowering
and I get the impulse, for ages women in fiction were soft and passive and this is the correction but somewhere we decided that the only way to write a powerful woman is to give her all the worst traits we used to celebrate in male antiheroes, as if strength and cruelty are the same thing
they're not. the strongest people I know in real life are not cruel. strength shows up as patience, as holding a line under pressure, as kindness that costs something, as enduring. a woman who's "strong" because she's mean is just a different cage, the cage of having to be hard to be taken seriously
I want more powerful women whose power isn't measured in how many people they've intimidated. who are formidable AND warm. who are strong in ways that don't require a body count(not that ) the cruel queen is fun sometimes but she's become the default, and the default is quietly saying that softness and strength can't coexist in a woman, which is its own kind of trap
not "be a better writer" generally. one specific surgically-stolen ability
I'd take pratchett's footnote timing the way he could drop a footnote that's funnier than the sentence it's attached to, with perfect comedic rhythm. I have no idea how he did it and I'd kill for it
or maybe le guin's ability to make a single sentence feel like it contains an entire philosophy
that economy.. that weight per word
what's the one specific skill you'd transplant and whose exact ability do you covet
finally said it out loud to a friend "i'm writing a novel." been working on it privately for over a year and just decided to let one person in
she was lovely about it asked questions, seemed genuinely interested and the whole time i was smiling and answering i had this sinking feeling, like i'd handed over something i wasn't ready to give and by the time i got home i half wished i'd never said anything
idk she did nothing wrong it's that the second it existed in someone else's head it stopped being entirely mine, and i hadn't expected to feel the loss of that.
i don't know if this makes me a private person or a coward or just a writer. but i'd love to talk to people who've felt it is there a community where this kind of thing isn't weird to admit? like I wanna talk talk and not wait for some starnger to comment on my posts, any group or server?
trying to figure out if my manuscript is the "right" length and getting wildly different answers everywhere
what I think I know.. adult fantasy can run long, like 100-150k, but debuts are told to stay under 120 or agents balk at the printing cost.
romance tends to be shorter. YA shorter still.
thrillers are tight but these all seem like rough rules people break constantly
what I actually want to know from people who've sold or self-pubbed:
- did length actually matter to agents/readers or is it overblown
- is the "debut should be under 120k" thing real or fearmongering
- does self-pub have more length freedom than trad
- what happens if you're genuinely 20k over the "normal" range for your genre, do you cut to fit or trust the story
is there a real sweet spot per genre or is everyone just guessing and citing each other
i've spent the last year looking for a writing community that actually feels like one and mostly coming up empty
the big subs are too big to know anyone the discords i've tried are either dead or full of people who were already friends before i got there so i've stopped waiting to find the perfect room
it's like a writer can't even talk with fellow writers until you're talking about "their" story and the feedback is plain selfish like okay u do me I do you,
Why can't writers connect beyond just feedback