r/royalroad

For writers: have you ever felt it was time to just give up and stop writing?

I originally got into writing after my cancer diagnosis and recovery. It was a whole new world and a chance to learn an entirely new skill.

When I started, it was so liberating. I'd had characters in my head for years, and I could finally give them a home. Writing helped me process a lot of things in my life, including past relationships, people, and even my own health.

Then writing became a source of stress.
Somewhere along the way, writing became "what is good for the meta?" I still wrote what I wanted, but since writing takes so much time, I hoped to either find a path to monetize it or at least have a positive impact on a reader: make them laugh, or help them connect with something my character was going through.

While trying to learn how to grow, I realized I needed to network. But that only added more time, more stress, and a reminder that I didn't always fit in with that group either. What once gave me liberation has left me with so much doubt.

I don't know if this is burnout or a sign I should walk away. And honestly, I'm scared that if I stop, I lose the thing that got me through the hardest part of my life.

If you've been here: did you take a break, change how you write, or quit? Did the joy ever come back?

For the last few of my chapters some of my readers have been complaining that I'm "edging them"(disclaimer: I offer no such services) by finishing most of my recent chapters with cliff hangers. The thing is, I don't inted to do it that way, I just end up hitting my word count of about 2k+ words(some 2100, some 2500+) and sorta run out of inspiration to continue with the chapter.

Does anyone practice getting better at writing cliff hangers? Is that even a thing? Or is it something that comes naturally? I've heard that writing a cliff hanger is a hood thing to keep your readers engaged? So, what aspect of writing did you find out that you were unintentionally getting right?

https://preview.redd.it/3sy9xlqrghth1.png?width=4096&format=png&auto=webp&s=01a553c0d6c9c862c97a8d784cbee067eac6c23e

https://preview.redd.it/oykusk1tghth1.png?width=1742&format=png&auto=webp&s=0d86c1e77f1d7d248ecbdea71eff5fb3a1cb6076

I got some copies of my books printed from Amazon KDP, with their new ground paper, thinking that if it was good for the environment. The actual heights of the books all appear to vary by 1-2mm each and the artwork is drifting all over the place! The blue rectangle was supposed to be 3mm from the edge of the book, but as you can see it is drifted onto the spine in a couple of these.

It is a little sad as the Hardbacks have all been a decent quality so far.

I think I will adjust the art a little to make them a little less obvious when they are drifting and donate these to a local book shop to sell at a discount so that they can benefit at the very least :D

I started releasing Manifold of Aeons almost exactly 4 months ago and went on hiatus a little under 2 months ago. It was the first book I had ever written and I learned a lot both from writing it and from posting it on RR. I made a lot of mistakes but I'm still proud of what I was able to do and for what's coming in the future.

For reference, I'm currently at:
93 Followers
17,484 Total Views
269 Average Views
291 Pages (~80k words)
145 Total Comments
16 Favorites
10 Ratings
1 Review

I had one Ad that I started 6 days after the first chapter's release.
It recently finished with 28 followers and 45 read laters gained from a 0.45% CTR. It's worth noting that it was running after my story was on Hiatus for a part of its run which I'm sure affected its total effectiveness.

Notable Retention Points:
1 - 67%
2 - 74%
3 - 90%
26 - 88%
44 - 86%

All other chapters are in the 90s-100.

My release schedule was 7 chapters on the first day, 2 chapters a day for the rest of the first week, and 1 chapter a day for the rest of the first book.

(Since this got long, here's the table of contents for the Mistakes section:

1. Release Schedule (too fast)
2. Late Inciting Incident
3. Prologue
4. Chapter length ~1k
5. Paragraph length (too short)
6. Cover Issues
7. Title was unclear
8. Questionable Prose
9. Fixed book 1 instead of writing book 2

)

1. I want to talk about the many mistakes I made, and the first one was the release schedule. I'm overall happy with it, but if I did it over again, I would probably do 5 chapters a week instead of 7 since I always noticed decreased views over the weekend compared to weekdays. But that's a pretty mild mistake so let's get to some others.

2. The worst one was probably putting the inciting incident too late, at the end of chapter 3. I had hoped that since it was marketed as a Time Loop story that readers would understand that there needed to be setup beforehand so that the looped events would have a baseline to compare to. Now I've seen other time loop stories put their inciting incident in their first chapter and I feel silly for thinking I needed as much setup as I originally thought I did.

3. Despite the warnings I had a prologue as my first chapter. I still hate that this is a mistake since I do feel the tone promise is important for this book before getting to the more "normal" daily life of the MC. But I understand now that it is a mistake since I wanted a lot of followers and prologues seem to go against what readers on RR want.

4. Chapter length was too small for Royal Road as the average for book 1 was 1k words per chapter. I had wanted the pacing to feel lightning fast and I thought that less words per chapter would help with that. I now understand that it can feel like you're not being given enough as a reader when you can finish reading the most recently released chapter in a flash.

5. Speaking of length, on my first self-promo here on this sub, the most common complaint of my work by commenters was on my paragraph length. I had been under the impression that making shorter paragraphs would be catering to reading on mobile. It didn't help that the number 1 on Rising Stars at the time I was researching had mostly shorter paragraphs with only a few larger ones. Because of all the feedback, I went back through and combined a ton of paragraphs while still keeping it on the shorter side since I wanted to avoid bricks of text. I expect I reduced the total number of paragraphs in book 1 by around half.

6. I was (and honestly still am) having issues with making a good cover for my story. I heard feedback that you couldn't tell what kind of story it was when looking at the cover and I honestly still haven't been able to figure out how to do that better for this story. Maybe the true mistake was making a story that couldn't have a cover that easily communicates what kind of story it is and hook the viewer at the same time. I started out with a fully AI-generated ChatGPT cover that was too busy and everything blended together when looked at as a tiny thumbnail. I also got feedback from multiple people who said the obviously AI cover was a deterrent to them from reading my story. I tried several covers and the one I ended up on was one I drew myself then had AI do a light pass over it to try to make it look more professional (So I guess it's AI-assisted instead of AI-generated?). It's missing out on the fantasy elements and the broken hourglass I made (AI kept messing it up so I kept my version) isn't super clear on a first glance, but I got tired from how much time I was putting into covers, so I've settled on this one for now. My hope is that it doesn't immediately look obviously AI generated and so won't turn away readers that are tired of the obviously AI generated ones. (I have my original self-drawn one somewhere in my folders if anyone's curious.)

7. I also got feedback that my title was too vague and didn't shed any light on what kind of story it was. I had been hoping that just adding [Time Loop] next to it would alleviate that problem, but I've since seen other time loops with better titles which show it can be done. I'm kind of stuck with this one for spoiler reasons now, but this knowledge will be useful for my next series for sure.

8. Depending on who you ask, my prose was also bad enough to turn away readers. Things like word repetition, not enough background details, too many filter words, etc. I have improved over the course of writing book 1, but I have seen others say that prose isn't a huge deal on RR as long as you meet the baseline quality. I'm pretty confident by now that mine should at least be able to pass that now.

9. That leads to the final one I want to talk about and it ended up being a pretty brutal one for me. I ended up spending far too much time and emotional energy trying to fix book 1 while it was still releasing at the schedule I had originally set for it. This along with my follower count being far under what I had hoped for kept me from working on book 2 of the series I had planned to write while releasing book 1 on RR. Every time I tried writing a chapter for book 2 I had book 1's faults and results in my mind that made me second guess everything I wrote. It paralyzed me and I almost changed the ending of book 1 to make it a standalone story I could abandon after finishing. I feel like the changes I made to book 1 had diminishing returns that might've been better to put that focus and energy into book 2.

That's a lot of mistakes.

Unfortunately, a lot of them are pretty baked into the book I had written. I was almost done writing the entire first book before I started doing my heavier research for RR, so a lot of the learning I've done here will be considered for my next series rather than trying to spend more time changing book 1 into something it wasn't designed to be. A few like better prose and chapter length are being improved in what I've been writing of book 2.

One miscellaneous thing I want to talk about are Shoutout Swaps. I was very adverse to them at the start and only agreed to start doing them when I had less than a follower per day my first week posting. I ended up doing around 20 shoutout swaps before I gave up, realizing that I would likely be either ending the series or going on hiatus soon. I'm going to be honest, I was very disappointed with the results of the shoutout swaps I did. Whenever I looked at analytics at people finding me from within RR, I never saw more than 4 clicks from any shoutout swap and usually less than that. I had even tried to make sure the shoutout swaps I did were with series that would potentially have an overlapping reader base with mine. Maybe it was my cover and blurb, but either way, I was really disappointed, especially after how much of an emphasis there is on them in this sub. That said, I'll probably do them again in the future since two clicks is better than zero clicks without a swap I suppose.

So what ended up happening to make me go on hiatus? I mention it in problem 9. I ended up spending too much of my time trying to figure out what was wrong with book 1 and how to fix it that I didn't have time to work on book 2 like I had wanted. And when I did work on book 2 chapters, I was second guessing everything I wrote because of how poorly book 1 had done compared to what I had wanted for it in addition to the conflicting advice on prose I had gotten on this sub at the time.

I almost changed the ending to book 1 to make it a standalone book I could abandon, but after talking it over with a few people, I decided to just release the chapters I had already written for book 2 and then go on hiatus.

I then took a long break and now I'm back to writing chapters for book 2 that I'm happy with. One thing I haven't touched on is that I wrote book 1 as "bridges and islands." I wrote the important chapters for the book first before going back and writing the chapters that bridged those islands together. I really liked writing that way, but found that I felt I needed to write book 2 in release order to make sure there were chapters available to post online. I'm now back to writing chapters out of order and I'm much happier for it and excited for where it looks like the series is headed.

I'm also excited for my next series that I'll be attempting to avoid all of the mistakes I made with series 1. But that's still a ways away, so I'll just continue writing series 1 and hope to gradually build an audience that will lead future books to have a better chance when first released.

Also, a quick shoutout to SeekerScales who commented on a majority of my chapters, wrote a lovely review, and said they found me through my first self-promo post on this sub. You were a shining light in the darkness.

Thank you everyone who took a look at this absolutely massive post. Let me know what you think about any or all of this. I'm interested if anyone else has dealt with similar issues or found success in avoiding similar mistakes.

So many stories on royal road its not always the easiest and im sure there are lots of stories out there i will enjoy that i just have not seen.

Plz come with suggestions of gems, favorites maybe a good self written one or just a decent read u know isnt that popular