This article was guest written by Unice5656, author of Fantasia.
Why I’m somewhat qualified to write this
I write Fantasia, an ongoing webserial that has managed to more or less stay in the top 10 Best Rated for almost five years (sometimes it sinks to #11 or 12 but it usually goes back up). In this time period, it has amassed approximately 3500 registered followers and 904 ratings. I also have a completed novella hanging around #35 on the Best Rated list and a secondary project that hasn’t been updated in months hanging around #50 (it was around 35 back when it was actively updating). I was also a moderator on the site for two years and in that time read a lot of the submissions as well as all the forum chatter posted during my tenure.
So you’ve started writing and think your story is as cool as an Emperor penguin in Antarctica. Now what?
Basically, there are two steps to this. One is attracting readers to find your story, the second is getting them to read it and click Follow. This guide will mostly focus on step one, with a few tips for step two.
How readers find new stories on RRL
There are two main ways people look for new stories on RRL
- Browsing the lists generated by the site (By far the most popular)
- Best Rated: This list uses a fancy algorithm to determine the highest rated stories on the site. More high ratings gets you higher on the list.
- Active-only ranking: This is the same algorithm as the best rated list but only includes stories updated in the last 30 days. To stay on it, update at least once every 30 days.
- Complete: This is the same algorithm as the best rated list but only includes stories that are marked complete. At this point in time, you have to submit a support ticket to get someone to manually change a story’s status to complete, and it’s worth doing so if your story is done. However, this list tends to be pretty stagnant and gets browsed less often than the Active-only ranking, so there’s no hurry to upload your entire novel if you happen to have it completed.
- Popular this week: This list features fictions that have had a lot of high ratings in the past 7 days. In order to be ranked high on this list, you pretty much have to update every day, maybe twice a day, and your story has to fit into the typical wheelhouse of the typical RRL reader. I’ve never been high on this list and it only gets you transient visibility compared to the more permanent ranking gains of the lists above, but it’s popularly browsed by people looking for new stuff, so worth getting onto when first starting out.
- Latest Updates: This list adds stories with newly-added chapters to the top of the list and pushes older updates downwards. It takes anywhere from an hour to several hours for a story to get pushed out of visibility on the list, depending on the time of day (the site is weighted towards North American users). There’s no point in timing your updates to high-traffic times on the site, as this is also when most people update chapters, so your story will get proportionately less time and the list and it works out to around the same amount of visibility.
- Newest stories: This list works the same way as Latest Updates except it only includes newly approved fictions. I’m not sure how many people actually browse this list, as the stories only have one chapter up. You have no control over when your story will show up on the list, as it depends on when it’s approved and not when you submit it.
- The Search function: This is probably less known and less popular than browsing the lists, but I have had several readers tell me they found my story by looking up specific tags. If you go to the Search page and click Advanced Search, you can see how it works. People can choose to look for certain tags, look for stories without certain tags (click twice on any of the tags and it will go to a red minus sign), look for stories with a minimum length (1 page is approximately 275 words), look for a minimum average rating, sort by completed/active/hiatus, and order their search results by different measures. The bottom line is to properly tag your story with all the tags that apply. Do not apply tags that aren’t really in your story; for instance, don’t go ‘oh, well my MC isn’t female but I have a strong female character in the cast’ and tag it ‘Female Lead’. This will only annoy readers who find your story through the search function and don’t get what they’re expecting.
People additionally get stories by recommendation/word of mouth. Not a lot you can do about that except to encourage your readers to do so. People also find RRL stories from offsite (such as NovelUpdates and Top Web Fiction) but I have no idea how much traffic comes from different places and no expertise on other sites.
I did a poll of my readers on Chapter 40 of Fantasia to see how they found the story.
(As far as I can tell, most of the “Other” chosen is the Advanced Search function)
As you can see, the best way to get readers is to be high on the Best Rated list. I haven’t done anything magical to maintain my ranking except to continue to write the same story for all this time while other projects have been completed or dropped. The second most popular method is being found on the Latest Updates list, so as a newbie, updates are king.
Ways people do not find stories on RRL
- Browsing the forums. 99% of the readers on RRL don’t go on the forums. On them, you with find the same 6 people discussing repetitive subjects with people who post newbie questions. There is a Promote Your Webnovel subforum that you can post on that nobody looks at. Of slightly more use is the Recommendations subforum, where people ask for recommendations for specific kinds of stories, so if you’re willing to creep that forum and get one reader at a time, go for it. Keep in mind that people tend to be leery of people recommending their own writing. Conventional advice also states that you should put a link to your fictions in your forum signature and then participate in conversations there; if you do this, you will at most gain the 6 users who actually use the forums.
- Getting featured on Facebook. What? RRL has a Facebook page? Exactly. 99% of the readers on RRL don’t follow its Facebook or Twitter. A while back, while I was a moderator, I attempted to feature stories with some objective measure of writing quality, but at this point it appears they are randomly pasting story synopses onto the page with no application process to get featured, so even if you wanted to be featured, there’s nothing you can do to increase your chances.
- Promoting yourself on the Discord chat. I believe this is actually explicitly against the rules of the chat and you will get in trouble for spamming.
- Joining a group on the RRL forums. The main thing goes back to the fact that 99% of readers don’t use the forums. As well, if you belong to a group of writers, the group’s reputation is only as good as its worst writer. Don’t bother and it will save you a lot of time and melodrama.
- Paying RRL to feature your fiction. Seriously, save your money, especially if your story doesn’t fall into the typical wheelhouse of popular stories on RRL (see below)
What readers like on RRL
In order to understand what becomes popular on RRL, you have to understand the origin of the site and the typical reader demographics. RRL started out as a website posting translations of the Korean light novel Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, a story involving a guy who finds a secret class in a virtual reality video game and becomes super powerful while becoming rich and famous in real life and getting the most beautiful girl in the world (literally #1 as appraised by the supercomputer AI in the story) as his girlfriend. (This may sound disparaging, but I was actually one of the original users at this point in time and find the story hilarious.)
Perhaps not surprisingly, the main demographic on the site is teenage boys. A lot of the guys on the site are actually over the age of 20 but continue to act like teenage boys, so I just lump them all together as teenage boys. The last time I had access to demographics, male users outnumbered female users of the site 9:1.
I did a poll on the age of my readers in Chapter 52.
The largest group there is actually in their mid twenties, but this may be just a reflection of my own age and the number of “clearly born in the 1990s” references I have in my story. Again, just imagine them as still teenagers.
I did a poll of the male: female ratio of my readers in Chapter 35.
Keep in mind that as a female writer with a female MC, I likely have a higher proportion of female readers than most stories do.
I did a poll of the continent my readers are from in Chapter 45.
As you can see, people are from places that would enjoy reading stories written in English, a lot from North America but a significant amount from Europe as well. I’m not sure how this would affect your writing strategy unless you were planning on posting stories in another language on RRL. RRL currently doesn’t have much of a reader base to support other language stories.
The long and the short of it is, the typical reader on the site is a teenage boy who enjoys Asian story elements. Tropes that are common in manga, anime, and light novels abound on the site. Stories set in games, harems, wuxia/xianxia cultivation stories, stories randomly set in Japan for no reason, reincarnation stories, all super common and super popular.
That being said, by no means should you compromise your writing by going for what’s popular if you weren’t intending on writing something of that nature in the first place. Additionally, many readers complain of being tired of the generic plots so common on the site and are actively looking for more unique stories, which gives you an opportunity.
Some elements that you should go for, regardless of kind of story:
- A strong main character. Teenage boys don’t like it when their MC gets beaten up or constantly loses. Your MC doesn’t have to be overpowered and float through life like a blessed butterfly, but if they’re constantly being bullied and/or ruminating about their insecurities, it’s not going to go over well. Give your MC a little badass confidence.
- Humour. Even if your story touches on darker subjects, have moments of lightness. People go on RRL to relax and escape the drudgery of real life.
- Action. Fight scenes, danger, excitement, levelling up, these things are what teenage boys enjoy. If your story has 10 chapters of build-up before anything happens, it’s going to flop. Restructure your story to flash forward to something happening or get rid of the build-up or something.
- Romance. Not the super sappy romance-novel type of romance. Teenage boys don’t like that. They do enjoy when the guy gets the girl in the end (or the beginning, and then starts collecting more girls but that’s another discussion).
TLDR; just tell me what to do to get readers already!
- Write a good story that will appeal to teenage boys. Give them a mix of the stuff they’re used to and a unique element that will make them click on your story rather than the ten thousand other ones they have to choose from. Give your story an interesting title. Make sure you have at least 7-10 chapters of content ready, enough to get into the action and have readers invested in the story.
- Submit the story with an attractive cover (keep in mind that the image size is pretty small, so complex images will not work too well), a good blurb (no more than two short paragraphs, describe your premise without being vague, introduce your MC in an appealing way), and the correct tags. Your title, cover, and blurb are of the utmost importance to attract browsing readers.
- Once your story is approved, update, update, update. There is no better way to gain visibility as a complete newcomer to the site. I recommend daily updates as a good way to launch a new story, even if you’re sure you won’t be able to keep it up (which is why you should have 7-10 chapters ready from step 1). Rather than trying to update during the highest traffic times of the site, I recommend updating at random times throughout the day to capture audience from different time zones. Don’t update again until your fiction has been pushed off the first page of the Latest Updates list. If your story is from your own website and you have a lot of content, I wouldn’t go faster than updating twice a day. If you have long chapters, consider splitting them into smaller chunks to increase the number of updates (only if it works for the story).
- Interact with your readers. Teenage boys (and also other people) enjoy feeling important, so take the time to reply to comments and PMs from your readers. Thank them for taking the time to comment and answer their questions to the best of your ability. Check the site on a daily basis or get it to email you when you get a PM or story comment. In my experience, people also enjoy voting on polls, so you can ask a poll question with each chapter (I wouldn’t recommend doing this on the first chapter, but more at the point where uninterested people have already left and you only have the dedicated readers left. Also wait until you have a decent number of followers, as in my experience, less than half of them actually vote). Polls can give you valuable information about your readers and what they want, or they can be completely random, fun questions. Encouraging comment activity also has the benefit if reassuring you that someone is indeed reading the story. Tell the readers what’s been going on with the story writing, let them get to know you a little bit in your author’s notes. Be silly. Use exclamation marks! Post pictures of cute animals (okay, that last one may be specific to my own fiction).
- Get people to rate or review your story. Brace yourself. It’s time to be obnoxious. But charmingly obnoxious. You are going to ask people to review your story if they liked it. If you’re feeling really bold, ask them to rate it 5 stars. Let them know that their rating is weighted more if they leave a review and even higher if they leave an advanced review. Thank them and give them a virtual cookie. Promise that you’ll update if they leave reviews. Use the boxes available for author’s notes every chapter, and ask every chapter. Turn it into an ongoing joke. Make a poll asking people if they’ve left a review (I did this in chapter 46 and got an extra 10 ratings that update). You NEED those reviews to make lasting gains on the Best Rated list. There will be people who are annoyed by your constant badgering for reviews, but most people will just humour you or learn to ignore it. Remember, the tone you’re going for is “cheerfully obnoxious”. Don’t go into “desperate” territory. The same rules that apply to your MC apply to your persona as an author on RRL. Give yourself a little badass confidence. Teenage boys don’t like desperate authors.
- Keep on grinding. Update regularly. At the bare minimum, update every 30 days so that your story’s status isn’t moved into “hiatus” from “ongoing”. People are very afraid of dropped stories on RRL as they are so common and will not try a story with a hiatus status. Most people find weekly updates manageable. Contrary to updating on your own website, updating at the exact same time/day each week might not be the best strategy to capture an international audience.
- Remember that all of this will only work if people are interested in continuing to read your story. My first chapter has 80,000 views, which drops to 50,000 views for Chapter 2 and 35,000 views for Chapter 3 and around 3,000 views for the latest chapter. That’s a pretty decent retention rate (keeping in mind that 1 view is not 1 reader and if they visit multiple times, like to answer comments, the view count will go up). If you find that your view count (Under the Chapters tab of your story dashboard) from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 goes down more than 90%, it’s a sign that people are clicking on the story but not interested in continuing to read and you may need to do something to fix that rather than continuing to try to gain visibility.
- Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have a meteoric rise to fame. There’s a huge element of luck to all of this. There are stories on the Best Rated list that don’t have all the tropes I mentioned, but they are definitely outnumbered, so if your story doesn’t fall into the typical popular categories, don’t expect a huge number of followers. That being said, you can still have a high ranking on the Best Rated list with a relatively small number of followers and ratings as long as you’re consistently rated 5-stars, so focus on the quality of your writing.
- Recommend your other works to your readers. There’s already a link to your other works in the About the Author section under each chapter, but it doesn’t hurt to occasionally mention the existence if your other stories in your author’s notes or recommend them in replies to comments if the reader mentions some aspect of your writing they enjoyed that is also present in the other story. Building your first large audience is the hardest; after that, subsequent stories can bask in the reflected glory.
- Report inappropriate reviews. These are usually accompanied by low ratings, so getting them deleted can significantly improve your average rating. Things that are against the reviewing rules include threats, personal attacks on the author, hate speech, discrimination, spam, recommendations to read a different fiction without mention of the actual fiction being reviewed, and basically anything that’s not a review of the story. Things that are not against the rules include low ratings where people write “I didn’t like it because it was boring”. There is no rule that states that criticism has to be constructive.
Things you should not do
- Try to attract everyone. RRL is not a game of more views = better. Remember your ultimate goal is to climb the Best Rated list. Having your first review be a low score can be a devastating blow to your audience building. As the number of ratings increase, the algorithm takes into account that you’ll get random hate low ratings, but you need your early ratings to be all 4 and 5 stars. Tag your story and write your blurb to attract your specific audience and nobody else.
- Go for quantity over quality. You can flood the Latest Updates list with your new chapters all day long, maybe even get on the Popular this week list, but it’s a lot of effort for transient visibility and will hurt your long-term growth if you start getting low ratings.
- Redirect everyone immediately to your independent website. Like I said multiple times, your long-term visibility and regular gain of new readers from RRL is excruciatingly dependent on getting high numbers of high ratings. If you write in your story blurb “This fiction will have the latest chapter post on [link] and updates will be delayed for one week on RRL”, interested readers might click away to your site (or not; there is definitely a segment of readers who aren’t interested in reading off of other sites). Then they read the story on your site and yay you’ve gained a reader. The problem is, they’re no longer on RRL and will never leave you a review. I recommend not linking to your independent website anywhere in the blurb or your author bio. Wait until you’ve caught up your updates to what’s posted on your website and then include the link to your website in the author’s note at the end of that chapter. It is also a good idea to have a link on your website back to RRL and encourage the readers from your website to leave a review on RRL.
- Delete chapters that have comments on them. Really, since you can edit chapters, there’s no real reason to delete them. Remember that comments spawn other comments. People are herd animals.
- Give other fictions low ratings in order to raise your rank. Mainly because this makes you an asshole but also because it’s not very effective. The site also periodically deletes spam ratings and bans people who make multiple accounts for this purpose.
- Make multiple accounts to give yourself high ratings. This will get you banned.
- Obsessively check your view count and statistics page. This is not good for your mental health and will not help you grow faster.
- Be rude to anyone. Remember, even if someone leaves a comment that is completely rude, you in your author persona must be pleasant and polite (but also not a wimpy pushover because teenage boys don’t like that). Alternatively, you have the power to delete all comments that annoy you in your fictions and you can take full advantage of this.
Other things people have done
- Review swaps. Trading 5/5 ratings with other users is explicitly against the rules but it is allowed to trade reviews if you don’t guarantee rating the other person 5/5 and write explicitly in the review that it’s part of a swap. This may help get you the initial ratings that you need but keep in mind that people do browse the reviews when deciding on whether or not to read your fiction and nobody takes review swap opinions seriously. It also takes quite a bit of time to read someone’s fiction and write a decent review, so you’re probably better off just writing more of your own fiction in order to have more updates. There’s a section in the forums with people looking to do review swaps if you really think it’s a good idea.
- Guest chapters. This is traditionally done on Web Fiction Guide as part of the April Fool’s swap but can really be at any time in the year and doesn’t necessarily have to be reciprocal. It’s a lot of work because you have to read the other person’s fiction and then write a chapter for it. It may be worth it if the story is something you would have read anyways for enjoyment, the other author has a large following, and the other story’s audience is exactly the one you want for your fiction. For instance, even if the other author has 10,000 followers, if they write hard-core sci-fi and you’re writing historical murder mystery, you probably won’t get a lot of readers out of it. I have personally featured two talented guest writers on my own fiction but you would have to ask them if they thought it was worth it.
Unice5656 writes Fantasia, one of the largest and most popular serials on Royal Road Legends. She likes pictures of baby ducks.
Join us next week for The Ultimate Guide to Promoting Web Fiction!
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