Thanks for the response, I'm not clued into any of this stuff so it's always nice to hear from someone who is.
Have there been any controversies by the usual suspects?
That is odd because I was looking through their rules and all of the romance restrictions sounds like it's prohibitive to even try based on what modern jillers like to read.
That's hilarious. Are they confused by the concept of per capita and questions about breakfast too?
this is so beautifully autistic
Not that I'm aware of. You can often find someone on the forums trying to correcT the record about the usual tripe, but they get a surprising amount of pushback (that is to say, statements like "I don't quite agree with you" instead of bending the knee to the current year progressive idols). I get the feeling the userbase of Royal Road leans more right than any single user is willing to admit for fearing of being deplatformed.
I really don't know what audience they're trying to chase. Most Royal Road users seem to be the kinds of people who get off on power fantasies instead of porn.
I wouldn't be surprised. Combine autism with the reading level of your average zoomer or even alphoid... it's grim. If these kids can't keep up with litRPGs and isekais with two different perspectives, then they're gonna get fucked when they try to read a real book (
, I know) Thank you, sperging out about it made me feel better. I've been frustrated with it lately.
i think the thing is that sperging out about this in very heavily pozzed/retarded spaces will get every midwitted, overly-performative, suck up of a faggot/woman whining about something.Not that I'm aware of. You can often find someone on the forums trying to correcT the record about the usual tripe, but they get a surprising amount of pushback (that is to say, statements like "I don't quite agree with you" instead of bending the knee to the current year progressive idols). I get the feeling the userbase of Royal Road leans more right than any single user is willing to admit for fearing of being deplatformed.
I really don't know what audience they're trying to chase. Most Royal Road users seem to be the kinds of people who get off on power fantasies instead of porn.
I wouldn't be surprised. Combine autism with the reading level of your average zoomer or even alphoid... it's grim. If these kids can't keep up with litRPGs and isekais with two different perspectives, then they're gonna get fucked when they try to read a real book (
Thank you, sperging out about it made me feel better. I've been frustrated with it lately.
From reading the forum I get the impression that the authors lean left, or at the very least hold leftist value (black people good, trans woman are woman etc...) but at the end of the day it's still dominated by male authors writing stories for a male majority audience and the men on that site still knows what they're into. Hell judging from the dm fiasco we have recently they might even have less tranny chaser than kiwifarms.
There are plenty of traditional fantasy stories there, you'd probably do fine. If you want to get attention it would probably help to dump a decent number of chapters (say 10-20) at a rapid clip at the start, like schedule posts once a day. The "meta" there for getting eyeballs seems to involve posting rapidly at the start and then switching to a more sustainable 2-4 chapters a week. Chapters also tend to be on the short side, like 2-4k words. Check out the current stories on "Rising Stars" to see what I mean. I have also heard rumors of Discord gay ops among authors to upvote their stories and downvote competitors, but I'm not sure how significant of an effect that has.
To give a mild defense of the genre, people find it satisfying to see tangible progress, for the same reason people like leveling up in video games. It also originated out of the xianxia/wuxia roots of the site, where cultivators would have different "levels" basically with weird names. This can be a crutch for bad authors and definitely attracts autists, but it can also be amusing if it's done well. Here's one example of (in my opinion) good execution: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/92144/the-legend-of-william-oh
Yes, and it's hilarious. I vaguely remember one story a while ago where the author decided to make the main character gay for his best friend with basically no foreshadowing, and the story cratered from ~4.5 stars to 3 practically overnight. The RR audience is definitely full of chuds, while the authors are more of a mixed bag. There's a clique of authors who took over r/ProgressionFantasy for example, and they added a year-round pride flag.
Honestly it's because most RR authors are amateurs, often with day jobs, and are trying to crank out 10k+ words per week. Trying to weave together multiple points of view in a coherent way, with minimal editing and a shortage of time for planning, is basically asking for disaster. In my opinion multiple POVs also isn't a great fit for a web serial format, where say if you have three POVs and update weekly, that means your audience is getting a chapter for each POV every three weeks. That makes it much harder to maintain reader attention.
Nicholas Fisk wrote some good hard sci-fi back in the 80s but I don't know if they count as YA or kid's books.
I thank God every day for being born a hyperlexic, and that I had parents and grandparents who would read to me even after I long memorized the book in their hands. I also remember phonics being taught to me in elementary school (Mom hoarded my assignments and shit from that time, so I saved some of those phonics booklets from first grade for future use), though I think most of that might've been through a JumpStart game or some other computer activity center I would play the shit out of.
I’m pretty sure the reason I became a good reader is because my mom taught me my letters when I was 3, and helped me sound them out. She or my dad read to me every night as a baby/toddler, and after teaching me to print capital letters, my grandfather would send me carefully printed letters in all caps that my mom would help me sound out and read.
I was taught sign language, so by the time I was 2 I knew how to spell. I also read tons of books (like keeping my mom up until midnight reading to me every night), so by the time I was 4 I was tested for reading at the university level.
Are you me? I got banned from the library in 1st grade because I was bored to tears with my grade level's books and wanted to read books from more advanced levels. I also got in lots of trouble for working ahead and asking for more work and more engaging work.
Yeah I was going through videos on youtube and that's what they all said as well.
This meta is actually not exclusive to Royal Road, but basically every web novel platforms used the same meta. It's influenced a lot by how the web novel platforms in Asia works, especially in East Asia like China or Japan. This is where Royal Road are most influenced by, though I'm guessing a lot of people there are also South East Asians as well, instead of the South Asians like the pajeets.
This is real. When Webtoon launched Yonder, their attempt at bringing this model to the West, a part of their process involved hiring rooms of "editors" who had free rein to rewrite and alter the stories put before them. This led to some of their biggest purchases never getting released in full. Wonderful business sense, eh? You pay five or six figures for someone's badly written story, then pay more money to multiple people to get them to basically rewrite it, and then somehow count on making all of that back through pay-to-unlock chapter-by-chapter micro-transactions.
Western audiences also basically revolted over the whole pay per partial chapter microtransaction model. One example I recall from Naver's launch was the Practical Guide to Evil, a pretty decent YA-ish web serial where people were not happy about the prospect of having to pay $475 in microtransactions to read the edited versions of the seven books. And for any series like that which had a popular free release prior to getting put behind the Naver paywall, there are going to be plenty of bootleg epubs and other versions floating around for anyone who knows where to look. The unedited version is even still up on the author's website, although it might have been restored after Yonder collapsed. People can mentally justify paying $5 a month on Patreon as "supporting a struggling author" but having to pay almost $500 is insane, even a set of premium hardcovers would cost less than half of that.
What an interesting example.