6 ms·

Royal Road is one of the platforms for indie authors to publish serialized web novels. Many people use that to jump into a full time writing career -- successfu

by hosh 2y ago

Royal Road is one of the platforms for indie authors to publish serialized web novels. Many people use that to jump into a full time writing career -- successful new serials get on a ladder, paetrons get set up, and when enough chapters are written, they get edited and published to Kindle. The publication to Kindle Unlimited ends up with the books getting stubbed. In return though, you have a kind of presale so you know people like reading the work, and a sufficient fan base to appeal for support for a successful launch on KU. One of the things I've been seeing the authors reporting to their subscribers are people stealing that work by scraping the chapters, running it through LLM, and then publishing it on KU. Authors have been adding watermarks into the text, though I don't know how successful that is. (On the other hand, many authors use generative image AI to create covers, which has angered artists whose work has been sucked up by the generative AI machine).

torginus 2y ago
I really want to like Royalroad, as it's full of well-written stuff, made by clearly passionate and talented authors, but I can't help but notice that everything seems to some sort of Isekai/LitRPG/Progression novel where the protagonist fights anime-style battles and gets progressively more powerful, with sometimes numerical stats increasing, as presented by stat blocks in the story. This genre was completely unknown to me before I discovered RR, and I'm suprised how ubiquitous it is. Is this what young people want nowadays? The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  That's genre fiction - a formula, with some reader-insert gratification. A site like RR is specifically aimed at readers who want those kinds of stories. Other fiction markets are the same. Mysteries, fantasy, thrillers, romance, all have their tropes and sub-tropes. Most don't have an RR equivalent because they're marketed through other communities, like TikTok for romance. Original fiction that doesn't follow strict genre rules and expectations is a very hard sell today - but I'm not sure that's ever been untrue.
  - torginus 2y ago
    I'm sure you are right but it didn't use to be this bad - I remember a couple of years ago I tried to familiarize myself with the old fantasy classics, most of which certainly weren't considered respectable literature back then. By far the worst offender of the bunch was Lin Carter's Under the Green Star - in which the sickly protagonist has his mind transported into a body of a powerful hero of legend, in a faraway realm, and rescues a beautiful princess who falls madly in love with him - at which point the teenage boy pandering became so unbearable, that I had to put the book down. This is exactly the tier wher most RR books stand at. Other books, such as the Elric books by Moorcock, or Leiber's Fafhrd books would still qualify as genre fiction, but have far more depth and nuance to them and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. I wonder, what other sites are there for online fiction? I only know of Wattpad, which seems to largerly focus on romance for teenage girls, and AO3, which seems to focus on smut/fanfiction. While all 3 sites have hidden gems, it's too much of a bother for me to wade through the typical faire to bother looking for them.
- vunderba 2y ago
  Isekai (e.g. wish fulfillment + power fantasy) is absurdly popular in the anime/manga industry so I guess I'm rather unsurprised that its leaking over to more traditional novels as well.
  - meowface 2y ago
    As an anime fan, I wish there were more series that strayed from this formula. So many are either isekai, "protagonist has an ultimate power/entity inside them they can't fully control", or both.
    - hosh 2y ago
      You mean like Fieran? That is something author Blaise Corvin calls “exploration fantasy” and inspired him into attempting a new serial along that line. There is also Your Lie In April. Not a fantasy or reincarnation. There are few other exceptional ones here and there.
      - meowface 2y ago
        Funnily enough I was actually going to write "Frieren is the only one that comes to mind that doesn't follow this formula", but I figured it would sound way too myopic since surely that can't be the only one.
    - torginus 2y ago
      Honestly I was just thinking about this - there have been many manga series (which get turned into anime eventually), that started out with an interesting premise that can be taken into many directions, only to turn into a cookie-cutter shonen battle manga. I think I know the reason for this - shonen is a relentless popularity contest, where magazines only feature the most popular works and will quickly drop your series once it starts losing readers. The way to consistently stay on top is to appeal to the biggest demographic - that is shonen battle/isekai fans by making your stuff to be exactly like the other stuff. But doing so makes you lose the readers who were interested in the thing that made your manga unique in the first place. And after a time, these people will stop reading the publication altogether, skewing fan demographics even more towards genre fiction, making it even more impossible to create something unique. I have seen this happen multiple times.
- LordDragonfang 2y ago
  As a (perhaps not-so-young) consumer of several RR stories in those exact genres, yes. It's a fun genre that really tickles the same part of my brain that building munchkins in D&D does. Progression fantasy is just very satisfying to read. (In case anyone is looking for recommendations, Mother of Learning is the best all-around, Delve is probably my favorite, and Worth the Candle is incredible if you can stomach how much of a crapsack world the protagonist is dragged through)
  - where-group-by 2y ago
    If we're doing recommendations I would like to add my own, which are: - bog standard isekai - isekai with numbers, but it's more of a horror story, at least for book 1 - hope - which actually isn't isekai, nor litrpg, but still fantasy about a young protag - death by chocolate - a detective cyberpunk story
- jtolmar 2y ago
  LitRPG fans aren't all young people, it's also weirdly popular with middle-aged women with fond memories of playing World Of Warcraft. I don't think the phenomenon is young people these days, so much as every online fiction site slowly narrowing in on one subgenre over everything else, and Royal Road's being trashy power fantasies. I'm on a discord where authors discuss these things, and they talk a lot about the RR community and the hoops they need to jump through to match that specific group's specific tastes, because it's one of the niches where the money is right now.
  - pragmatick 2y ago
    Hey now, I'm 42 and like some LitRPG / progression fantasy (only read Dungeon Crawler Carl, Mother of Learning and Cradle, though).
- Aerroon 2y ago
  >Is this what young people want nowadays? Yes, but it's not just young people. >The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones. You can basically trace a lot of the web novel versions back to anime/manga/light novels. (Maybe the reason is that in Asia these are also web novel, eg Shousetsuka ni Narou.) However, this kind of a genre is and was popular in the west independently of that. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote A Princess of Mars in 1912. It hits onto most of the same ideas these more modern stories do.
- idlemach 2y ago
  One factor you may be missing in the prevalence of Isekai/LitRPG/Progression Fantasy novels on RoyalRoad is that the original purpose of the site was to translate Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, a novel about a Virtual Reality MMORPG called Royal Road which was emblematic of the genre. From there, people started publishing fan fiction of the story, then their own similar novels, and more. The audience for the genre never left and is still the largest on the site, even if now there are other genres as well.
  - red-iron-pine 2y ago
    yeah important detail. like the site was created for and named after isekai, you're gonna get a lot of it
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hosh 2y ago
  Progressive fantasy is what RR is known for, and many series like that launch from there. There are others that are progressive fantasy adjacent. Progressive fantasy covers litrpg (and its many variants including 4x rpgs), so-called “cultivation” fantasy (wuxia, xianxia, etc). It shouldn’t be surprising since fighting animes have been around for a long time, and now isekai animes are now the rage, and those all overlap into progressive fantasy. There is a subreddit for this. Other platforms will have other types of serials. I just don’t know them off the top of my head. My wife reads a romance serial somewhere else.
- m463 2y ago
  I read a few of these on kindle, some are ok, but some are just not very good at all. and they seem to seamlessly run into another genre called haremlit where the main character easily collects partners left and right. Now I tend to shy away from kindle unlimited and books with warnings about "unconventional relationships" (in my experience both mostly mean poor writing quality) If anyone has their own tips for picking not-a-waste-of-time books, I'd like to know.
  - hosh 2y ago
    I had found a few I like on RR. The authors will sometimes do a shoutout for ones they liked, or promote. That gets me a fairly good variety.
WereAllMadHere 2y ago
I don't think there's a comparison between the AI book scraping and the generated covers. One is using a tool to create a new artwork, one is using a tool for plagiarism.
- pizzalife 2y ago
  >One is using a tool to create a new artwork, one is using a tool for plagiarism. Is it "new artwork", though? That's the big question. I would say both are tools for plagiarism.
- hosh 2y ago
  That is not how the artists I have talked to see it. Many are very angry about it. When I asked one about the generated cover, she came right back with, why didn’t the author reach out to work with them? And now, DeviantArt is collapsing, as artists flee, and content is being dominated by automated generative AI spamming out content. Now, I understand the frustration of someone able to see something in their head and is unable to put it into drawing. Storywriting is already an all-consuming discipline … but so is anything creative.
  - torginus 2y ago
    Honestly I don't get why people use GenAI covers. You can get a surprisingly decent if basic cover for as little as $50 (lots of artists in Latam and SEA willing to work for not very much), and if you're willing to drop a couple hundred on it, great artists will make line up to work with you. Considering the time and effort that goes into writing a book, if you value your own time, and work, this should be a no-brainer.
    - disqard 2y ago
      It's low-effort, and, once enough time has passed, it'll be this decade's equivalent of those trivial-to-add "blink" or "marquee" tags from the geocities times. Fast-forward 5 years, and our attitude might be: Hmmm, so you added an AI-generated image to your AI-generated slop "post", everybody knows "those" pages. Not gonna waste my time here.

by hosh 2y ago

torginus 2y ago

I really want to like Royalroad, as it's full of well-written stuff, made by clearly passionate and talented authors, but I can't help but notice that everything seems to some sort of Isekai/LitRPG/Progression novel where the protagonist fights anime-style battles and gets progressively more powerful, with sometimes numerical stats increasing, as presented by stat blocks in the story. This genre was completely unknown to me before I discovered RR, and I'm suprised how ubiquitous it is. Is this what young people want nowadays? The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones.

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
That's genre fiction - a formula, with some reader-insert gratification. A site like RR is specifically aimed at readers who want those kinds of stories. Other fiction markets are the same. Mysteries, fantasy, thrillers, romance, all have their tropes and sub-tropes. Most don't have an RR equivalent because they're marketed through other communities, like TikTok for romance. Original fiction that doesn't follow strict genre rules and expectations is a very hard sell today - but I'm not sure that's ever been untrue.
- torginus 2y ago
  I'm sure you are right but it didn't use to be this bad - I remember a couple of years ago I tried to familiarize myself with the old fantasy classics, most of which certainly weren't considered respectable literature back then. By far the worst offender of the bunch was Lin Carter's Under the Green Star - in which the sickly protagonist has his mind transported into a body of a powerful hero of legend, in a faraway realm, and rescues a beautiful princess who falls madly in love with him - at which point the teenage boy pandering became so unbearable, that I had to put the book down. This is exactly the tier wher most RR books stand at. Other books, such as the Elric books by Moorcock, or Leiber's Fafhrd books would still qualify as genre fiction, but have far more depth and nuance to them and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. I wonder, what other sites are there for online fiction? I only know of Wattpad, which seems to largerly focus on romance for teenage girls, and AO3, which seems to focus on smut/fanfiction. While all 3 sites have hidden gems, it's too much of a bother for me to wade through the typical faire to bother looking for them.
vunderba 2y ago
Isekai (e.g. wish fulfillment + power fantasy) is absurdly popular in the anime/manga industry so I guess I'm rather unsurprised that its leaking over to more traditional novels as well.
- meowface 2y ago
  As an anime fan, I wish there were more series that strayed from this formula. So many are either isekai, "protagonist has an ultimate power/entity inside them they can't fully control", or both.
  - hosh 2y ago
    You mean like Fieran? That is something author Blaise Corvin calls “exploration fantasy” and inspired him into attempting a new serial along that line. There is also Your Lie In April. Not a fantasy or reincarnation. There are few other exceptional ones here and there.
    - meowface 2y ago
      Funnily enough I was actually going to write "Frieren is the only one that comes to mind that doesn't follow this formula", but I figured it would sound way too myopic since surely that can't be the only one.
  - torginus 2y ago
    Honestly I was just thinking about this - there have been many manga series (which get turned into anime eventually), that started out with an interesting premise that can be taken into many directions, only to turn into a cookie-cutter shonen battle manga. I think I know the reason for this - shonen is a relentless popularity contest, where magazines only feature the most popular works and will quickly drop your series once it starts losing readers. The way to consistently stay on top is to appeal to the biggest demographic - that is shonen battle/isekai fans by making your stuff to be exactly like the other stuff. But doing so makes you lose the readers who were interested in the thing that made your manga unique in the first place. And after a time, these people will stop reading the publication altogether, skewing fan demographics even more towards genre fiction, making it even more impossible to create something unique. I have seen this happen multiple times.
LordDragonfang 2y ago
As a (perhaps not-so-young) consumer of several RR stories in those exact genres, yes. It's a fun genre that really tickles the same part of my brain that building munchkins in D&D does. Progression fantasy is just very satisfying to read. (In case anyone is looking for recommendations, Mother of Learning is the best all-around, Delve is probably my favorite, and Worth the Candle is incredible if you can stomach how much of a crapsack world the protagonist is dragged through)
- where-group-by 2y ago
  If we're doing recommendations I would like to add my own, which are: - bog standard isekai - isekai with numbers, but it's more of a horror story, at least for book 1 - hope - which actually isn't isekai, nor litrpg, but still fantasy about a young protag - death by chocolate - a detective cyberpunk story
jtolmar 2y ago
LitRPG fans aren't all young people, it's also weirdly popular with middle-aged women with fond memories of playing World Of Warcraft. I don't think the phenomenon is young people these days, so much as every online fiction site slowly narrowing in on one subgenre over everything else, and Royal Road's being trashy power fantasies. I'm on a discord where authors discuss these things, and they talk a lot about the RR community and the hoops they need to jump through to match that specific group's specific tastes, because it's one of the niches where the money is right now.
- pragmatick 2y ago
  Hey now, I'm 42 and like some LitRPG / progression fantasy (only read Dungeon Crawler Carl, Mother of Learning and Cradle, though).
Aerroon 2y ago
>Is this what young people want nowadays? Yes, but it's not just young people. >The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones. You can basically trace a lot of the web novel versions back to anime/manga/light novels. (Maybe the reason is that in Asia these are also web novel, eg Shousetsuka ni Narou.) However, this kind of a genre is and was popular in the west independently of that. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote A Princess of Mars in 1912. It hits onto most of the same ideas these more modern stories do.
idlemach 2y ago
One factor you may be missing in the prevalence of Isekai/LitRPG/Progression Fantasy novels on RoyalRoad is that the original purpose of the site was to translate Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, a novel about a Virtual Reality MMORPG called Royal Road which was emblematic of the genre. From there, people started publishing fan fiction of the story, then their own similar novels, and more. The audience for the genre never left and is still the largest on the site, even if now there are other genres as well.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  yeah important detail. like the site was created for and named after isekai, you're gonna get a lot of it
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hosh 2y ago
Progressive fantasy is what RR is known for, and many series like that launch from there. There are others that are progressive fantasy adjacent. Progressive fantasy covers litrpg (and its many variants including 4x rpgs), so-called “cultivation” fantasy (wuxia, xianxia, etc). It shouldn’t be surprising since fighting animes have been around for a long time, and now isekai animes are now the rage, and those all overlap into progressive fantasy. There is a subreddit for this. Other platforms will have other types of serials. I just don’t know them off the top of my head. My wife reads a romance serial somewhere else.
m463 2y ago
I read a few of these on kindle, some are ok, but some are just not very good at all. and they seem to seamlessly run into another genre called haremlit where the main character easily collects partners left and right. Now I tend to shy away from kindle unlimited and books with warnings about "unconventional relationships" (in my experience both mostly mean poor writing quality) If anyone has their own tips for picking not-a-waste-of-time books, I'd like to know.
- hosh 2y ago
  I had found a few I like on RR. The authors will sometimes do a shoutout for ones they liked, or promote. That gets me a fairly good variety.

WereAllMadHere 2y ago

I don't think there's a comparison between the AI book scraping and the generated covers. One is using a tool to create a new artwork, one is using a tool for plagiarism.

pizzalife 2y ago
>One is using a tool to create a new artwork, one is using a tool for plagiarism. Is it "new artwork", though? That's the big question. I would say both are tools for plagiarism.
hosh 2y ago
That is not how the artists I have talked to see it. Many are very angry about it. When I asked one about the generated cover, she came right back with, why didn’t the author reach out to work with them? And now, DeviantArt is collapsing, as artists flee, and content is being dominated by automated generative AI spamming out content. Now, I understand the frustration of someone able to see something in their head and is unable to put it into drawing. Storywriting is already an all-consuming discipline … but so is anything creative.
- torginus 2y ago
  Honestly I don't get why people use GenAI covers. You can get a surprisingly decent if basic cover for as little as $50 (lots of artists in Latam and SEA willing to work for not very much), and if you're willing to drop a couple hundred on it, great artists will make line up to work with you. Considering the time and effort that goes into writing a book, if you value your own time, and work, this should be a no-brainer.
  - disqard 2y ago
    It's low-effort, and, once enough time has passed, it'll be this decade's equivalent of those trivial-to-add "blink" or "marquee" tags from the geocities times. Fast-forward 5 years, and our attitude might be: Hmmm, so you added an AI-generated image to your AI-generated slop "post", everybody knows "those" pages. Not gonna waste my time here.