I’ve seen a number of debut authors selling huge numbers of books on Amazon after releasing their first LitRPG book. Often, after digging into their success, I’ve found that they’ve come from Royal Road, a serial fiction website with a particular focus on LitRPG. They will write chapters there on a set schedule, then package them up as an e-book and sell a ton on Amazon.
Digging into it further, there’s a huge ecosystem and suggested approaches that selling on Amazon is only a small part of.
This post is taken from three online guides, How To Become Successful on RoyalRoad, Royal Road for Beginners, and Running your story like the business it is. If this post is interesting to you, and you want more information, you’ll get it from those three links. I have limited personal experience with this and am mostly synthesizing the information they present.
Step 1: Understand What LitRPG Readers Want
I regularly meet people who don’t know LitRPG. I explain to them what the genre is, and often describe it as “romance novels for men.” In place of the romance conventions of romance novels, they offer a power fantasy.
Much like romance novels, the readers of LitRPGs are insatiable and want endless variations on similar stories. At their heart, each of them is a story that incorporates mechanics, such as those found in a table-top role playing game or a video game. For example, when a protagonist finds a magic sword, numerical information about it might be provided.
The best way to write LitRPG is to be a fan of the genre, aware of the tropes, and write something similar to what has been successful. Much like how romance publishers had set outlines that they expect authors to conform to, LitRPG readers aren’t looking for wild innovation – they want to get what they expect.
Step 2: Start Writing On Royal Road
Before you start writing a serial story on Royal Roads or a similar site, you’ll probably want a backlog: many chapters of the story already written. You release the story in 1,500-5,000 word chapters. Consistency is important, both for length of chapters and when they’re posted. Daily postings, Monday to Friday postings, and three days a week postings seem to be the most popular.
If you’re trying to get readers, which is the point of the whole thing, you’ll want a good-looking cover, an attention grabbing title, appropriate tags, and a well written synopsis. Readers will start at the beginning, so your first dozen chapters have to really hook the reader and get them engaged with the story. It’s expected that most chapters will end on a cliffhanger and keep readers excited for the next release.
Rising Stars is a list of the most popular, new stories on Royal Road. You want to get on it as free advertising for more readers. It uses a bunch of metrics to determine the rank, but basically you want a great story that readers love.
Recently Updated is just a list of the stories that have most recently had new content added to them. This may get you a smaller amount of attention than Rising Stars. Each time you post a new chapter, you’ll likely be on this list for up to an hour.
It’s suggested that releasing a ton of words at the start, perhaps 20,000, before following your standard release schedule can be a good way to find early readers. Some readers want to see a chunk of the story available before they’ll invest the time reading it, so releasing a bunch at the beginning provides them with this.
Once you have things set up, it is probably a good idea to pay for advertising to get more readers onto your story. This could help get you onto the rising stars list (or higher on it), which itself helps get more readers.
You may consider review swaps, which is where you and other authors read one another’s stories and leave reviews, and shout-outs, which is where authors advertise one another’s stories on a particular chapter.
If you have previous stories on Royal Road, you can advertise a new story by posting the details as if it was a new chapter on your old stories. This will be shown to the followers on those old stories.
Step 3: Evaluate Your Launch
After two months, you’ll have a sense of the trajectory your story is on. You can estimate the monetization (see below) by figuring that 3% of your followers would be willing to pay you an average of $8 / month. So 3,000 followers would make you $720 every month (3,000 * 0.03 * 8). 300 followers would make you $72 every month.
At this point, if you don’t have enough followers for it to be worth continuing, your best approach might be to end the story, start a new one, and try to get followers from your first story to be your initial readers for the new story. Try to figure out where you missed the mark and improve your second attempt.
Step 4: Monetizing With Patreon
Once you’ve gotten a bunch of followers (i.e. Royal Road readers), you’ll eventually want to set up a Patreon account. You’ll let readers pay you a monthly amount in order to read your backlog of chapters before they’re released to Royal Roads. About 3% of readers will do this, and will subscribe at whatever level lets them read the furthest ahead. It should usually cost about $10. You can have lower tiers which let them reader a smaller number of chapters in advance.
There are a fair number of writers making $10,000s every month doing this.
Step 5: Monetizing with Kindle Unlimited
There’s a secondary audience on Kindle Unlimited who enthusiastically read LitRPG books there. Taking the released chapters above, bundle them into discrete books and release them on Kindle Unlimited (and Amazon) each time you have a book’s worth. Kindle Unlimited doesn’t allow content to be posted for free elsewhere, so you’ll need to remove any chapters from Royal Road when you post the books to Kindle Unlimited. You’re mostly interested in your current readers at this point, who will have already read the previous chapters, so removing them from Royal Roads isn’t a big deal.
Step 6: Create An Audiobook
This doesn’t seem to be on a lot of LitRPG author’s radar (this step is from me, not the linked to guides), but audiobooks are big business. A genre publisher I know says that he sells 5% of his books as paperbacks, 15% as e-books, and 80% as audiobooks. There’s an enthusiastic market for LitRPG audiobooks.
An audiobook can be created fairly easily through ACX. You can either find a narrator who will record the audiobook for a share of the royalties or hiring them and keep the full royalties to yourself (or learn to record it yourself, which most people advise against). If you pay outright, it will be between $50 to $1000 per finished hour of audio (what readers hear). An hour of audio is around 9300 words. So a 70,000 word book would be around 7.5 hours of audio. It would cost $370 – $7,500.
For writers making $10,000s every month, this doesn’t seem like an outrageous amount to spend for something that will start making you more money every month. Do the royalty split if you’re nervous, but I suspect that eventually you’ll easily earn back whatever you pay your narrator.
Step 7: Don’t Bother Creating A Paperback / Hardcover / Prestige Print Edition
I’ve seen popular LitRPG authors try to release physical books and there’s no interest in them.
Go figure.
You can see my Royal Road profile here. I’m currently posting my Endless Seas story. Once it’s complete, I plan to release my new Dimensional Traveler book (which is a deck building LitRPG) here first.
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