Author skills
NaNoWriMo, great… but don’t forget the Royal Road “Writathon”
A writing challenge that’s ideal for LitRPG and gamelit authors.
NaNoWriMo is a huge international event where novelists new and old try to write a short novel in a month. The usual target is getting 50,000 words written in the 30 days of November.
It’s fun, well organised, free to enter, and I have certainly benefited from the motivation and accountability it provides (you can see my profile here!). Last year, I worked on a first draft of book 3 of my Sparta Online series.
However, there is another less well-known writing event that I’d like to tell you about, and one that is especially important to Fantasy and LitRPG authors: the Royal Road “Writathon”.
As with NaNoWriMo, it’s free to enter the writathon, and the simple act of joining and setting a word target can be a powerful motivation to achieve your writing targets. The challenge is roughly similar in scale — 55,555 words within 5 weeks.
From my own experience, though, I would say that the writathon is a better experience for honing your writing skills and for gaining readers.
That’s because you are not just writing the words, but uploading them onto Royal Road’s platform as you go.
They don’t count towards the target if they aren’t published!
This means that you can’t get away with a sloppy, messy story with no plot, the way you can with NaNo. Purely getting the words down on the page isn’t enough. It has to be at least semi-edited, and ready for readers.
What’s more, you can get feedback, likes, and even earn money as you go along, rather than have a draft that is just sitting on your laptop. And if you are one of the prolific writers that makes the 55k word target, you will appear on the list of winners, gaining your writing further exposure, as shown in this screenshot from the official Royal Road website:
(I am on the list, but a fair bit further down!)
Writathon happens twice a year, starting in November and April. At the time of writing this article, the next one is due to begin on April 1st 2022 as stated here, and it’s also possible to see from Royal Road’s website that they have held the same contest for the past couple years as well.
It seems likely that it will continue every year — at least as long as the site is operational.
Whenever you are reading this, now is the time to begin getting your writathon novel ready, because ideally you will have a plan and a front cover before the event kicks off. New words added to an existing web-novel can also count.
Why Royal Road, you might ask?
Well, there are many web-novel sites, but it is widely recognised that Royal Road is the best one for authors of fantasy, and particularly LitRPG. That’s why I put my web-novels ‘The Tooth and Claw Guild’ and ‘Sorcerer, Level 1’ on there.
And many of the biggest names in LitRPG began there before moving over to Amazon, for example, Shirtaloon.
This means that getting highly rated or on the ‘trending’ list on Royal Road is a big deal. And the exposure that comes with doing the writathon will really help you to achieve that. Just think — you could have established yourself as the next big thing in LitRPG in just over a month!
If you do join the next writathon, drop me a message to say hi – and good luck!!
(added – here is my entry! Demon Hunters)
J. F. Danskin is an author of LitRPG and historical fantasy. His series ‘The Tooth and Claw Guild’ is in many ways a classic LitRPG, but with some real twists the further you go. ‘Sparta Online’ is an ebook series based on ancient Greek wars and myths, and it ties into the same overall world. He has also written VR-based fantasy novels and stories set around a game called ‘Shadow Kingdoms’.