Author skills | Webnovels

Winning the Royal Road Writathon

It’s not enough just to enter—to get the most from this contest, you need to make the ‘trending’ lists. Here’s how.

Royal Road is a site that publishes web-novels. These ‘serialised fiction’ stories are released a chapter at a time. They often come out on a regular schedule, such as one or two chapters per week — or sometimes even daily.

There are other web-novel sites out there, such as Vella and Smashwords, but out of all the options, Royal Road is surely the best one for fantasy and sci-fi authors.

I’ve explained before how the Royal Road writathon challenge is well worth considering.

It is a similar undertaking to NaNoWriMo in terms of length and timescale, but has the advantage that the web-novel format on Royal Road forces you to edit as you go, and greatly boosts your visibility to fantasy readers (I mean… it will be infinitely more visible than it would be in the bowels of your hard drive, right?!).

But there is more. It’s not enough to just enter the Royal Road writathon. You need to win.

But what exactly do I mean by that?

By ‘winning’ the writathon, I don’t mean that you will beat every other author. I just mean that you will enter, participate actively, and reach the target word count of 55k words.

In other words, winning is finishing the course.

This is still quite an undertaking, but the potential rewards make it worth doing, and worth doing well. Some authors are earning five-figure sums monthly on Royal Road. And the writathon is an ideal way to bump yourself high on the trending titles list.

There are a few other things to consider. As JF Brink explains in this excellent guide to success on Royal Road, there are some things that will boost your chances of breaking out on what is increasingly a crowded platform.

To summarise, the points below are all strongly recommended:

• If the story is new, begin with a bang by publishing ten or more chapters over the first couple of days. Make each one between 1500 and 2500 words long.
• After that, publish a chapter every day, seven days per week… or every weekday, at the very least. If that sounds a lot, it’s actually spot on in terms of what you would need to complete 55k in five weeks (e.g. just over 1500 words a day x 35 days).
• Keep the chapter length as consistent as possible. You want readers to know what to expect.
• Craft a story that can keep going over the long haul. It shouldn’t come to an end at 55k. Instead, be prepared to keep going month after month once the contest is over.

I’ll say more about promoting your story on Royal Road in another post. But for now, I think it makes a ton of sense to stick to the principles above as you tackle the writathon.

After all, why wouldn’t you start as you mean to go on? And why wouldn’t you want to go on in a way that would lead to success?

It’s also going to be helpful if you can make the top ten of the writeathon winners list (thereby being much more prominent in the list). However, this probably means writing and publishing 100k words in just over a month!

The rapid release model of successful web-novels is not for everyone, I know. But if you’d like to get there, I would advise checking out my other article about building up your word counts:

In the meantime, the next best thing is to publish regularly, even if the quantity of what you produce is quite a bit less than what the most prolific authors manage. If you publish regularly, at least your fans will know what to expect, and they will look out for the next chapter.

One last piece of advice — but perhaps the most important of all — is to stick to a highly popular genre. Fantasy and sci-fi are huge on Royal Road, but more specifically, litRPG is one of the hottest genres around.

Even within that, there are particular sub-genres such as portal fantasy that are going to resonate a lot with today’s readers, and will really suit the chapter-by-chapter format.

Good luck if you do join the writathon this year — and let’s swap shoutouts!

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