Running your story like the business it is

Preface.
I want to preface this whole guide by saying that I am writing this from a business perspective, and it is aimed at authors who want to make a concerted effort to transition their writing into a paying career, or simply are interested in the business side of writing. Furthermore, while there are some concrete tips in this guide, it's generally focused on strategy and mindset rather than the craft of writing a webserial.

I’ve found it very interesting how similar the mindset and approach of many of the top-grossing authors on this webpage and LitRPG Amazon is, and how stark the contrast is to the less-successful ones who are perennially treading water. Having a passion for writing and your story is the most fundamental requirement for making it as an author, but it's not the only thing. This guide will try to showcase how to most efficiently go about turning that passion into a career. 

As such, Parts 0-5 cover topics aimed at new authors on RoyalRoad, on how to set a strong foundation for your business. Parts 6 and 7 cover the actual monetization, and are aimed at authors who have "made it". Finally, there is a Q/A at the end, where I've gathered my answers to some follow-up questions to this guide.

Introduction.
I chose to put together this guide for various reasons. First of all, I was kind of bored, and it seemed fun. This platform has helped me live my dream, and I hope this guide can help someone else down the road reach this point as well.

Secondly, there are no real guides on the subject any longer. Lone’s otherwise excellent guide that helped me when starting out is a bit outdated by now, and the other one is unfortunately riddled with inaccuracies. There is also so much bad advice floating around on this forum, and I felt it was time to do something more constructive than shaking my head in bemusement.

Third, the market is rapidly growing. When I started writing Defiance of the Fall, the blockbusters in the genre were making $5-7,000/mo on Patreon, and something like five people (excluding Asia ofc) could be considered making an actual living writing webnovels. Now, there are a bunch of us making over $20,000/month on Patreon alone, in addition to the piles of cash coming in from Amazon. How will things look in another three years?

I am not (only) saying this to brag, but to showcase how a small niche has become a legit career move for authors in a short few years. Writers who previously had never heard of RoyalRoad or even LitRPG are coming over in droves, hoping to use this platform to launch or reinvigorate their careers. And as such, competition has become a lot harsher.

So, while there’s more money to be earned, it’s become harder to get your hands on it.

Some people will still manage to fall ass-backward into success on this platform just by writing a good story. But as competition intensifies, it will become harder and harder to simply be “discovered”. If your goal is actually to make a living on RR, you shouldn’t leave it all up to chance.

You need to do everything in your power to improve the odds of you succeeding in this increasingly competitive marketplace.

Part 0 - You need to treat your writing like a business.
This is just part 0, but it is also the place where a lot of RR’s authors fail. If you’re writing intending to turn it into a career, you need to treat your writing like a job rather than a pastime or a hobby. Being an indie author is functionally the same as being a small business owner. That means you have to put the hours in, you have to grind even on days when the words are resisting being put onto paper.

And as any other small business owner, you need to wear multiple hats to get the machine going. One hat is obviously the writer-hat, but a lot of authors don’t bother wearing their business-hat, resulting in their story being good but no one reading it.

Your story is the product, but products normally don’t sell themselves. You always need to consider ways to put your product in the hands of your consumers (the readers), and at a later stage turn these consumers into paying customers (patreon/amazon/etc).

So keep this mindset in mind as we go through this guide.

Part 1 - The common questions.
When starting out, a lot of aspiring authors have many questions, wanting to make the most of their “RR launch”. Unfortunately, these authors are often met with real kaka advice when asking these kinds of questions on the RR Forums, so I figure I’ll bang these out (somewhat) quickly.

How long should a chapter be? How many chapters a week should I release?
Believe it or not, the right answer is NOT “follow your heart <3”, “there is no right answer”, or “anything between 500 and 5,000, depending on the scene.”
The correct answer is 1,500 to 2,500 for 5-7 times a week. More is better, but you need to comfortably be able to put out this every single week. Setting a clear release schedule and delivering on your promise is extremely important to growing your reader base.

Read winged wolf's guide on the subject to set up a schedule and chapter-length that works for you.

You can be flexible in this regard. My advice is to start at the lower end and work your way up in word count as you get better acquainted with marathon writing. The first chapters of DotF were 1,500-1,800 words, 5 times a week. This has gradually increased as I gained experience, and I now comfortably release 2,800-3,200 word chapters 5 times a week.

However, DO NOT RANDOMLY DEVIATE from your established chapter length.

A very common phenomenon I see on this forum is how people’s chapters are wildly fluctuating in word count from chapter to chapter. This might be fine if you’re writing as a hobby, but it should be avoided if you're writing as a job.

You can’t just add 50% length to chapters to “get everything you want into it”. That is the equivalent of working 50% overtime that day. You will burn yourself out long before you reach any success if you don’t learn to limit yourself and how much content you put out.

Controlling the pace and word count of your writing is a skill by itself. Learn how to round out chapters, how to portion the story into correctly-sized chunks. Suddenly releasing a massive 5,000-word chapter when you normally release 1,800-word chapters is not a sign that you’re a passionate writer.

It means you don’t know what you’re doing.

You might argue that it all evens out. Some chapters will be longer than average, and some will be shorter. Unfortunately, things don't work that way. If your average chapter length is 2,000 words, no one will react to a 3,000-word chapter. However, you can bet you'll get a bunch of annoyed comments if a chapter ends up being 1,000 words, only half of what your customers have come to expect.  

Remember, writing your serial is your job, where you have a set amount of content that needs to be produced every day/week. If you have a good day, use that extra word count toward tomorrow’s goal, to take a Friday off, or simply boost your private stock.

How long should I keep up this schedule?
Forever.

No joke. You should keep up this schedule forever. There is a common suggestion where people are told to build up a big stockpile and release it daily for a month, which should put you on Rising Stars. After that, you can go down to your “regular schedule.”

This advice might work in two cases:

1. You’re doing this for fun, but you want at least some readers to engage with.
2. Your story is not very long, and you just need a short stint on RR before putting the story on Amazon.

But if you’re looking at stories like Azarinth Healer, Beware of Chicken, He Who Fights with Monsters, or the smash hit Defiance of the Fall, stories where the authors are making bank month after month, this is not good advice.

You will never become a heavy hitter by working hard for one month then slowing down to a crawl where you release 1-3 chapters a week. Indie Authorship is to a large degree a quantity game.

So I shouldn’t build a stockpile?
You absolutely should. A good stockpile before you start releasing your story will allow you to reach Part 5 of this guide (the watershed), while still working or studying, and without burning yourself out.

You should still aim to write as much as you release where possible. If you hit success, you can then turn some of that stockpile into Patreon Early access (more on that later). It will also be a valuable buffer in the early stages when the writing takes more time and effort.

But you shouldn’t think of the first month of the story as a hump you have to get over, where you have to work hard so you can relax later. With so much money on the table, just doing the bare minimum will never be enough. The one thing that unifies almost all the big Patreon Accounts is a high weekly output.
Sure, there are some exceptions to this rule, but you should never model your business after the weird outliers.

At what time of the day should I release?
It doesn’t seem to matter much. Just be consistent, releasing roughly the same time every day. That way you build a habit among your readers to check in at the same time for their daily dose of your story.

Part 2 - The premise.
So you want to become a (paid) author. To maximize your odds of making it, you need to write the right kind of story. Just like any other businessman, you need to do market research to find out what’s popular. Check the bestsellers on Amazon, the top stories on Novelupdates, and PtW on RR. Figure out what sells.

When it comes to writing, I won’t do a full guide, but I have a few basic rules I recommend you follow:

• Lean into the tropes – they are tropes because they are popular. Pick the ones you like, and don’t try to deconstruct or add twists to everything. Tropes can also help you with plot points, lessening the burden on you (which is very important when you’re writing big chunks of words daily).

To be clear, this doesn't mean you ought to blindly copy others. The idea is to pick and chose the trope/setting that's proven to garner interest and fuse it with your ideas, creating something both unique and familiar enough to get some free push/publicity. Say you have figured out an interesting power/quirk for your MC, and want it to be a big part of your story.

When bringing in the tropes to the plotting, you can ask yourself why the MC is unique. Did he get his hands on unique treasure? Did he get isekai'd and got to keep his powers from his previous life? Get unique power from a God/System on transmigration? Is he a reincarnated master either using parts of his old powers or some unique treasure he found before dying? Is he, either unbeknownst or knowingly, the descendant of some unique race/power/whatever?

These are examples of popular tropes that sort of come with their own fanbase, and even some plot points that can help you out today/in a month/years down the road. Is he unique because he's part of a now-extinct race? Now you have a "face the enemies that extinguished said race"-arc ready to go at any time, along with the mystery of his origin. Does the power come from a unique treasure? Now the MC has a subgoal of upgrading or repairing said treasure to continue progressing.

• Stay in the middle lane. Don’t try to invent new genres or write in unpopular ones. You can import new popular tropes from Asian webnovels, but it’s a bit risky if that trope hasn’t been popularized in the west yet.
• The ABC of Webnovels is ALWAYS BE CLIFFIN’. If the readers complain, that means you’re on the right track.
• Related to my previous point; a good webnovel has to be addictive, where the readers keep wanting to come back day after day to read what your MC is up to next.
• Leave your story room to grow. The MCs of cultivation stories start in some hovel at the corner of the smallest empire of the weakest continent of a low-grade world for a reason. This goes for the ‘system’ as well. Don’t explain everything in the beginning, give it room to grow as both you and the reader find out more about the world.

Some might balk at this, feeling that the whole point of being an author is creative freedom, to write what and how you want. Well, sorry to break it to you, but until you become a bigshot, you need to cater to the market. If you make your “quirky blend of this and that, a never-before-seen deconstruction of the genre”, regardless if there’s a demand for such a story, it’s just literary masturbation.

It's important to write what you enjoy, but it has to be something that your readers enjoy as well.

As for actually writing the story or creating a working LitRPG system, that’s for some other guides to cover.

Part 3 - Launch day.
Nothing to it. You’ve done your research and built up a stockpile. Time to launch.

Depending on how much content you can produce, set up a launch schedule that hopefully kickstart your reader base. Perhaps launch up to ten chapters over a weekend, allowing everyone to get a real taste and get hooked on your story. Go even beyond the "standard" 5-7 chapters a week until you've gained your footing. Those going all-out right now are often doing 2ch/day for up to two weeks.

These chapters should not be a short lull slowly building up to something. This is not traditional publishing, where the reader has already bought your book and will probably keep reading even with a slow start. You need action from the get-go, you need to make people want to read what comes next, to have them come back for more.

This is possibly why Apocalyptic LitRPG and Isekai are doing so well on this platform/in general. It has a very clear plot point right at the start, where the reader is thrown right into it. From there, the readers will be curious what kind of twist to the trope you have added to your story, where you take a beloved concept.

Part 4 - Active Growth.
In a competitive market, you need to put more effort into actively getting your name and your story out there. RoyalRoad has better discoverability than most platforms, but that doesn’t mean you can leave all the work to the algorithms.

Do review swaps and get some early reviews for your story. Promote it where you can without getting yourself banned. Perhaps do shoutout swaps with other new authors.
When you have released for a few weeks and posted maybe ~20 chapters or so, it’s time to expand your promotion. Now that you have a decent chunk of product to “sell”, it’s time to promote it to other LitRPG/cultivation communities outside RoyalRoad. Facebook, forums, Reddit, discord servers. There are a lot of places where fans of the genre gather.

This is where you have to put on your salesman-hat and be a bit shameless. Push that product, baby. Even if you don't get direct sales, it will help you get your name out there, which might help you down the road.

Perhaps even take out ads on RoyalRoad if you have the money. From what I'm told, they can be very effective for stories on RoyalRoad. People see an interesting ad, they click, and suddenly they’re reading chapter one. A month later they’re a patron. Ezy-peazy.

Paradoxically, the RoyalRoad Forum is NOT one of the places to market your story. This place is essentially a daycare for bored or burned-out authors needing a place to vent. There are barely any readers here, so don’t get bogged down in this place.

Part 5 - The Watershed.
I’d say give it two months.

After that, it’s time to evaluate. Is your story now on Rising Stars, with good growth numbers and a healthy reader-base? Do you feel your story can go the distance? Congratulations! Jump straight to Part 6.

If not, or if you're unsure, read on.

Ultimately, only you can determine if your story is a success or not, based on your situation and your goals. But if your story has seen some growth, but you are uncertain if it's "enough", you can follow a few rules of thumb to estimate it. Take your # of followers, and multiply it with 3%. That's a decent estimate of the number of patrons you can expect to get in the short run Have you reached 3,000 followers after your stint? That means ~90 Patrons and ~$720 a month (you can check Section 6 how to calculate these things).

The bigger and more established patrons can increase this number well beyond 10% conversion, but it takes time to get to that point even if you do "everything right." So looking at the 3% conversion along with your growth numbers, you should be able to make some projections whether the project is financially viable. For some, $720 might be more than they are making at a full-time job, depending on where in the world you live. For others, it might at least be enough to warrant further focus on the story.

After all, if you can double both the conversion rate and the number of followers over the next couple of months, you'll be sitting at $3,000/month. That's life-altering money for most people, where you can focus on writing full time, or at least go down to part-time on day-job to give your writing career a proper go.

However, if you have, say 400 Followers at the watershed, which translates into ~$90/month, and your numbers have kind of plateaued - then you might have a (commercial) failure on your hand. Here’s the harsh truth; if you haven’t managed to build any momentum after two-three months even after following the previous steps, chances are you never will with this story. Unfortunately, it looks like your story didn’t grip the attention of the RR reader base.

So what now?

It might be hard to hear, but sometimes you need to let go of a bad investment before it poisons everything around it. You have to fight the sunk-cost fallacy and make a decision. Make a clean break? Give it another month or finish up the current arc before throwing in the towel? Whatever you end up with, follow through.

You can try and retool it into a Kindle Unlimited release if you still have confidence in the story. Kindle Unlimited has a larger and wider audience, and what doesn't work on RR might be a hit over there. There are many examples of RR authors making the switch and finding decent success after a weak RR run. Even if it doesn't turn out to be a blockbuster on Amazon, it can generate a few thousand dollars which will fund your next project. But if you don't find success with Book 1 over on KU either, it might be time to throw in the towel.

Ultimately, some businesses simply fail. My recommendation is to drop it. I’m sure a few readers will be disappointed, as will you. But if you’re candid with the fact that you can’t waste months of your time with a failed story, they will understand. You cannot guilt yourself into continuing to waste a huge chunk of your life on something that isn’t accomplishing your goals – helping you become a successful author.

However, it’s not a complete loss. If you’ve managed to consistently write for two consecutive months, your writing skill has probably shot through the roof. Use this to make your next story even better. Back to the drawing board. Once more, look at what the popular stories do, try to figure out where your story was different. Did it lack some elements? Did you mess up and write in an unpopular genre?

There is one piece of advice I cannot stress enough: DO NOT ATTEMPT A REWRITE.

Rewrites are the biggest poison to an indie author and their career. I can understand the sentiment. You’ve written for months, maybe a whole book’s worth of content. You have grown attached to your MC and the world you’ve created, and you’re thinking to yourself “if I just tinker with it a bit…”

Unfortunately, rewrites of failed stories are almost invariably failures themselves, even if the fanbase often agrees that the rewrite is superior. But remember, having a well-made product is useless for a business if no one’s buying it.

Part 6 - Monetization. (Patreon)
This is where the fun begins!

So, you made it past the watershed that stops 99% of the stories on RoyalRoad. Amazing! Time to celebrate, and more importantly, time to start making money! The basic premise of this guide is that your goal is to maximize your income without harming the growth or longevity of your story, so that you can transition from a day job/studies into a career as a full-time writer. 

There are no doubt many roads to success, but I have tried to pinpoint the methods that have worked the best for RR authors. The best ways to monetize your story will no doubt change as time passes. For now, there are two viable routes; Kindle Unlimited (and Audible) or Patreon, or a combination thereof. That doesn’t mean things won’t change in the future.

Right now, Kindle Vella is kind of a joke, but that may change over the next few years. And who knows, RoyalRoad’s own unprecedentedly slow-cooked premium feature might turn out to be a banger. But for now, KU and Patreon is the name of the game.

You can essentially go KU immediately after scrounging up enough content of your serial to repackage it into a book, and it might be a good option if you only find middling success on RoyalRoad. If you plateau at 1,000-2,000 Followers, it will most likely be extremely hard to earn a living wage on Patreon alone, so it might be a good idea to aim for a shorter running length of the story and an early KU release.

It's also likely to be the best option if your story won’t run more than the length of 2-4 books. However, if you followed this guide and leaned into the tropes, your webserial should have the legs to go much longer than that.

Therefore, if your webnovel’s following is big enough and it can continue for years, only going Patreon in the beginning is probably the right play. Doing so will let you monetize your story without any drawbacks. More importantly, it will let you continue to expand your community and build up the chapter stockpile, following, and the money required for a proper Amazon launch in the future.
So if you think you can get a patreon going, my advice is to go for it.

So Patreon! What should I offer? Tiers? Aaaaaa-
You’re a success, a titan of industry, and it’s time to monetize! Unsure what to do? Just copy some of the big hitters. It’s not rocket science setting up a successful Patreon. If you’ve reached this part of the guide, you have already accomplished the hard part – accumulating a reader base large enough to justify monetization. Copy the tier-ladders of me/Shirtaloon/Zogarth and you’re pretty much done. 

Just remember, it took time for the established patreon accounts to reach their chonky Early Access. My early access at $10 started at 15 chapters in total, and it only gradually increased to 50 chapters over years as various patreon goals were met and through other drives. 

Take note, launching a Patreon means you should go all out with the marketing. Make sure your readers can’t miss it – bomb them at the start of the month. Also, I’d suggest adding various goals, such as every 50/100 new patrons – bonus chappies for everyone! Reaching certain $/month – improved tiers! The theory is pretty much the same as Twitch Subathons - get your community invested in the success of your Patreon page.

That’s pretty much it, but for those curious about the nitty-gritty on making the most of your Patreon, read on. There is a very simple formula for calculating almost any RR author’s income, no matter if their income is hidden or not.

Patreon income = K * [$ for highest early access tier] * [# of patrons]

K is a coefficient that depends on various factors, generally between 0.7 and 1. For most authors, you’ll hit pretty close to the mark by going with 0.8.
It’s a simple formula, right? More importantly, you can pretty much only affect one of the variables – [$ for highest early access tier] (you can improve your coefficient number through a few means, but that is for some advanced guide I guess).

So what’s the takeaway? If you enjoy earning a decent wage, then your full early access should be accessible at $10/month. Giving full access at $5 will almost halve your income. There are also some other things to note, namely;

• Side benefits barely add to your income. Don’t trust me? Find an author’s patreon that offers all kinds of stuff, like named characters, art, side stories, maps, at higher tiers. Compare it with the formula against a barebones patreon account only offering early access. All that extra time and effort barely translates into $.
You might sway a couple of patrons with a nice offering, but it’s ultimately not time efficient. You’d bring in more money and supporters by focusing on your main product instead of these side projects. Your readers are supporting you to read ahead, so if you have time to do all these kinds of side missions, perhaps see if you can increase your weekly output or improve the tiers instead.
• The K coefficient is rarely higher than 1. This relates to the previous point. What does it mean? It means that if you provide full early access at your $5-tier, you will on average never earn more than $5 per patron, even if you have a $10 with all kinds of nice benefits.
• The K coefficient is rarely lower than 0.7. Why is this important? It means that your biggest tier will invariably be the one that has the biggest offering of early access. More than 90% of my Patrons are $10, because that’s where you get the most bang for the buck. It might seem odd, but ten bucks is ultimately nothing to our target audience. It’s a lunch/1 metropolitan beer/2 rural beers/a single microtransaction of a game.  
Still, this point is contingent on you not going crazy and introducing prohibitively expensive tiers. $10 seems to be the magic number.
• Patreon is mainly transactional in nature. Patreon can be used as an artist’s coffee tip jar, but you will literally only earn enough to buy a couple of cups of coffee if you treat it that way. Early access is a product that you sell through Patreon’s platform. Without a good chunk of product locked behind the paywall, you will not see any real growth. Just having one or two chapters is not enough. I often see arguments like “It works for Wandering Inn and Beware of Chicken,” but you need to look at yourself in the mirror and ask if your story has even close to their cult following.

Easy enough, right?

But remember – the moment you start accepting payment in return for your story, you are officially running a business rather than a hobby. There’s no “I’m not feeling it today” – writing is now your job, and you need to put in the work so that you can publish according to your set schedule.

If you start being flaky with your schedule, you will very quickly kill your readers’ confidence in you and lower their willingness to financially support you.

Transitioning into a business also means you need to start looking into things like incorporation and taxation. Unfortunately, I cannot give any advice on this point (never take tax advice from strangers on the internet) since every country has its own rules.

Part 7 - Monetization 2 – Electric Boogaloo. (KU/Audible)
You’ve now worked on your story for a while, you have a big stable following on RoyalRoad, a Patreon that either allows you to write full time, or at least has turned your writing into a decently lucrative side gig.

So you’ve had one monetization, what about second monetization? As mentioned at the beginning of Part 6, Patreon and KU/Audible are currently the two options for monetization. You’ve done one of them, so now it’s time to do the second.

When making the move to KU, you can approach one of the indie publishers who can deal with everything involved in such a release, but some people have found great success going at it alone.

With a publisher, you will give up a chunk of your revenue, and there is ultimately no guarantee that they’ll be able to generate more sales than if you go at it alone. Conversely, self-pubbing puts far greater demands on your ability to wear multiple hats. It’s not just about finding an artist for a cover and a good editor You HAVE TO figure out how Amazon works, marketing, ads, price points, etc etc.

I chose to go with a publisher and it worked out well for me. As such, I don’t really have any inside scoop on how to make the most out of your self-pub release. If you want to go at it yourself, there are places such as the LitRPG Author community where you can get good advice, along with guides such as wutosama’s on the steps required to turn your webserial into books.

Instead, I will use the final part of this guide on a topic that is just riddled with misinformation, and perhaps even disinformation, in this community.

Going “wide” or Kindle Unlimited exclusivity?
Going wide means avoiding the KDP Select exclusivity clauses and releasing your books on multiple platforms, often while keeping the story on RoyalRoad. Meanwhile, going with KDP Select means you can only release your book through Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, which means you also have to remove the chapters from RoyalRoad, Patreon, and any other platforms where you might crosspost the story.

This is a hotly contested topic on RoyalRoad for some reason, even if there is an overwhelming consensus in the LitRPG/ProgFantasy community in general. Simply put;

Going wide is trash. Never go wide unless you have f*ck-you money or you’re just releasing the books for fun.

I cannot stress enough how much worse going wide is, in pretty much 100% of cases for authors in our genre. Going wide will legitimately delete 80-90% of your potential paycheck, while negatively impacting other aspects of your business. And the so-called “negatives” of choosing to publish on Kindle Unlimited have been absolutely overblown, so I’ll go over them one by one.

"Exclusivity bad!"
Obviously, not being pigeonholed into using one platform would be preferable, but there is a reason new TV shows only show on one channel, why many video games release on only one console, why certain products can only be bought in certain stores. Sometimes, picking a narrower market can vastly improve your income, and KU is one of the most poignant examples of this.

Kindle Unlimited is where the vast majority of our target market is located. RoyalRoad’s reader base is just a drop in the bucket compared to Kindle Unlimited, and the gap is even bigger if you compare KU to other ebook platforms. And you get paid for every single page read on the platform, compared to RR/Patreon where you only earn money from your “superusers”.

So that’s where you need to be.

"You miss out on the readers and income from the other platforms!"
Sorry to say, there aren’t any readers on other platforms. Amazon essentially has a monopoly on LitRPG/cultivation/Progression Fantasy. I’d say that 99% of all readers are on Amazon, and of this 99%, over 80% are using Kindle Unlimited to read.  The old Lorekeepers of the genre have informed me that amazon/KU "only" have ~90% of the global ebook market, rather than 99%. Most likely, smaller niches such as LitRPG are more bunched up on Amazon, pushing that % even higher, but it's unlikely to have reached 99%.

And ask yourself, if a reader with Kindle Unlimited had to choose between a mountain of free content or having to pay for your story because you went wide, what do you think they’d choose?

If readers on RoyalRoad had to pay five bucks to unlock the first 50 chapters of your story, do you think they’d do so, or would they rather go read one of the 50,000 free stories on the platform instead?

You barely get paid on KU.
Simply false. Unless your books are unusually short, you will make as much or even more from a KU-readthrough compared to a full purchase.

"Going KU will harm your RR community and Patreon."
This is both the most common and the dumbest argument I’ve seen put forth on this topic.

Do you know who's NOT negatively impacted by you moving your story to Kindle Unlimited? YOUR READERS.

Releasing on Kindle Unlimited means you have to remove your old chapters, but what does that matter to your readers who are up-to-date on the story? To your Patrons who are reading early access?

So, who is impacted? Your Non-readers. You will see a decrease in new free readers finding your story on RoyalRoad, but that doesn’t matter. By the time you’ve reached monetization part two and started looking into publishing, your growth on RR would long since have plateaued already.

There is simply not too much growth to be had after you’ve done your early stint on Rising Stars where you get your name out, though it can be prolonged a while if you manage to appear on Best Rated or Popular This Week.

But even if you manage to snatch a permanent spot on the front page, you will exhaust the RR reader base soon enough. Left are only the RR readers who have consciously chosen not to read your story day after day, month after month. These people don’t matter, and you should absolutely not make business decisions based on the wants or needs of these non-paying non-customers.

If anything, going KU will reinvigorate both your RR following and your Patreon as long as you do things right. KU would connect you with a lot of new readers who love your story and want more, following you to RoyalRoad and then Patreon.

"It’s risky!"
Sure, it is a risk to make the move to KU. Kindle Unlimited is not some magical platform where everyone earns mountains of cash. Most releases fail, as businesses are wont to do. That’s life. Competition is harsh, and if you half-ass your release, you will be buried.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. More importantly, the exclusivity clauses are only for three months. Did your release fail? You can simply take the story off from KU after three months, switching over to wide distribution. You can even put the chapters back on RoyalRoad if you want. However, you should know that every single new release will bring a surge of readers to book 1 as well, but that's only really true if it and its successor remains on KU. 

Multiple-book readthrough of wide distribution is way worse since the reader has to fork up some money between every book, instead of just clicking "read next book in the series".

TL;DR
This part transitioned into a rant, but that’s the way of the road, I guess.

So TL;DR – Don’t be a dummy by going wide. If/when you finally make the move to Amazon, do it right and release on Kindle Unlimited.

Simply put, choosing to go wide over going KU means you are prioritizing non-paying non-readers on RoyalRoad over actually paying customers on Amazon. This is obviously crazy if you’re running a business.

Why should those who want to support you have to pay full price when they can support you without additional costs through Kindle Unlimited? It’s like demanding your fans should buy your CDs to listen to your music instead of putting the songs on Spotify.

Why should you hamstring your career on the off-chance that someone wants to read your story (without paying, of course) on RoyalRoad a year after you started out?
As I said, things might change if RoyalRoad actually releases a paid feature of their own. After all, they say you lose 40% of your revenue for every extra step the customer has to go through.

But for now, KU is the final destination of an RR Author’s career.

One suggestion.
I only have one tip if you decide to take this step on your own: you absolutely cannot half-ass an Amazon release.
The success of the first book will essentially make or break the story. If your first book is a success, you now have a money-printing machine that will continue as long as your story does. If your book fails to make a splash, you will be fighting an uphill battle with every release.

So you need to go all out, especially, with the first book. Every hour and ad dollar you spend to get more people to read your first book will also yield returns for all future releases.

If you just convert your RR chapters into an epub, slap your homemade cover on it put the onto KU and hope for the best, then you’re essentially doomed.

That’s it, folks.
These are some of the insights I've gathered from starting multiple businesses before turning to writing about axe-wielding maniacs, and the things I've learned over the past years of writing Defiance of the Fall. No matter which section of this guide you currently find yourself in, I hope you’ve found some ideas or suggestions that can help you move further up the ladder of success. 

It should be noted, though, that while this whole guide is centered around monetization, the most important part of writing a long-running webnovel is a passion for your work. I often see people talking about cash grabs when looking at the huge success stories, including my own, but something that unifies all the authors of the big stories is an incredible passion for their stories, the genre, and the craft. 

So if you only want to get into the game for the money, you are probably better off getting a normal job instead.

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Q/A (Answers gathered from the thread)

Q: How do you administrate posts and tiers on Patreon?
Unfortunately, there is no way to automate this. There are essentially two methods, depending on how tryhard you are. 

The first is to go to post -> published -> edit on the chapters that needs to be unlocked for each tier. Add the tier and click save. Now the patrons can access it.

The tryhard version also needs you to go post -> published -> edit. However, in this method you first remove access for ALL tiers. Second, you edit again and add ONLY the new tier that gets access today while checking the box "notify patrons with this change". Then you do a third edit and re-add the old tiers that should already have access, making sure you do not have the "notify patrons about this change" checked.

The benefit of the tryhard version is that all patron tiers will get an email when the new chapter is out. The benefit of the first version is that it won't make you want to bash your head into a wall (as much). As such, I am recommending the first method. The way I generally do things are

1. Post new chapter for $10 on Patreon.
2. Post RR chapter.
3. Make a chapter release announcement on Discord (where I have a ping role for this).
4. Unlock the three chapters for $1, $3, $5-tiers

This way, the $1/$3/$5-tiers know that they'll be able to access today's chapter a few minutes after the RR release/after getting pinged in my discord. Meanwhile, the $10 gets actual release emails, which I guess can be considered a premium feature for my biggest supporters?
 
Q: Is this guide/route/career viable as a side-gig, where you maybe only put an hour or two into it per day?
A: I'm not sure, honestly. Success and being able to monetize partly hinges on standing out from the crowd, and pushing out more content is the most reliable method for this. If one could so easily earn 20k a year on a writing side gig, a lot more people would do it.

It ultimately depends on how quickly you can write and how much free time you are able to invest. I haven't really looked into the "medium-successful" strategies, but I guess you could simply try a downscaled version of this guide. For example, instead of 5-7 chapters a week, maybe aim for 4. At 2,000 words apiece, you'd need 8k words a week. This should be manageable with a proper schedule. For example, one could do 1k words a day on weekdays and 3k words over the weekend.

This will still be a big time and energy investment, where you will essentially be working two jobs.
 
Q: My story is doing well on RoyalRoad, but I’m not making any money on patreon. What can I do?
If you have thousands of followers and you've had a good run on Rising Stars, but you're not making any "real" money, then the problem is probably conversion rather than growth. You need to analyze why your readers are not invested enough in your story for them to want to become paying patrons. There can be so many different reasons for this, so I can't really pinpoint it in a hypothetical scenario, but there are a bunch of things mentioned in the guide you can check off to make sure you covered all the bases.

1. Did you set up your Patreon Page correctly? (tiers, early access offers)
2. Did you promote your patron actively?
3. Did you do any campaigns like a subathon? (Bonus chapters upon reaching patron goals etc)
4. Are you offering enough chapters in early access? (if you start with just one or two chapters, few will be willing to pay any larger sums?

If the answer is yes to all of the above, the issue is probably with the story. As I mention in the guide, writing a webnovel is different from a traditional novel, so you need to make sure you keep the tempo right. 
1. Is the tension high enough? (If its just slice of life chapters without any cliffs or urgency, fewer people will sub)
2. Are you leaving readers wanting more at the end of chapters? (cliffs rather than conclusions)
3. Is your story building up toward something? (big power-up, fighting arc nemesis, solving a mystery, etc etc. Teasing interesting events will get you more patrons).

As for the second string of questions, I personally wouldn't give up on a story that has garnered thousands of followers. That's better performance than 99,9% of stories on this platform. For example, Defiance of the Fall "only" had something like 5-6k Followers when I left Rising Stars (trending back then), yet I made over $5k the first month with Patreon. I'd rather try to fix the issues that might cause your reader-to-customer conversion ratio to be so low. To keep up the growth while figuring these things out, you can definitely take out ads, plug the story on forums/reddit etc, maybe crosspost on places like scribblehub if it's the right genre. 

I'd probably even go KU before dropping a story with this kind of following. 

Q: I don’t like Patreon! Can I use services like Ko-Fi instead?
Ko-Fi is not a real option for this kind of business model for various reasons. One of them is simply that RR has Patreon integration, and the userbase of this platform is used to Patreon.

But the most important reason is VAT - Ko-Fi does not charge VAT on subscriptions. With them, you are the counterpart to the supporter, which means you would have to individually file VAT for every single transaction. No matter if we're talking bookkeeping or administration, it's an absolute nightmare. Therefore, it's pretty much impossible to use platforms like Ko-Fi/Subscribestar without breaking the law.

With Patreon, they are your counterpart, and they are responsible for VAT while you simply collect the net money.

Q: How do you deal with the pressure of coming up with new things? How do you combat burnout?
I don't feel there are any pressures to come up with things to write. The problem is rather having too many ideas, and scrapping fun concepts since the story would just become too big. There is also the arc fatigue where you've written a current arc for 3-4 months. You kind of want to move on to the next shiny idea, but there is still a month left to write on your current arc. During those times it's nice to have a pretty good stash of private chapters. That way, you can start writing on the next arc and get your daily word count, while using stockpiled chapters to deal with the daily releases. 

This helps with general writing fatigue as well. A lot of authors usually have multiple projects for this reason, but you can't really do that as a webnovelist (without hobbling your career). But working on multiple arcs at once can really help you push through rough patches, or just help improve your daily word count.

Q: How should I plot a series?
There are no right answer to plotting. Part of the job is finding a sustainable method that works for you. Personally, I don't plot too much. I know what the next few arcs will be, and I have bulletpoints of important plot points for the current arc. Often, those bulletpoints get scrapped as I come up with new and better ideas for the arc. After all, some of them last 3-5 months, and there is a lot of time to come up with new things. Other authors I know have every chapter detailed in big spreadsheets and follow it pretty faithfully. 

Q: How do you deal with editing?
As for editing, there is only so much editing you can do without having it take up too much time. First, I write 60-90% of a chapter and move on. Quick and dirty to get out the daily numbers. Then, on the day of (patreon) release, I flesh out and refine the chapter until it reaches 100%. In my case, this is often ~1 week later. The reason I split it up like this is partly to return to the chapter with fresh eyes, and partly to better be able to join it with future chapters I've written since.

After that, I do a final editing pass for typos/flow etc. Of course, there are then two more editing passes with actual editors for the Amazon releases. I generally don't do retroactive changes for the webnovel, but I have adjusted some things in the ebooks to better suit the later chapters/story arcs. 

The part you mention about revision and cutting sounds like advice for traditional writing rather than writing webnovels. Certainly, one should avoid having a bunch of fluff in one's story, but there are no restrictions where each part needs to be cut down and refined to the point everything fits into a book. I don't care if a story arc balloon into 2-300k+ words, as long as I feel I can keep the chapters interesting and engaging. 

Q: I was writing sub-1000-word chapters for my upcoming story. Should I fuse them into longer chapters, or keep them short so I can double the release rate?
It's nigh impossible to say with any certainty which is better and worse. Personally, I'd most likely take another week or two to stockpile 10 chapters+ and release the first chapters at 1500 words. It's more work, but I think it has good odds of paying off.

Reader drop-off is by far the highest in the first couple of chapters, and you want to do everything in your power to keep that drain at a minimum. There are two points of "friction" I can see with releasing incredibly short chapters at the start, both of which can lead to a higher reader loss.

First, there comes a point where the chapter's shortness becomes an annoyance that turn some readers away. I'd say that point is around 1000 words. Any less, and some feel the story lazy/unprofessional, and even designed to game the RR algorithm.

Secondly, you can consider the first 1-2 chapters as the "ad" for your story. Many readers read one or two chapters to see if the story is in their wheelhouse. With 750-word chapters, you can only fit half the content to showcase. Some might feel nothing interesting has happened, and simply give up on the story before they get to the good stuff. This ties into the advice in the main post that you need action from the start to hook the readers and make them keep clicking "next".

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EDIT 02/21 - added some explanations about trope-leaning and the measurements of success.
EDIT 10/28 - added A Q/A section containing my answers to questions in this thread.