Dear Reader,

I’ve taken my books off of Wattpad entirely. Royal Road immediately had more traction and despite the romance I think the rest of the story and series suit Royal Road quite well.

I have, however, learned a hard lesson.

I have been told by people I know who are fellow voracious readers on Royal Road that the trick was posting often, so that’s what I did. Unfortunately, none of us were aware that’s only half the story, so I wasn’t building a following. I was reliably getting 30-60 views per chapter which was great for getting rid of the feeling of writing to a void, but it wasn’t growing the way a novel on Royal Road needs to in order to build a sustainable audience because I wasn’t providing chapters with the appropriate word count. Posting 1k word chapters three times a week was burying my story because each chapter was closer to a taste test for the readers. If longer chapters are what the audience wants, then that’s what I want to provide.

Luckily, relaunching novels isn’t unusual for the platform, so I’ve decided to do a hard relaunch for my series and the other novel I’ve been writing. The “You Were My” series will be posting chapters averaging about 2500 words to Royal Road three times a week starting on July 20th.

What this experience has taught me is that Royal Road is a site built for avid readers and they know it. On the one hand, that makes it an appealing website for serious authors, but on the other hand, it means you need a backlog for the first month that is nearly the word count required for a typical novel, minimum. (Webnovels are about 30-40k words longer than a typical novel.) That’s a pretty significant upfront word count. from what I can tell, that’s part of why relaunching your novel is relatively common on Royal Road- you have the first month of your book to collect the traction your novel will coast on for the rest of its life on Royal Road unless you pull it down and relaunch it.

Interestingly, there’s a similar schedule for Kindle- you apparently get significantly more views the more frequently you publish, with the theoretical ideal posting schedule being one novel every three months (doesn’t need to be part of the same series.) Someone I admire once told me if I could write 10k words a week, I may not become one of the highest paid authors, but I could reliably make a living writing. I now am able to see some of the data behind his words for myself and it’s amazing how true it seems to be- time will tell if it is.

I’m not sure I can recommend this method for everyone, but it looks like the best method for me, even if my current writing speed means I’ll need a break between novels to rebuild a backlog. I have a backlog several months long- and by the end of it I hope to be a significantly faster writer, just as I’ve become through the last two writing challenges I’ve participated in. My current writing speed is about 5k words per week between two books, working on getting it to 6k.

I’ve also launched a Patreon- I don’t expect too much traction with my first series, but it seemed silly not to have one ready when I have a backlog of a little over 50 chapters to offer any really eager readers. If you’re interested, you can view it here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/EdenAstrophel

Thank you to all of you keeping up with my author journey, I hope reading my journey inspires you on yours.

Love,

Eden

PS: If you’re from Royal Road, this is Eden Astrophel officially saying they are attempting to add a fresh “In The End You Were My Hero (You Were My Series)” to Royal Road.