kosamsel
Member
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2025
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Hi! This post is going to be a repository of all the advice I’ve scrounged together for new authors posting on ScribbleHub for the first time (that isn’t just “have a nice cover and post consistently”, haha). Quite a few folks come through the forums looking for advice on getting more readers, and while I am not in any way a ScribbleHub AuthorityTM, I’ve been here and on other sites for a little while now, so hopefully some of this stuff will still be useful!
1. Set your goals, manage your expectations. The very first thing you should do when you’re posting your work online for the first time (on any site, not just SH!) is to articulate to yourself *why* you’re posting. Not just to get readers’ eyes on your work, that’s a given! What kind of audience are you looking for, and what sort of community environment do you want to create? Are you trying to make money? Build a long-term following? How do you want to represent yourself as an author (I.e., your personal brand)? At what point will you consider yourself *happy* as a writer? Being honest with yourself about your goals will save you some frustration down the line.
Once you have some idea of what you want, you need to know what you can reasonably expect. I’m not going to sugar-coat it: on any given webfiction site, the majority of stories are going to garner a modest following at best, and a lot of them will languish in relative obscurity. At the time I’m posting this, there are just over 38,000 stories on SH. Roughly 30,000 of them have 10,000 views or fewer. Around 35,000 have 500 readers or fewer. (If you’d like to check these numbers for yourself, head over to the Read tab, go to Series Finder, click the Advanced button at the top, and play around with inputting different numbers to see what the average for certain metrics are sitewide. You can also do this on RoyalRoad if you post there.)
That should give you an idea of what kind of stats you’re probably going to be looking at for your own story here in the future. Keep in mind that not many stories on SH ever get truly finished (fewer than 5,000 at the time I’m posting), so readers will likely be a bit hesitant to pick up a new story by a new author until there are a decent number of chapters. That number varies from person to person, but most people I’ve seen won’t pick up a new story until it has anywhere from 10-50 chapters, although there will always be exceptions. In other words, don’t be discouraged if your story has a slow start; it’s not necessarily an accurate predictor of how it will perform in the long run.
SH doesn’t really have a single global numeric ranking system for its stories. If you want to know how you’re doing overall, your best bets are to check your Tag rankings (found on your statistics page) and your Series Ranking, especially on Rising (found under the Read tab).
So, setting aside raw numbers, what can you expect from your first few months?
In most cases, if you post consistently (at least once a week, though a lot of people aim for more than that), you should see a slow, gradual uptick in your readers and engagement over time. I can’t give you a benchmark for this because, uh… idk how LOL, but you’ll probably get an idea within your first 25 or so chapters of what your story’s outlook is going to be. Important note: this is NOT a hard rule, some stories don’t see success until 50+ chapters, so don’t give up just because you’ve hit chapter 25 and you don’t have the numbers you want yet, especially if you posted those 25 chapters in a short time frame! But, in the name of transparency, I can’t guarantee that there will be some magical number you’ll hit and see your story suddenly take off either. I think 25 chapters is a good middle-of-the-road number, far enough in that you should be at least starting to gain a bit of traction.
Now, to close this out, I want to quickly add that genre plays a huge part in visibility! Many of ScribbleHub’s most popular stories are adult-themed, and tags like girl’s love, harem, gender bender, cultivation, and smut are usually the heaviest hitters. That doesn’t mean you can’t post anything else here! It just means that you might have an easier time attracting readers who come to SH to find those sorts of stories, just like RoyalRoad attracts readers of LitRPG.
2. The advice part. This is actually going to be much shorter, because… well, your options for actively promoting your work on SH are pretty narrow. There are a few key pieces of advice you’ll see all over the forums, and I’ll repeat them here: build a backlog of chapters before you start posting, establish a posting schedule and stick to it, try to use an eye-catching cover, and encourage reader engagement by asking specific questions at the end of a chapter, creating polls, responding to comments, and by asking for feedback directly.
I would strongly advise you DON’T post on the forums to advertise your work. It’s not against the rules or anything, but most readers on SH don’t come here to find something new to check out. The forums have a reader section, but really, most people who post here frequently are other writers.
Your best friends, in terms of visibility, are the New Series and Latest Updates tabs. You can take advantage of the New Series buff by posting every day for the first week or two. DON’T upload your entire backlog in one day. For one, you’ll lose out on consistent Latest Update appearances, and for two, mass updates generally get your story “muted” by the algorithm to prevent you from spamming and gaming the system. Most of your views will come on update days, naturally, and you’ll usually pick up a few readers per update once you build momentum.
On the subject of Discord and Patreon, this is another scenario where a few stories earn the lion’s share of attention. Don’t expect to build a massive outside community or earn big money. It can happen! It’s just rare. You’re far more likely to end up with a handful of regular readers and maybe a couple of consistent Patreon supporters if you’re lucky. Engaging that sort of audience takes time, luck, and proven diligence. Most people don’t want to make a financial commitment to a story that’s likely to be dropped, so if you’re in this for profit and for the long run, do make an effort to treat this just like a job and provide consistent offerings.
And… that’s all from me, I think! I’ll update this post if anything else comes to mind, but for now, happy writing!
1. Set your goals, manage your expectations. The very first thing you should do when you’re posting your work online for the first time (on any site, not just SH!) is to articulate to yourself *why* you’re posting. Not just to get readers’ eyes on your work, that’s a given! What kind of audience are you looking for, and what sort of community environment do you want to create? Are you trying to make money? Build a long-term following? How do you want to represent yourself as an author (I.e., your personal brand)? At what point will you consider yourself *happy* as a writer? Being honest with yourself about your goals will save you some frustration down the line.
Once you have some idea of what you want, you need to know what you can reasonably expect. I’m not going to sugar-coat it: on any given webfiction site, the majority of stories are going to garner a modest following at best, and a lot of them will languish in relative obscurity. At the time I’m posting this, there are just over 38,000 stories on SH. Roughly 30,000 of them have 10,000 views or fewer. Around 35,000 have 500 readers or fewer. (If you’d like to check these numbers for yourself, head over to the Read tab, go to Series Finder, click the Advanced button at the top, and play around with inputting different numbers to see what the average for certain metrics are sitewide. You can also do this on RoyalRoad if you post there.)
That should give you an idea of what kind of stats you’re probably going to be looking at for your own story here in the future. Keep in mind that not many stories on SH ever get truly finished (fewer than 5,000 at the time I’m posting), so readers will likely be a bit hesitant to pick up a new story by a new author until there are a decent number of chapters. That number varies from person to person, but most people I’ve seen won’t pick up a new story until it has anywhere from 10-50 chapters, although there will always be exceptions. In other words, don’t be discouraged if your story has a slow start; it’s not necessarily an accurate predictor of how it will perform in the long run.
SH doesn’t really have a single global numeric ranking system for its stories. If you want to know how you’re doing overall, your best bets are to check your Tag rankings (found on your statistics page) and your Series Ranking, especially on Rising (found under the Read tab).
So, setting aside raw numbers, what can you expect from your first few months?
In most cases, if you post consistently (at least once a week, though a lot of people aim for more than that), you should see a slow, gradual uptick in your readers and engagement over time. I can’t give you a benchmark for this because, uh… idk how LOL, but you’ll probably get an idea within your first 25 or so chapters of what your story’s outlook is going to be. Important note: this is NOT a hard rule, some stories don’t see success until 50+ chapters, so don’t give up just because you’ve hit chapter 25 and you don’t have the numbers you want yet, especially if you posted those 25 chapters in a short time frame! But, in the name of transparency, I can’t guarantee that there will be some magical number you’ll hit and see your story suddenly take off either. I think 25 chapters is a good middle-of-the-road number, far enough in that you should be at least starting to gain a bit of traction.
Now, to close this out, I want to quickly add that genre plays a huge part in visibility! Many of ScribbleHub’s most popular stories are adult-themed, and tags like girl’s love, harem, gender bender, cultivation, and smut are usually the heaviest hitters. That doesn’t mean you can’t post anything else here! It just means that you might have an easier time attracting readers who come to SH to find those sorts of stories, just like RoyalRoad attracts readers of LitRPG.
2. The advice part. This is actually going to be much shorter, because… well, your options for actively promoting your work on SH are pretty narrow. There are a few key pieces of advice you’ll see all over the forums, and I’ll repeat them here: build a backlog of chapters before you start posting, establish a posting schedule and stick to it, try to use an eye-catching cover, and encourage reader engagement by asking specific questions at the end of a chapter, creating polls, responding to comments, and by asking for feedback directly.
I would strongly advise you DON’T post on the forums to advertise your work. It’s not against the rules or anything, but most readers on SH don’t come here to find something new to check out. The forums have a reader section, but really, most people who post here frequently are other writers.
Your best friends, in terms of visibility, are the New Series and Latest Updates tabs. You can take advantage of the New Series buff by posting every day for the first week or two. DON’T upload your entire backlog in one day. For one, you’ll lose out on consistent Latest Update appearances, and for two, mass updates generally get your story “muted” by the algorithm to prevent you from spamming and gaming the system. Most of your views will come on update days, naturally, and you’ll usually pick up a few readers per update once you build momentum.
On the subject of Discord and Patreon, this is another scenario where a few stories earn the lion’s share of attention. Don’t expect to build a massive outside community or earn big money. It can happen! It’s just rare. You’re far more likely to end up with a handful of regular readers and maybe a couple of consistent Patreon supporters if you’re lucky. Engaging that sort of audience takes time, luck, and proven diligence. Most people don’t want to make a financial commitment to a story that’s likely to be dropped, so if you’re in this for profit and for the long run, do make an effort to treat this just like a job and provide consistent offerings.
And… that’s all from me, I think! I’ll update this post if anything else comes to mind, but for now, happy writing!
