Making a living off writing stories

[JayMark]

I'm an outsider from the acting biz, so correct me if I am wrong: but isn't Royal Road the exact definition of a vanity press? I know that in the book world you have these predatory publishers who prey on a dream and will let you publish a book, but you gotta pay dues outta your face until you are blue (adverts on the site) just to even get a shot at stardom. You are paying overpriced fees for what is essentially a fancy book binding, which would be better served by hosting your own website because its about to get around the same traffic as it would without the ads: pretty close to zero.

I really don't like pay-to-win schemes, played too much bad gacha to want to deal with this kind of stuff, so the whole idea of a vanity press, but gacha really rubs me the wrong way too.

They make their search features insanely difficult to use. Mid-list fiction is immpossible to find. Try to find anything not advertised, not on rising stars, not updated in the last two minutes, or not on the front page and you are out of luck.

 

[PancakesWitch]

Friendly reminder to everyone involved that the webnovel contracts prevent authors from saying anything disparaging about webnovel, so any posts promoting it from people actively using it cannot give you potential downside information. Further, webnovel is funded by the Chinese Communist Party, and disputes must be handled in chinese courts.

I dont really care about international politics, so Webnovel being a branch from the Chinese Tencent doesnt matter. I have talked about the things that I dislike about webnovel many times, and nobody has come knocking at my door about it after all these years. Unless you literally live in China, they cannot do anything to you.
You can see Webnovel Authors themselves constantly complaining about webnovel in their own forums too, and they dont really do anything to them, you're probably paranoid about chinese things in general.
Being a Webnovel Author doesnt suddenly turn you into a secret agent of the CCP, its just a page where you post novels and sell chapters...
I know you won't listen to any of this and continue believing your made up reality, but I hope other people that read this aren't influenced by your misinformation.
Honestly, I wouldnt invite anybody to become a webnovel author because none of you can handle posting daily chapters either way, and if you dont have that ability you cannot really succeed there.

 

[DaScoot]

I'm an outsider from the acting biz, so correct me if I am wrong: but isn't Royal Road the exact definition of a vanity press? I know that in the book world you have these predatory publishers who prey on a dream and will let you publish a book, but you gotta pay dues outta your face until you are blue (adverts on the site) just to even get a shot at stardom. You are paying overpriced fees for what is essentially a fancy book binding, which would be better served by hosting your own website because its about to get around the same traffic as it would without the ads: pretty close to zero.

I really don't like pay-to-win schemes, played too much bad gacha to want to deal with this kind of stuff, so the whole idea of a vanity press, but gacha really rubs me the wrong way too.

This is entirely incorrect about Royal Road. You do not pay anything to post on Royal Road, Royal Road does not do any publishing, it has nothing in common with any sort of vanity press.

Royal Road and ScribbleHub are virtually identical except for the amount of traffic, the visual design, and the fact that RR has harsher rules against smut stories.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

This is entirely incorrect about Royal Road. You do not pay anything to post on Royal Road, Royal Road does not do any publishing, it has nothing in common with any sort of vanity press.

Royal Road and ScribbleHub are virtually identical except for the amount of traffic, the visual design, and the fact that RR has harsher rules against smut stories.

Except Royal Road does have "sponsored memberships" which IS a "pay to play" mechanic. If you don't win a sponsorship in a contest or pay for one, you will get buried in the site unless someone searches specifically for you or for your work.
It is a little easier to search for an author and find their works due to the way the forums are set up on RR, but only a little.

 

[aToTeT]

Any suggestions (that don't involve writing porn) on how I can make enough money writing stories to live comfortably off of it?

You took the best solution right out of my mouth and said you didn’t want it.

No, but really: there are no easy answers to the question of ‘how do I make money with art?’

No matter the form, no matter the method: there are no guarantees of success.

I do not even see the point in offering an option for ‘authorial support dollars’ (might as well be pennies at this point) unless I grow a base of readers so big that it begins to actively ask me for such a thing.

Which is fine; writing isn’t my ‘I will make money doing this’ thing; it is my ‘I could not stop if I wanted to’ thing, and trying to hold the word-vomit in just makes me sick.

I watch a variety of YouTube videos to argue with myself: to better my writing; most of the channels about the subject are writing ‘Gurus’ with an unhidden financial incentive for you to buy in — and maybe many of them are also worth that money, I cannot say; but what I can very much say is that those with the explicitly free advice tend to offer some of the best advice when it comes to improvement itself.

I’ve seen some interesting paths revealed in such videos, self publish, traditional publish, even numbers; strategies and tactics that failed and sometimes seemed to work…

But the issue with me rattling off some fated, certain method for success… is that there appears to be no such thing.

I do think you should be cautious of the man who tells you he has all the answers, and I think you should not be to appreciative of those unwilling to grandstand on answers speaking from the very opposite of authority.

But what do I know? I hope success finds you in a manner comfortable and very holistic to your writing-nature.

 

[HouseDelarouxScribbles]

This is entirely incorrect about Royal Road. You do not pay anything to post on Royal Road, Royal Road does not do any publishing, it has nothing in common with any sort of vanity press.

Royal Road and ScribbleHub are virtually identical except for the amount of traffic, the visual design, and the fact that RR has harsher rules against smut stories.

But that's not true from what I know... Please allow me to speak, In the acting business, there are three things that a promotion needs to survive. Content, distribution, and finance. Content and finance are analogous to the webnovel writer and patreon. This is easy to understand. The way that webnovels are 'distributed', or reach the attention of their potential readers are through websites that allow for fair and equal 'distribution'. These sorts of websites cannot be 'publishers', because there is little to no favoritism in who gets 'distributed', or has more eyeballs on a story.

The moment that you step into the realm of putting up ads, and really bad ones to boot, you will have to favor one side or a type of story to gain what limited attention there is on a distribution pipeline. Attention is a limited resource. Otherwise, there would be no meaning to a 'distribution'' pipeline, and everyone would be magickally directed to the webnovels we like. But we don't live in that sort of world. Therefore, a distributor who actively takes a hand in favoring, promoting, and doing 'unequal distribution' is indeed a 'publisher', because the business model of the distributor has a monetary (conflict of interest) gain in promoting those who hand it money (through ads) over other readers.

While I understand there may be many variations of bad publishing practices, and perhaps that is where the confusion lies, but a vanity press is a distributor that does not have the best interests of its client at heart. You might be confused because you think of a singular type of scam where the vanity press asks for money upfront, and I completely understand, but I contend that a distributor that asks for money to do its job of distributing through paying for advertisements on the distribution website is a kind of vanity press. The logical end of such a system is that it has now gone into the business for itself, and its business is the promotion of 'established' authors who pay into the system.

Therefore, the closest analogy would be a pay-to-win gacha game, which is run on the same model. Just because there are many free users doesn't mean it is not a pay-to-win. Or in the more crass sense from my world, there is a world of difference between actors who have worked the stage, and actors who have worked the casting couch. I refuse to elaborate. (chadgrin.jpeg)

Therefore, since one site is in the business of 'unequal distribution', and one site is not, would you not say that there is a fundamental difference in design philosophy and that your view might be incorrect?

Dou, this level of understanding is possible for Fxxxxx Exxxx. What do you think, everyone?

 

[beast_regards]

I'm an outsider from the acting biz, so correct me if I am wrong: but isn't Royal Road the exact definition of a vanity press? I know that in the book world you have these predatory publishers who prey on a dream and will let you publish a book, but you gotta pay dues outta your face until you are blue (adverts on the site) just to even get a shot at stardom. You are paying overpriced fees for what is essentially a fancy book binding, which would be better served by hosting your own website because its about to get around the same traffic as it would without the ads: pretty close to zero.

I really don't like pay-to-win schemes, played too much bad gacha to want to deal with this kind of stuff, so the whole idea of a vanity press, but gacha really rubs me the wrong way too.

Not exactly.

The Royal Road is the mix of several features designed to make money, very profitable for the site, and very counterintuitive for the writer in question.

Only practical difference between them and Webnovel is that Webnovel is pay to read as well.

Vanity presses are (unless very scummy) quite predictable. You pay them money; they print you a book. Selling the book is your problem, so you will end up with loss, but they don't own your book (unless very scummy) and usually deliver what they promised (fancy binding)

They have features like the vanity press would have, like overpriced fees for the book visibility, which they are then turned against you through their algorithm which has nothing to do with the books at all, and instead works more similar to the Facebook or the Twitter. The RR might have taken your money for the book, but they aren't under any obligation to show it to anyone. They are fuelled by conflict, with all their reviews, and down votes, and boting, and general hateful attitude, so your book (visibility of which you paid for) is burried and all but destroyed. The search features are bugged, the lists are dominated by the cartel arrangement between the writers, and rules are turned against you...

They could even copy your work to other sites and sell the rights to your own story to third party...

If you imagine Amazon as government, then COTEH is the mob, and the RR are crooked cops taking money from both sides while running protection racket on their own.

 

[Aijikan]

You can write porn?
I thought we were just supposed to watch it and do some heavenly movements?

 

[ConansWitchBaby]

Romance

 

[Crownfall]

If you imagine Amazon as government, then COTEH is the mob, and the RR are crooked cops taking money from both sides while running protection racket on their own.

I'm an outsider from the acting biz, so correct me if I am wrong: but isn't Royal Road the exact definition of a vanity press? I know that in the book world you have these predatory publishers who prey on a dream and will let you publish a book, but you gotta pay dues outta your face until you are blue (adverts on the site) just to even get a shot at stardom. You are paying overpriced fees for what is essentially a fancy book binding, which would be better served by hosting your own website because its about to get around the same traffic as it would without the ads: pretty close to zero.

I really don't like pay-to-win schemes, played too much bad gacha to want to deal with this kind of stuff, so the whole idea of a vanity press, but gacha really rubs me the wrong way too.

Royalroads advertisement CTRs are straight up mythical in terms of the value they can provide, well designed advertisements that are targeting follower gain and not CTR can ROI within a month and even straight up double investment especially now that ads last so long. Royalroad is absolutely not a "gacha" system; well written fics that understand the core wants of the audience and deliver it will make money.

If you run ads on a fic no one wants to read, well, the saying in COTEH is that the best marketing in the world will only get a reader to your first page.

As the landscape of the site has shifted with ad burn rate slowing and price going up the system has actually tilted more heavily in favor of the most skilled authors on the site; its possible to pull hundreds of followers from a single advertisement for what I would consider median authors now.

But I SUCK at writing litrpgs ?

The first step to being good is being bad