Should I jump the gun?

[PBJ_Time]

Should I publish my draft now? Both here and on Royal Road? I have 20 chapters written already, but only 6 of them are even fairly intelligible thanks to Grammarly and many nights of revisions. It's why my draft feels so little at the moment whenever I ask for feedback, and why the latest revised chapter on my Google Doc is always incomplete.

My initial plan was to save enough money for an ad campaign on Royal Road that would last me a month or so, but I realized doing it the "wrong way" won't get you any more traction than a story that has no campaign. It could be the ad is vague or the synopsis turns out to be uninteresting.

Other stories just start with no promotion whatsoever a la Super Supportive, but as soon as it gets popular enough, they start a patreon. Hell, I've seen stories go up the "Rising Stars" very quickly just by doing a few review swaps.

The most successful campaign I've seen on the site is when the ad links directly to the first chapter, coupled with the synopsis on the author's notes section. It ensures that you'll always get views and potential readers who probably won't drop your story anytime soon.

I understand quality and proper formatting is what really matters in all this (besides riding the trends), but it's kinda scary to me how I could just spend $200 on ads and never gaining as much as twelve more followers.

I've set up a Ko-Fi because I don't want people to see my real name via PayPal, and I can't for the life understand why they won't let me change it despite me waiting 3 business days every time. It sucks bad.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I'm considering getting a pre-paid debit card for these things. Supposedly, most of them work the same as a bank account, even having routing numbers and such.

And I would suggest waiting until you have five chapters you are happy with and posting them all on one site one day, the other the next, then see where it goes.

 

[Tyranomaster]

You need to sit down an evaluate your business practices, and potentially the actual viability of what you're doing. First and foremost, don't just "Publish a bunch of chapters". Schedule, schedule, schedule. Readers want consistency. You want those 21 chapters to come out daily, and then have 2-4 chapters coming out a week after that.

I've run two ad campaigns on RR, and both were ONLY when I thought they'd recoup my costs (they did). Spending a bunch of money on a "maybe it'll work" is practically gambling. 95% of stories fall flat on their face. Many, MANY of the RR campaigns that are run for "new" stories that do well are a new story by an established author, not actually a brand new story. The ones that don't do well are pretty much people just spending money to get readers, but never recoup their costs, because people don't want to go to their patreon.

My advice, make sure everything is good first. Get your ducks in a row, and the quality down. Then, if you get patrons on patreon, AND you think you can actually get more readers through an ad campaign, spend the money.

 

[PBJ_Time]

You need to sit down an evaluate your business practices, and potentially the actual viability of what you're doing. First and foremost, don't just "Publish a bunch of chapters". Schedule, schedule, schedule. Readers want consistency. You want those 21 chapters to come out daily, and then have 2-4 chapters coming out a week after that.

I've run two ad campaigns on RR, and both were ONLY when I thought they'd recoup my costs (they did). Spending a bunch of money on a "maybe it'll work" is practically gambling. 95% of stories fall flat on their face. Many, MANY of the RR campaigns that are run for "new" stories that do well are a new story by an established author, not actually a brand new story. The ones that don't do well are pretty much people just spending money to get readers, but never recoup their costs, because people don't want to go to their patreon.

My advice, make sure everything is good first. Get your ducks in a row, and the quality down. Then, if you get patrons on patreon, AND you think you can actually get more readers through an ad campaign, spend the money.

So, I should just do what Super Supportive's author did, then. I remember them deleting a bunch of other stories under their belt that never pulled through, and they only hit big by simplifying their synopsis and prose and doing shout-outs.

 

[melchi]

Depends on how much you got ready. The author for he who fights with monsters had 80k words in the backlog before he even started posting.

 

[Tyranomaster]

Order of importance in writing:

1. Story (Is the story interesting. This encompasses the premise and enjoyability of reading.)
2. Readability (This covers prose, writing quality, grammar, spelling, etc.)
3. Discoverability (This is about all forms of discoverability. Advertising, shout outs, proper tagging, etc.)

Basically, You really want to focus on one and two first, then you can think about three, but three is very important. Basically, if the story seems boring on it's face, then people stop at 1. If it's riddled with errors, or too complicated, people stop at 2. Getting eyes on your story is good! Paying for eyes on your story before you are confident in your story's quality is bad. It'll be double discouraging because of the lost money.

See this link for a rundown I did a while ago on this forum for getting readers.

 

[ScarletWeeb]

Should I publish my draft now? Both here and on Royal Road? I have 20 chapters written already, but only 6 of them are even fairly intelligible thanks to Grammarly and many nights of revisions. It's why my draft feels so little at the moment whenever I ask for feedback, and why the latest revised chapter on my Google Doc is always incomplete.

My initial plan was to save enough money for an ad campaign on Royal Road that would last me a month or so, but I realized doing it the "wrong way" won't get you any more traction than a story that has no campaign. It could be the ad is vague or the synopsis turns out to be uninteresting.

Other stories just start with no promotion whatsoever a la Super Supportive, but as soon as it gets popular enough, they start a patreon. Hell, I've seen stories go up the "Rising Stars" very quickly just by doing a few review swaps.

The most successful campaign I've seen on the site is when the ad links directly to the first chapter, coupled with the synopsis on the author's notes section. It ensures that you'll always get views and potential readers who probably won't drop your story anytime soon.

I understand quality and proper formatting is what really matters in all this (besides riding the trends), but it's kinda scary to me how I could just spend $200 on ads and never gaining as much as twelve more followers.

I've set up a Ko-Fi because I don't want people to see my real name via PayPal, and I can't for the life understand why they won't let me change it despite me waiting 3 business days every time. It sucks bad.

Do an ad campaign once you have published at least all of those twenty chapters, potential readers will drop a follow and never come back if they only see like six chapters.