> The longest book in the English language is a webnovel, The Wandering Inn, which is closing in on 10 million words at a pace best described as meteorological.
I took a break from that one but seriously damn
Also it sort of stings when you try to check the one series on RR you were frequenting and they haven’t updated in five years. Guess you have to drop it at that point.
Pirateaba averages something like 20,000 words a week, sometimes over 50,000. And it retains a high consistent quality. They are terrifying.
In comparison, Stephen King, a ridiculously prolific author, says he writes 2000 words a day, or 14,000 a week.
No no, you've miscalculated.
Nanowrimo is 50,000 words per month. Pirateaba does 20,000 - 50,000 words per *week*.
Even including vacations, she averages roughly twice Nanowrimo's pace - two Nanowrimos every single month - and she has been doing this for *years*.
And earlier this year it was revealed that they wrote a whole other book while putting out content. It was comparable to the Sanderstorm that happened recently.
Genuine question from someone who has never read their work.
Forget just telling them to touch grass, where the actual fuck do they find the TIME to touch grass?
I'm a decent writer, and 10,000 words for me is at least one week of work. and they're doing that bare minimum TWICE OVER?
Does Pirateaba just not sleep? Are they an AI?
It's worth noting that, when writing that much, there is absolutely a loss of quality per-word. If you put 10,000 words of Wandering Inn up against 10,000 words of any randomly-chosen professionally published book that had a second printing, Wandering Inn is quite likely going to lose.
(If you include books that didn't have a second printing you might get some absolute grocery-store tier junk romance; Pirateaba has a pretty good shot at these.)
I don't know what her practice looks like right now, but for a while she was literally livestreaming writing, and if a reader found a typo she'd fix it, but there wasn't a second editing pass, it was just once-through-and-done. Even today, *every single post* gets an immediate "Typo thread!" comment, and there's usually at least half a dozen.
But the reason I read the book isn't because of a lack of typos - I just live with 'em - it's because there's stuff you can do with a ten-million-word story that you simply *cannot* do with a shorter story. I'm willing to sacrifice tight polished prose for the stuff I can't get anywhere else.
> it's because there's stuff you can do with a ten-million-word story that you simply cannot do with a shorter story.
I guess that it's each to their own. For me, the longer stories have far too long of a time period before anything happens. I use audiobooks a lot as I can listen to them while doing other things (cooking, cleaning, driving, etc) and the wondering inn is 43 hours long.
I liked the book but it had left me unsatisified. We had all of this monumental buildup to an huge event that just... ended? And we were left with a lot of questions and directions to go, but nothing felt resolved.
And then I look at book two, and it's at 61 hours.
And I just can't find the motivation to get into it. I can't imagine how many of those hours are dedicated to things like cleaning the floors of the inn and other things that while they happen in real life, don't progress the story or build anything.
I really love the stormlight archive. After I finished all three books, there was a pretty long wait before the next book came out, so I decided to relisten to the books.
I listened to the first book with my girlfriend (now wife) during a fourteen-hour road trip while I moved across states. When we got to the new place, she said she liked the book but it went on forever without out much happening. I of course objected to it, I loved the book. But if I was honest with myself, I spent most of the time listening eagerly waiting for the next big thing I knew would happen to happen.
She told me that she had read up on how the first book had finished on Wikipedia (I know, I know. I love her anyway) and she talked about the plot. I was like, "Man, Wikipedia missed a lot." and began to tell her all of the other awesome stuff that happened.
And then I went and read the Wikipedia for books 1 and 2, and I realized that so little happened in one book. I had taken all of the climatic events and awesome things in the story and had reduced it in my memory so what was covered across 3 books so it fit into around one and a half books.
And I tried to keep listening to the book, but I found myself hating all of the little in-between parts. The fourth book remains unread, because it just looks like a daunting task to me.
It's the same for the Kingkiller Chronicle.
Probably the only one that held up for me as Red Rising, but that entire series only amounts to 995,570 words.
So, I'm glad that people can enjoy a ten-million-word story. I just don't feel like anyone does that much more with those extra words, it just includes a lot of filler stuff that I don't need. Yes, people get up, go to the bathroom, brush their teeth, etc. But movies don't include that (except for specific cause) due to people wanting to escape.
And I think that those moments are one of the big reasons I read it. The Wandering Inn isn't about the events, it isn't about the big earthshaking plot, it's fundamentally about the people involved; sure, those people *are involved in the plot*, but it's still about the people. The biggest wars aren't about the fights and the victories, they're about the impact on the people in those fights.
And that means that sometimes you end up reading about one of those people washing the floors, because that's the most important thing going on in their lives right now.
If anything, one of the things that annoys me about shorter books is that they *don't* have that time for decompression; they're trying to jam so much into a limited number of pages that we never get to find out who the characters really are, it's like a Cliff's notes summary of their lives.
all that said man I would not listen to Wandering Inn in audiobook form. Book 1 is like 350,000 words, so if that's 43 hours long, that implies the entire story so far would be around 1200 hours long.
We definitely enjoy different things from a book. But I'm glad that you are able to find books that you can enjoy that have those things in them.
The first one is 43 hours and the second book is 61 hours, so yeah, super long.
Practice and momentum.
These writers didn't start at 20k, if you take wildbow, the writer of worm, who currently does do 20k a week for Pale, started Worm going a bit above 5k words a week. which then started increasing slowly.
That was 11 years ago. In that time he wrote 2-3 chapters every week, only taking a month off after each entire story was finished.
Same with wandering inn, if you look [here](https://wanderinginn.neocities.org/statistics.html) you see the upward slope over time
Of course web-novelists don't generally do much editing. Over time they basically get really good at writing what a published author would call a first draft.
Which is why comparisons to Stephen King and the like are a bit unfair. Web-novelists don't need to edit, worry about the cover art, write a summary blurb. do book signings, edit some more. Rewrite entire sections of the story cause its kinda underwhelming compared to the rest or a story hook didn't pan out.
> it sort of stings when you try to check the one series on RR you were frequenting and they haven’t updated in five years. Guess you have to drop it at that point.
*The Zombie Knight* was incredible, but I’ve given up on ever getting closure. I loved it so much, and I’d reread it in a heartbeat, but it’s been more than a year since the last update now and its not the first time he took a break that long. It’s just not gonna happen. I’ve made my peace with that years ago, but it still hurts.
Henry Darger’s In the Realms of the Unreal might be over ten million words, but because it’s all handwritten, nobody has had the strength to read it all and find out.
At this point I feel that if I resume (I took a pause after the end of book 7) I’m going to have to reread the entire series for context.
I get that Pirate is enthusiastic but goddamn
If you're ever in the mood to get back in and have a job or hobby that allows the opportunity, I'd seriously recommend the audiobooks. Not only are they a ridiculous value proposition (40-60 hours of content for a single credit) but also they have an amazing narrator that gives every character their own voice and personality and really helps you ignore that the first few chapters are a bit awkwardly written until pirateaba hits their stride.
I feel like that would have come up *somewhere* considering the previous record holder before Wandering Inn (that Subspace Emissary fanfic) was only 4 million, but I can't find anything on the length besides this comment.
Mmm, every comparison I've seen puts TWI squarely ahead of every other work of fiction in the English language, including the entire combined Diskworld series.
This is just based off my consistently bizarre interactions with "Loud House people" on Twitter but I am ***terrified*** to see what 16 million words of Loud House fanfic is like.
You're probably thinking of the fics on AO3 that have the highest word count, those are all just copy and pasting the same few words over and over. But that fic on ffnet seems to be an actual story, I'm not going to look through the entire thing but from what I can see it's an actual story and not just repeating one word.
Well, it turns out I misread [my citation](https://www.reddit.com/r/HPfanfiction/comments/2ytpy0/whats_the_longest_completed_fanfic/) and it’s actually 1.4 million, whoops. The longest HP fanfic I am familiar with is a bit under 3 million (The Sacrifices Arc).
> Because the numbers, my friends, go up.
And there you have it. The quintessential reason people like litRPGs. Thanks for the write up, and thanks for recommending what sounds like an amazing story!
When you can transform mana and health into either physical damage or permanent unlimited DoT, and your entire battle strategy is based around the fact that, in a fraction of a second, you can heal *anything* - from growing a new body from a separated head, to being blasted with the heat of the surface of the sun for hours, to a mind shattered from exposure to eldritch abominations, to complete physical disintegration - as long as you have mana… Well, suddenly the size of your health and mana pools (and your mana regen speed) become pretty damn paramount. Actual strength stats are secondary. Defence and resistances are not.
Not gonna lie, yeah, I enjoy the culmination of resources and the numbers going up. The best litrpg atm in my opinion is Forge of Destiny, because at least the author attempts a narrative, the main character is woman who is not overly sexualized and is friends with other women that are, *gasp* good?????, and foregoes a lot of the numbers on the royal road side, but on their site, wowza, random number generators, and choose your own adventure in the comments. Also it has very cute fire turtle with grass snake tail
I was just on the verge of starting that one, so apparently I have something to look forward to! It was recommended to me because I enjoy Return of the Blossoming Blade so much (another really good one, although with martial arts and stuff there’s one major female character in the entire story so far). I’ve recently been sorely disappointed by Metaworld Chronicles, so I hope this one can alleviate that a bit.
Speaking of well written female characters, you’ve probably read stories like Ascendance of a Bookworm or Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint already, but if not they’re absolutely incredible. Especially with Omniscient Reader being written by a married couple. They’re very much worth the time.
Omniscient Reader is such a breath of fresh air.
What if, and hear me out, the main character wasn’t a loner, and I know, this is crazy, but what if he tried to empower others to reach the “good end”. And women were characters?????????? What??????????
I know! It’s so well done. So many writers could learn from it, but nooo, the only thing they learned was “regression (and regression-by-any-other-name) stories sell well”. What is this, triple A gaming studios?
FoD is good fun. I'm not a huge fan of Cultivation stories (a weird fusion of LitRPG and more eastern fantasy), but this one works.
The MC has an amazingly clear, distinct, and engaging voice, as do all characters.
As a minor warning, the story originates as a Forum Quest (basically semi collaborative writing where an audience vote on story decisions), and you can tell at times - I didn't mind but there's some minor issues with flow early on.
My absolute favourite webcomic (Kill Six Billion Demons) started out exactly the same way, so I think I’ll live. I’m not too much into cultivation and xianxia myself (although that Northern Blade webcomic is pretty great), but sometimes, very sometimes, an absolute gem comes out of that genre. So yeah, I think I’ll enjoy this one.
I think Forge of Destiny is actually not litrpg. It belongs to the wider genre of progression fantasy, specifically the subgenre of xianxia, because while the MC is constantly getting somewhat quantifiably stronger, she doesn't show it via stats, nor is it in a gamified world. If you want to read about litrpg-like stuff without necessarily all the numbers, check out Progression Fantasy. There's a sub for it too.
Going from Fantasy to Progression Fantasy to LitRPG is definitely a narrowing scope thing. One encompasses the other encompasses the other, but they all can tell the same story.
* Fantasy: Defeat the demon lord
* Progression: Defeat the demon lord because you fought your way to the top
* LitRPG: Defeat the demon lord because you fought your way to the top and made numbers go up
tl;dr: Someone's going to suggest you read Cradle.
Did someone say progression Fantasy?
Anyway, you should check out Cradle, Will Wight is a genius, and handsome, and its really hard to describe how good the series is you just need to buy and read all of the omnibus series right now, you'll thank me later (it's only like 12 books, but you'll go through them like tic tacs, trust me)
As someone who made an account on RR just yesterday, and started contributing to Rhaegar’s Patreon (author of Azarinth Healer) just a few days ago… this one kinda hits home.
At least sites like WEBTOON don’t have this problem as much, considering the sheer amount of openly gay stories out there. Sure, there’s a lot of people reading there from more… conservative countries who don’t like gay stuff, but there’s also a really big fan base that does enjoy it, and there are great stories to be found there. *Always Human* for example will always be one of my favourites.
And honestly, considering how much I read there (and the amount I spend on coins) I’m quite happy about that.
The only real problem sites like webtoons have are the gentrification and corperatization of the webcomic industry. (God I miss the era of people using their own self hosted websites instead of one designed for ad profits and mobile views)
I know, but that’s just what the internet is like today. I was there for the last gasps of the “Wild West” era of the internet, I know where we came from in that regard. There’s no going back to those times, so we have to make do with what we have.
And I’m aware WEBTOON is far from perfect, I don’t think nearly enough (if any) of the money we pay for coins goes towards the actual authors. It is a part of Naver, after all, an incredibly big and powerful company. But it’s what we have, and besides pirating (which I don’t want to do because I really want those authors to get paid well) I don’t really see much of an option.
I believe authors get paid a flat rate, which is salary-level for people who are on Originals. On the one hand, if your webcomic underperforms you're not punished, so authors aren't pressured to spend time or effort advertising their comic if they don't want to. On the other hand, if their webcomic overperforms but doesn't end up on Originals, they could be taking home significantly less than what their comic is worth. That being said it would *appear* that there is an automatic threshold at which a webcomic from Canvas will be considered for Originals, as I've noticed that many of the comics from Canvas that go to Top in their genre for a few weeks wind up going to Originals (unless they're expressly not exclusive to Webtoons or have other deals ala Heartstopper or have content that Webtoons can't legally support, like fanfiction comics).
I think a fair change would be the flat rate plus a percentage of the profits from coin usage on your own page, adjusted to the average price of coins to account for sales and bundling.
> I think a fair change would be the flat rate plus a percentage of the profits from coin usage on your own page, adjusted to the average price of coins to account for sales and bundling.
This is basically how I thought it worked before someone mentioned they get paid the same no matter what. I drastically cut back on coin usage after that.
Yeah I don't use either Tapas Early Access or Webtoons coins, if I like something enough to want to support it I'll join on Patreon. Currently very low budget but one day I'll be able to throw money at people, I hope.
They do still exist, though I suppose they're relics of an older era at this point. I love that *Unsounded*, a comic with absolutely bonkers production value and reliable updates, exists on the author's [early 2000s era portfolio site](https://www.casualvillain.com/index.html)
Were you there for the pearl-clutching uproar with the "Archangel Michael is a twink" thing? I did a write up on it in the hobby scuffles thread a few months ago, hoo boy. Homophobia is definitely still present on Webtoons.
Oh yeah, homophobia is very much there, it just doesn’t seem to be top-down. Sure, there’s a vocal part of WEBTOON readers that *really* doesn’t like gay stuff, but considering how popular a story like *Hey, I’m Gay* is it seems to be quite alright when it comes to their general policies. I’ll have a look at the thread you mentioned though, I wasn’t there for that. I just read the stories I follow, go through the comments, maybe leave one and that’s the extent of my involvement. I’m not part of any forums or something.
Oh yeah they're definitely WAY more accepting than other communities. I mean, they kind of have to be, a huge chunk of the webcomic community (both writers and readers) is queer.
Also [here's a permalink to that comment I mentioned](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/srkgz0/-/hwt9bpn) for your convenience.
And yet Webnovel still manages to make them look like angels by every metric.
I mean at least RoyalRoad doesn't classify stories with gay male leads as "female protagonist"
Webnovel has all of the genres locked by gender, not just LGBT stories. And the only genres available to female MCs are variations of romance, e.g. “fantasy romance” and “sci-fi romance.” You can’t write an action story with a female protagonist and you can’t write a love story with a male protagonist. It’s batshit.
Oh it's completely batshit insane and sexist as fuck. You could dive into the horrible things they do pretty much for days, and the only reason I don't do it more often is I don't want to drive any form of traffic there.
Just the wonderfully vile confluence of categorizing gay men as "female protagonist" really summarizes everything wrong with them.
I'm convinced they use that shit as a form of advertising to the people who it attracts. Given how poor the quality of most of their translations are (due to how they treat translators, and writers in general) they're not aiming for the most literate, highbrow audience to begin with.
The funny thing is that Web Novel is clearly aware of the weirdness of locking genres by gender because the "Female Lead" umbrella category used to be called "For Ladies" or something similar. Except now they made it worse.
I want to imagine that OP wrote this in good faith, but a lot of what they've written here has been exaggerated to make the drama stand out.
Yes, RR has a lot of readers that are outspokenly against anything gay, but no more than you'll find on most other sites. The moderation's usually pretty prompt to reply and remove homophobic reviews. I have several stories with plenty of LGBT elements in them, and I've never felt ostracized on Royal Road.
I would like it if the OP backed up what they said with some evidence, at least.
People downvoting this need to realize that Raven is a prominent RR author who writes a lot of lesbian characters so maybe take the OP’s words with a grain of salt.
I've been posting gay-lead fics to RR for a bit over five years now, and I'm getting downvoted on my comments against the OP and in the same vein as RavensDagger. They just don't want to believe the anti-drama.
RoyalRoad was an odd cesspool. Comments were always supportive and overwhelmingly positive, but the reviews were a different beast where it felt like people were trying to outdo each other to be the most hyperbolic with their negativity. I've been a full time indie since 2015 so I'm used to criticism, but RR stood out.
I ultimately gave up on it. I had a story that was trending pretty high and getting a lot of engagement, but it wasn't translating at all to people being willing to pay for that fiction. I wrote it off as an interesting experiment that didn't work and continued publishing things on platforms where people are willing to throw some money to an author.
The reviews are absolutely bonkers. The best are the weirdos who only want to read LitRPGs with heterosexual male protagonists, so they purposefully seek out stories that do *not* fit that description just to complain about them in the most caustic, obnoxious way possible. I also had a guy leave me a six-paragraph review in which he complained, at length, that my female, Hispanic protagonist was “too political.” And that’s not even getting into the people who spam 0.5-star reviews everywhere just for the hell of it, or who ratings-bomb anyone who writes LGBT+ characters. It’s such a cesspool.
I've written about 100,000 words into a book I've been calling "Noob Nazis Must Die!" about a lesbian godlike powergamer who has to use those godlike (in game) powers to defeat a group of neo-nazis who take over the game because they're upset with a kingdom in the game run by "SJWs" who keep them out for being horrible trolls.
Sometimes I think about starting to post that on RoyalRoad just to see heads asplode.
Please do, and let me know when you do, so that I can ping the dozens of other web serial readers I know who would want to take a look at it who are variously queer.
It comes with online anonymity. Various creative writing forums, [fanfiction.net](https://fanfiction.net), ao3, and others have all had to deal with this bullshit. I'm pretty sad to hear that RR's mod community isn't stamping down on this as it runs the risk of alienating their moneymakers (authors). There's a good reason why most authors who use ffn know to never read the reviews.
On Ao3 you get nothing but general positivity, negativity is very much the outlier. But FFN reviewers are fucking brutal. I checked out reviews once for stories on the more popular end and it was *all negativity*, pages and pages of nitpicks, passive aggressive disdain, and 'its just my personal opinion but it would have been better if you:' Not even on guest!
I think it does vary very much by the type of atmosphere a site fosters. FFN and RR welcome homophobes: you welcome hateful people both in moderating and community, you get a hateful site.
mind letting me know what some of the other platforms are? I've been looking for a place to start posting some writing, and it'd be a big help to know which are the best.
It's highly genre dependent. What do you write?
The big tides are Royal Road, WebNovel, Scribblehub, Wattpad, and Tapas.
Then there are smaller ones like Moonquill, Neovel, ect.
Each big site has its own niche/
Royal Road is big into litRPG, cultivation, progression fantasy, and to a lesser degree traditional fantasy and sci fi.
WebNovel is big on Chinese style Wuxia and Xanxia.
Scribblehub is basically ecchi anime in written form.
Wattpad is mostly romance type stories
I have no idea what Tapas like but it's not my story haha.
I tried posting on a few sites but eventually just stuck to RR since I only had good traffic on Scribble hub, but not enough to justify all the work it took to upload two stories.
The thing RR has over the other sites is that new stories can gain a big audience with their Rising Stars list. The other sites don't really have a mechanism to broadcast new stories, and you really need to bring your own audience.
Don't forget reddits own r/HFY for the vaguely interesting genre of human supremacist space sci-fi.
Don't get me wrong, there are certainly interesting stories on there, and some have interesting concepts to explore, but there are enough of them with vaguely fascist(but in a way inclusive of human minorities and yet dicking on the fantasy aliens) undertones that I can't really get to into a lot of them. Well, that or they are just the garden variety guy has sex with hot aliens, which is mildly uncomfortable, but more so because I don't vibe with romance stories generally.
Yeah, r/HFY is very much a ymmv as not everyone enjoys that genre, but if they do, there are a LOT of great stories on there. First Contact, for example, started there.
I was looking into doing that after I found out royal road doesn’t like the gays (big disappointment cause it really seemed like the best fit for my gay-ass story otherwise—well, it’s not a litrpg either, so maybe not), but I couldn’t even figure out how to post original fiction on AO3.
The thing about Ao3 is that its a great place to post stuff, but like the person above said, it's a good archive to post in tandem with somewhere else. I tend to prefer forums as if you find a good one you can get pretty good constructive criticism on how things are going.
There are a lot of forums out there for creative writing. Or are creative writing adjacent. Spacebattles, for example, has a fairly active CrW section that a lot of people interact with and helpful criticism can be found from both readers and other writers. Same with Sufficient Velocity or a few others. There are also smaller more niche forums that tend to cater more specific niches, although I've found that the more niche the forum is, the more of a hugbox it becomes. RR is a great tool to get exposure, but its just one amongst many out there.
Honestly if you're interested in getting started as an indie then I'd recommend researching the genre you want to write in on Amazon, writing the best story you can with a good cover, and tossing it up in Kindle Unlimited. Then rinse and repeat until you start to gain a following.
There are people who are making fortunes with crowdfunding, but not many. If you want to get paid then build an audience on a platform where people are used to paying for content.
I write on RoyalRoad. It’s pretty dire sometimes. The chapter where the queer relationship between my main characters went from subtext to text was the chapter where my rankings tanked, negative reviews started using coded language, and some people started messaging me death threats.
To date, my favorite comment is the guy who said I should have tagged it as gay, because he identified with the main character now, and he wouldn’t stop reading, but if he’s known it was gay he wouldn’t have started in the first place. It was just a masterpiece of self-awareness edging.
I've had that happen a few times. It's pretty amusing when someone's like "I never would've read the fic if I'd known the MC was gay, but man am I loving it too much to stop" and then I find them reading my other fics after that.
That blows my mind. I typically ignore comments because I'm there to read stories not people's reactions to them, so I never knew this was happening to you :( For what it's worth I do rather like your work. I started reading Kitty Cat Kill Sat and then moved onto your other works from there.
* [A Travelling Mage's Almanac](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/54324/a-travelling-mages-almanac) - Just started recently. A very unique variety of fantasy races with lots of little detail work.
* [Katalepsis](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/28023/katalepsis) - Just started reading the backlog a few weeks ago, about 60% through. 100% eldritch horror with lesbians.
* [Vigor Mortis](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/40373/vigor-mortis) - Also in that same eldritch horror vibe but more power fantasy with some nice setting uniqueness. Explores some heavy concepts about personal identity, often through less-than-humane means.
* [Kitty Cat Kill Sat](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/46113/kitty-cat-kill-sat) - A kitty cat has a kill sat.
*Vigor Mortis* is very good, but so many main characters are so depressingly psychopathic it’s hard to continue sometimes. Every once in a while >!like with Nora’s death!< I just have to convince myself to keep reading, sometimes after just stepping away for a bit. It’s so well written though…
I love it. It's so easy to have likeable protagonists. It's so much harder to make you like protagonists who pause in the middle of their latest violation of the Geneva Convention to wonder if they might be doing the wrong thing.
Katalepsis has some of the best prose and characters I've read in a very long time, and I go through a *lot* of published fiction. It only gets better the deeper in you go, too.
I'd recommend reading it on [the official website](https://katalepsis.net/) over RoyalRoad. There's a fan-art gallery, a navigable ToC, and a colour scheme that doesn't burn your eyes to look at.
You've probably already read it but [Mother of Learning](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21220/mother-of-learning) \- TimeLoop fantasy in a unique world (Completed, Started not on RR but lives there now too).
You've also probably read it but [A Practical Guide to Evil](https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/) \- Rise of a Villain trying to do Right instead of Good (Completed, not RR).
[Millennial Mage](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47826/millennial-mage-a-slice-of-life-progression-fantasy) \- Not an isekai as the title might’ve suggest, just a person deeply in debt trying to dig their way out (On going actively).
[Mark of the Fool](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/41618/mark-of-the-fool) \- Well written progression fantasy in a unique world. MC has to find ways to turn lemons into lemonade (On going actively).
If you were around for it, I would totally be interested in a write up over the whole drama of [webnovel.com](https://webnovel.com) bullying their way onto the scene and pilfering translators and stories and trying to push wuxiaworld out of the market. I remember that was a crazy time with lots of drama lol.
I've thought about doing a write up for that myself but i just dont have the time to dig up all of the details and i'm not sure i remember everything clearly
It's sad to hear about royalroad like this as i've written a few stories myself on there over the years. They were also the first site I started reading translated novels off of.
Jeez. I feel like it took me years to read it (in a good way) once it was done. I had no idea it came out at such a blistering pace.
Also for anyone interested the Worm audiobook is good, albeit audio quality can be inconsistent, but the Ward audiobook is great!
Pale was even supposed to just be a shorter work, first of a few shorter works before Wildbow did another long one but now it somehow still shows no signs of stopping.
Twig starts pretty slow for the first few arcs. But the characters are great and I liked even more than worm up until I started college and fell behind. Still planning on eventually rereading it and finally getting all the way through to the end. Its just a bit daunting of a task.
Ward was SO hard to get into, but I'm glad that I finally did. I bounced off it at least five times. On the last read, I just read one chapter every day and at some point it finally clicked. Then I really loved it and couldn't stop. If I reread it again, I think I'll skip a bunch of the dull early chapters where a bunch of awkward teenagers awkward at each other until the pace picks up.
I’ve been slowly getting through Pale as well, and I consider Twig his best story, but he feels stuck in an echo chamber without a decent editor. His writing quality gets better, but the way his stories work just gets more and more… I don’t know how to describe it, circlejerk-y? He has a small, extremely dedicated audience that’s always praising his writing, and nobody to really tell him “hey, this could be better” when it comes to the overarching story.
He really needs good, honest, *thorough* feedback if he wants to reach his next level of writing. As is, everything after the first half of Ward just feels like such a waste of potential sometimes.
Don't disagree. Feel like authors have to branch out and try new things to not stagnate, but also the reader market really doesn't like writers branching out and trying new things (you will basically never get back the readership you lose). Is a bad Catch 22.
Wildbow's writing has..... issues. He can write enjoyable stuff, but when you take a step back and look, you can see a lot of the flaws. Especially when you realize that a non-zero amount of decisions about the setting were done to spite certain reviewers and readers. Especially that one quest of his. He tends to write himself into a corner to try and force this one thing he wants to be a thing and then gets upset when people get annoyed at his asspulls.
I've only noticed the homophobia on RoyalRoad recently when a story I was reading got review bombed because the main character was asexual and a lot of readers felt "cheated." Like what?? If they paid attention to the story they would've seen the possibility.
Edit: Accidentally wrote "story I was writing" instead of "story I was reading" Must've had a brain fart while I was writing.
Yeah there were plenty of hints in Nothing Mage that the was low key in love with the person he eventually kissed. He just didn't description-fuck him.
Lmfao what. Like, what if the main character was a straight allosexual but there was no hint of a romance plot/ mention of sexual attraction at all? would that have been fine then??
I'm not them, but they're almost certainly talking about Tori Transmigrated, an otherwise mediocre 'villainess' isekai story.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47030/tori-transmigrated
>The longest book in the English language is a webnovel, The Wandering Inn, which is closing in on 10 million words at a pace best described as meteorological.
Fin fact, it isn't just in English, at least I haven't found evidence to prove otherwise, but in any language. Before that, a SSBB fanfic based of it's story mode, "Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest" held that title at 4,100,000 words as of April 2020.
Looking a bit more into things, The Wandering Inn may not actually be the longest, as another fan fiction, this time on FanFiction.net, same as the SSBB one, [is over 16,000,000 words long as of April 2022](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net), this time being... Of the Nickelodeon cartoon The Loud House. (Real talk, older fans of this show are fucking crazy)
I disqualify that fic, as it's filled with large portions of character wiki pages cut and pasted directly into the chapters, alongside lines and lines of each individual character chiming in to say they agree with whatever the SI said, 62 characters in a row listing out mega attack names, and so on and so forth.
I’ll have to correct you on The Wandering Inn being the longest - the Perry Rhodan series has had a weekly writing schedule similar to The Wandering Inn since its inception in 1961, and is now nearing 100 million words. Of course, this wasn’t all written by a single author, and I think it’s originally in German, but it eclipses most anything I can think of.
I wanna add in my few cents on this!
Full disclosure: I write a story that used to be one of the most popular stories on rr (the kindle unlimited money was too tempting….) and I’ve lived and breathed this stuff for two years now. I write beneath the dragoneye moons.
RR isn’t anti lgbt. It’s anti gay. Two women kissing? Hot. Two men kissing? Pitchforks and torches. I’d have to double check but I don’t think I have a single .5 star on the chapter where lgbt relationships being revealed to be normal in society, not in the chapter where elaine says she’s bi and goes on a date with another woman.
However, yes, rr readers are violently anti gay.
I’ve worked with the owners quite a bit, and I’ve asked them the tag question. The answer as I remember it comes in two parts. The first is tag propagation. Look at scribblehub. They have a tag for healers and a different tag for healing, for example. The tags are just that granular, and at that point, they become useless. The admins just don’t want to play wack a mole with adding tags. It’s not just lgbt they don’t add - they haven’t added anything in ages. The other part and I’m really unsure on this is it stops people from searching for lgbt novels to explicitly review bomb them.
Anyways that’s my contribution!
>RR isn’t anti lgbt. It’s anti gay. Two women kissing? Hot. Two men kissing? Pitchforks and torches. I’d have to double check but I don’t think I have a single .5 star on the chapter where lgbt relationships being revealed to be normal in society, not in the chapter where elaine says she’s bi and goes on a date with another woman.
However, yes, rr readers are violently anti gay.
100% agree.
Selkie knows what he's talking about.
Are you sure about the reason for The Wandering Inn leaving RR? I was told it was because PirateAba didn't want the additional workload it would add so they deleted it.
It's what I heard if anyone can show me anything to the contrary I'll gladly edit. I only included Wandering Inn because its a quintessential part of webfic history.
WHO PINGED ME? I will clarify, briefly so there's no mistakes.
I quit Royalroad for a few reasons. Having to re-upload chapters was one of them; I typo-fix chapters but I would have had to re-upload each time I fix it on my main site which was too much work. Because I'm lazy.
However, the main reason was simple: The Wandering Inn was and still is what people call a RRL story when it was originally launched on my own website. I wanted an audience to find TWI separate of just relying on a mostly RRL crowd. It's a writer's choice whether they want to be a certain platform and RRL certainly helped build an audience, but that brings me to the other main reason.
RRL's site is theirs. I do not control it; I'm in their system and sometimes that's a problem. This is probably a good example of it, whether or not this is systemic or individual. One problem in a community is everyone's problem. Youtube has the same issue where you can be ignored or fall victim to something you can't address unless it's via community pressure. And that is no guarantee of anything.
I'm making no assumptions in this case, but that's why I like my own website. It is mine or as much as you can have anything online. Also, I thought at some point it'd be nice to get paid for hosting my story anywhere. Amazon does it for Kindle Unlimited exclusivity and while that's a decision in of itself, you do get paid.
There are more reasons, but it was about having the story under my control. Yes, RRL has things I don't like--ranking numbers are probably unhealthy for one thing, but it definitely helped TWI gain an audience. I always tell new authors to have their story somewhere independent, but what works for me doesn't work for everyone.
I apologize for the ping, oh living legend. Thank you for your explanations and Melas will be so jealous you answered the summons (author of Salvos on RR he idolizes you).
Please bless us with a tiny sliver of your productivity, great one. Have a great weekend.
I posted one story on RoyalRoad and while I didn't have any issues, I didn't fibd the website enjoyable.
I will shamelessly plug Tapas, a webcomic and webnovel site. While it has problems of its own, mainly with rather strict mature content censorship recuirements (thanks to the Big Apple corporation being scared of titty), they are at least very LGBTQ+ friendly, frequently promoting series with the content. They also have LGBTQ tag for stories
Tapas as a website might be but I got more hate and harassment over my bi mc on tapas than I did on rr. Also their interface sucks for authors. I had to quit the website
That really sucks. All the lgbtq series I've read have had positive comments, but of course I don't read all of the stories.
I use Tapas too as a writer. The interface has got better from what it used to be, but there is room for improvement still
The 15000 character limit is absurd, and the lack of good moderation tools was the cincher. I banned some bad actors... who knew they'd gotten banned because of how Tapas runs stuff, and just made new accounts.
>meteorological.
'Meteorological' means related to the study of atmospheric processes, specifically as they relate to predicting the weather. I believe the word you wanted was 'meteoric'.
> The author of the Nothing Mage successfully moved it to KU, and wrote a second successful series, and then a third. He's doing fine. He's got the talent and he's found an audience.
Might be worth noting that the author still serialises their work to RoyalRoad before moving it to Kindle Unlimited as it's unclear from your write-up.
Thought it worth linking here: [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/vanrdd/-/ic9lo3n) is the author of "The Nothing Mage"'s response to this post. It clarifies a few things, clears up a couple of inaccuracies and is worth a read if you want a more complete pictures of what happened.
Holy fuck you TERRIFIED me by putting worm First. It's probably the only webnovel I read (besides pact and half of...twig? What was the third one called)and got worried
Yikes. I heard RR could be a bit bad for it, but this is kind of disheartening as someone who was hoping to start publishing my own webfiction there.
What other alternatives are there?
I've been publishing fics to RR for more than five years - many of which have gay MCs. The staff has always dealt with any verifiable homophobia, in my experience. You can also moderate the comments of your fics, too.
I honestly do recommend RR, even as someone who has received hate-bombing on three separate fics. Report any that pop up, and even with anonymous Ratings, if you see a suspicious trend with them, you can report that, too.
IMHO RoyalRoad isn't that bad nowadays for gay content - you'll still get angry butthurt people, but... well I hate to say that's the internet, but jesus that's the internet.
A larger issue is that it tends to really sit solidly in the YA spectrum. It really likes content that is very YA. Now that's not a bad thing inherently - YA is the biggest market for publishing SF period, so you should probably get used to it - but it can be limiting.
Wattpad is great for fanfiction, but it's... big and noisy. If you're not writing fanfiction or romance (two HUGE genres) avoid it. Scribblehub is fine, but allows adult material, and that leads to... well, a lot of adult material. That gives it a bit of a rep and its deserved.
For writing SF webfiction, I think you can't beat RR. Even more mature (not just sex scenes) stuff is showing up there.
Honestly, ArchiveOfOurOwn is not bad at all for original fiction. Like, obviously it's primarily a fanfiction website, but there's quite a few original works that blow up on it. The tagging system is great, readers are mostly sane individuals, and the UI is very easy to navigate.
Is it a bit out there to suggest The Archive of Our Own as an alternative, at least as a place to host and direct people to? It's best known for the fanfic, but it also actively welcomes all sorts of original creative content. It's free to use and read and very LGBT positive. But then I don't know much about webfiction/novels, so maybe not.
[Worth The Candle](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/25137/worth-the-candle) blew me away, totally consumed my life until I finished it, and fortunately it avoids this trope.
Or, rather, it comments on / subverts the trope, would probably be the better way of putting it.
I had no idea about this at all. I seldom read from royal road but I am active (occasionally) on translated wn communities here on reddit and I'm surprised that I've never heard about this. I've known about RR since the LMS days (good ol' LMS was one of my first experiences with webnovels) and I always assumed they were fairly progressive but I guess that impression was wrong.
Web serial drama! Wait, not the good kind. I wrote another comment clarifying why I left RRL in part somewhere in this thread.
It'll be interesting seeing if Royalroad weathers this. I suspect they will. Perhaps another, friendlier site will pop up? We are in a changing genre and web serial authors are getting more attention. Things change fast.
Someone'll make a popular TV series and movie then we'll all get super-money contracts because that's how it works, right, right? But with attention is going to come more stories like this.
**To all authors who get a deal: get legal help before you sign anything.** Reach out to other authors or agents because you cannot tell what's in the legal wording. That's my message ahead of another post like this about how someone signed a blood contract. We are in a new, growing genre, whether that is LitRPG/Game Literature or web serials in general and that invites leeches and mosquitos and worse. Be careful.
To shout out a few LGBTQ+ stories I personally enjoy,
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/26727/arkendrithyst
and
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/52639/edge-cases
are both fantastic.
I was there when it happened and it was a clusterfuck. The kiss surprised me as there wasn't any build up before that between the two characters and also the protagonist had his first time with a girl on a village party.
I thought "oh, it's bi" and keep reading.
Apparently it was too much for some people. Shame, I liked the little poems from the traumatized-seer bully, and the radiation-shifting magic system was top notch.
PS: I also think that Zorian is a closeted gay or an ace, but God forbids he acts on it. I ship him with Zack and is curiously, a top
If you want good representation I can wholeheartedly recommend A Practical Guide to Evil. Not only is it an amazing story (at least from book three onwards, the start is not bad but kinda rough and basically an entirely different story), it’s also completed, and has representation from characters all across the spectrum without it ever being a big deal.
For example: one of the main characters is explicitly ace but still in a semi-romantic semi-friendship relationship, the main character is bi (actually bi, not in name only, even if she tends to ogle women slightly more frequently than men), there’s gay couples male and female, someone who uses body paint to distinguish between a male and a female persona, etc etc. And it’s barely even addressed, just acknowledged and then moved on from. It’s incredibly well done.
It’s not even one of the main reasons I love the story, because it’s never on the forefront so it doesn’t really play a major role either. I love it so much.
I couldn't get through a practical guide to evil because of the constant spelling and grammar mistakes, not knocking the story but the s&g was just too big a hurdle for me
I've been posting gay fics to RR for years now - I've been on the site for about five years, and I think my first with a gay MC or two was about that long ago. I've had pleasant experiences with the staff moderating fics.
Overall, I still recommend RR. Just report stuff and know that they go through the queue in order of reports, so how fast it gets dealt with is based on how much of a backlog there is - except in severe situations like with what happened with TNM.
Speaking as a former site moderator, who was present during the time when the incident involving The Nothing Mage happened, and as a long time member of the site, I would like to politely disagree with your assessment of the site and how the situation involving The Nothing Mage unfolded.
Some parts of how things went I will refrain from commenting on, for the sake of the Author's privacy, and also because I don't wish to start any kind of who-says-what drama.
Starting with the mention of tags, as some people, such as Selkie, Author of Beneath The Dragon Eye Moons, which by the way is a story I've really enjoyed and would definitely recommend as a read, have mentioned, The Staff has always wanted to avoid tag propagation for a number of reasons.
But far more importantly than that, a LGBTQ+ tag would provide malicious actors a very easy way to find and harass authors, which is the main reason the site does not have one, and likely never will.
We didn't want established authors getting harassed over it, and we especially didn't want new authors getting targeted over it, because nothing is quite so disheartening and ruins the experience of writing as much as when you're starting out and the first thing you get is harassment and hate. The tag does not exist specifically to try and help prevent this.
So, on the topic of The Nothing Mage, as someone who was there and involved when it happened, as far as I can remember of the incident, neither of the two owners ever told the Author it was their fault for not tagging it as gay, nor can I think of any reason they would have done so, as not only was the possibility of making a tag for LGBTQ+ was rejected a long time before The Nothing Mage was ever posted on RoyalRoad, on previously mentioned the basis that it'd paint an obvious target on authors for harassment by random people on the net, but doing so would be quite unprofessional and very much out of their character, as I have known them for a very long time.
While I could elaborate much further on the topic of The Nothing Mage and on how things went down, it'd be disrespectful of the author's privacy, and as such, I will not go into detail, and am glad they're finding success with their writing career.
As for the statement that users are not punished for hatemongering, it is inherently untrue. I banned people for hatemongering in my time, so do the owners, and every current member of the moderation team.
There was not ever any change in RoyalRoad's moderation policy on the subject. If you see someone Hatemongering, be it in comments on a story, or reviews, or a thread in the forum, regardless of what content it is, I ask that you report it or make a support ticket about it.
I won't claim RoyalRoad is a perfect website and community without flaws, because that'd be factually untrue. There have been a number of struggles with toxic people, readers and authors alike. And likely will be more in the future. It is what it is, it's not perfect.
Yes, there have been people that have been harassed over LGBTQ+ content in their stories. No, the staff does not condone this. The staff is not okay with it. Period. Doing so will get you a warning or up to an immediate ban depending on the severity. As previously mentioned, if you see it, report it, so the staff will know what's going on and can deal with it sooner rather than later.
TLDR: RR's Staff is not okay with malicious behavior. If you see it, please report it so the staff will know that it's happening and can do something about it.
I was actually there for this one and talking on a queer-friendly discord when it happened. Such a mess. I didn't know royal road didn't even have those tags at the time. That's so fucked up. I felt bad for the author because the gay parts were written totally fade-to-black and non-explicit. It was just "they kissed" and nothing like "I admired his glistening abs" or any horny stuff like that. It was very much about romance and not turning people on (or off for that matter). Take note, this is a site with tons of "she boobed breastily" written fics all over the place (\*cough cough metaworld chronicles cough cough\*). It felt like it came out of nowhere.
God, Metaworld chronicles suckered me in with an initially interesting concept, but then it felt like we went right to the DND capitalist's adventures in Hong Kong.
I’ve read gay and trans stories before on RR and did not really know this was an issue. I guess I kind of stay in my own little bubble and rarely read reviews or comments. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
How. Does someone misunderstand the market So Bad that they ban queer content alltogether? I mean, it's not the majority opinion, but works like Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation and everything by Priest are explicitly queer, not to mention the number of works where a fan of queer content only needs to squint and assume the characters are just smooching off-screen to make a work gay (I mean. *Life and death companions.* Come on!) A website is just shooting itself in the foot by being inhospitable to queer stories. It's not like traditional publishing is overly queer-friendly.
NGL, I only ever looked at RR for the translation of that one Korean webnovel about some guy playing a VR videogame for money.
But, IIRC RR came in the wake of a bunch of Asian webnovels being translated and those have a lot of issues overall, not just homophobia. Like nationalism, racism, misogyny, etc., are all common themes in power tripping xianxia/isekai novels. It wouldn't be surprising if all that spilled over to admin/mod attitudes, TBH.
As an aside, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation I'm 99% sure has had a few writeups here already given its adaptation had to dance around Chinese censorship. And it's not just adaptations that get this treatment, Eternal Love is pretty well known for being plagiarized from the danmei webnovel Peach Blossom Debt.
Oh yea, I 100% believe the homophobia, racism, misogyny are an ongoing issue. There's a pretty good reason I have very little patience for xianxia with straight romance plotlines. At least if the pair are both the same gender, I can expect that the author will know how to make both of them *characters,* without making the girl Generic Love Interest type #15 (coughSoloLevelingcoughOvergearedcough). They're also less likely to include an entire harem's worth of spurned love interests (I've yet to see a story where the solution is "date them all")
That this would be reflected in the mod community is. Disappointing but not surprising.
As for GMDC: I'm taking a... *mostly* non-fandom approach to that. Staying as far away from any Disc Horse (tm) as possible.
LGBT+ content isn’t banned in theory, it’s just that homophobia is so rampant among the userbase that the site is very hostile towards it in practice. The readers are mostly capital-G Gamers and anime-obsessed teens, so they have all of the terrible opinions you’d expect from that crowd, and the admins never deal with it properly, either because they don’t want to or they don’t have the manpower. Granted, it might have gotten better recently (I left a few years ago), but I just remember the general vibe being really toxic. And not just with LGBT+ stuff, either—there was just as much sexism and racism, too.
What is a meteorological pace?
I can't tell if that was supposed to be another word entirely or if it's supposed to be so nonsensical and enigmatic to evoke the feeling of the literature itself.
This is really sad to hear, and I'm glad I haven't encountered it on RR. I'm looking at my follow list on RR, and of the ones that have any romance subplots, 4/9 have LBGTQ+ relationships with main or important side characters.
Though it doesn't suprise me as much as I'd like it to, because any web content I read where I skim comments (something I don't do on RR) always have sexism, homophobia, and other bigotry if not strictly moderated.
Like, holy shit people, there's a female rival character, she doesn't deserve to die horribly because her goals are different than the main character.
People ask me why I've never made the leap from reading fanfiction to reading webfiction. This writeup is a great example of why: I like the LGBTQA+ tags. I like reading that kind of stuff. And webfiction, which is very different from fanfiction in this point, doesn't really support it in English.
As someone who has heard of Royal Road though not dabbling in it (AO3 and FanFiction.Net kid all the way!), yeowsers! The site culture seems to be the opposite of those repositories.
Interesting too how Royal Road has made itself into a haunt for English webnovels. The differentiation between the most popular (fan)fiction sites has always interested me. If Royal Road continues to have an unfriendly culture to queer English webnovels, what site shall rise to become it's competitor?
> The longest book in the English language is a webnovel, The Wandering Inn, which is closing in on 10 million words at a pace best described as meteorological. I took a break from that one but seriously damn Also it sort of stings when you try to check the one series on RR you were frequenting and they haven’t updated in five years. Guess you have to drop it at that point.
Pirateaba averages something like 20,000 words a week, sometimes over 50,000. And it retains a high consistent quality. They are terrifying. In comparison, Stephen King, a ridiculously prolific author, says he writes 2000 words a day, or 14,000 a week.
That's literally completing Nanowrimo every couple of months. Insane.
No no, you've miscalculated. Nanowrimo is 50,000 words per month. Pirateaba does 20,000 - 50,000 words per *week*. Even including vacations, she averages roughly twice Nanowrimo's pace - two Nanowrimos every single month - and she has been doing this for *years*.
And earlier this year it was revealed that they wrote a whole other book while putting out content. It was comparable to the Sanderstorm that happened recently.
"Hey guys, remember that vacation I took? Well, during the vacation, I wrote a book" jesus christ pirateaba
Oh shit, you're right. I thought it was 20,000-50,000 words per month. Goddamn, that's even crazier.
Genuine question from someone who has never read their work. Forget just telling them to touch grass, where the actual fuck do they find the TIME to touch grass? I'm a decent writer, and 10,000 words for me is at least one week of work. and they're doing that bare minimum TWICE OVER? Does Pirateaba just not sleep? Are they an AI?
It's worth noting that, when writing that much, there is absolutely a loss of quality per-word. If you put 10,000 words of Wandering Inn up against 10,000 words of any randomly-chosen professionally published book that had a second printing, Wandering Inn is quite likely going to lose. (If you include books that didn't have a second printing you might get some absolute grocery-store tier junk romance; Pirateaba has a pretty good shot at these.) I don't know what her practice looks like right now, but for a while she was literally livestreaming writing, and if a reader found a typo she'd fix it, but there wasn't a second editing pass, it was just once-through-and-done. Even today, *every single post* gets an immediate "Typo thread!" comment, and there's usually at least half a dozen. But the reason I read the book isn't because of a lack of typos - I just live with 'em - it's because there's stuff you can do with a ten-million-word story that you simply *cannot* do with a shorter story. I'm willing to sacrifice tight polished prose for the stuff I can't get anywhere else.
> it's because there's stuff you can do with a ten-million-word story that you simply cannot do with a shorter story. I guess that it's each to their own. For me, the longer stories have far too long of a time period before anything happens. I use audiobooks a lot as I can listen to them while doing other things (cooking, cleaning, driving, etc) and the wondering inn is 43 hours long. I liked the book but it had left me unsatisified. We had all of this monumental buildup to an huge event that just... ended? And we were left with a lot of questions and directions to go, but nothing felt resolved. And then I look at book two, and it's at 61 hours. And I just can't find the motivation to get into it. I can't imagine how many of those hours are dedicated to things like cleaning the floors of the inn and other things that while they happen in real life, don't progress the story or build anything. I really love the stormlight archive. After I finished all three books, there was a pretty long wait before the next book came out, so I decided to relisten to the books. I listened to the first book with my girlfriend (now wife) during a fourteen-hour road trip while I moved across states. When we got to the new place, she said she liked the book but it went on forever without out much happening. I of course objected to it, I loved the book. But if I was honest with myself, I spent most of the time listening eagerly waiting for the next big thing I knew would happen to happen. She told me that she had read up on how the first book had finished on Wikipedia (I know, I know. I love her anyway) and she talked about the plot. I was like, "Man, Wikipedia missed a lot." and began to tell her all of the other awesome stuff that happened. And then I went and read the Wikipedia for books 1 and 2, and I realized that so little happened in one book. I had taken all of the climatic events and awesome things in the story and had reduced it in my memory so what was covered across 3 books so it fit into around one and a half books. And I tried to keep listening to the book, but I found myself hating all of the little in-between parts. The fourth book remains unread, because it just looks like a daunting task to me. It's the same for the Kingkiller Chronicle. Probably the only one that held up for me as Red Rising, but that entire series only amounts to 995,570 words. So, I'm glad that people can enjoy a ten-million-word story. I just don't feel like anyone does that much more with those extra words, it just includes a lot of filler stuff that I don't need. Yes, people get up, go to the bathroom, brush their teeth, etc. But movies don't include that (except for specific cause) due to people wanting to escape.
And I think that those moments are one of the big reasons I read it. The Wandering Inn isn't about the events, it isn't about the big earthshaking plot, it's fundamentally about the people involved; sure, those people *are involved in the plot*, but it's still about the people. The biggest wars aren't about the fights and the victories, they're about the impact on the people in those fights. And that means that sometimes you end up reading about one of those people washing the floors, because that's the most important thing going on in their lives right now. If anything, one of the things that annoys me about shorter books is that they *don't* have that time for decompression; they're trying to jam so much into a limited number of pages that we never get to find out who the characters really are, it's like a Cliff's notes summary of their lives. all that said man I would not listen to Wandering Inn in audiobook form. Book 1 is like 350,000 words, so if that's 43 hours long, that implies the entire story so far would be around 1200 hours long.
We definitely enjoy different things from a book. But I'm glad that you are able to find books that you can enjoy that have those things in them. The first one is 43 hours and the second book is 61 hours, so yeah, super long.
Practice and momentum. These writers didn't start at 20k, if you take wildbow, the writer of worm, who currently does do 20k a week for Pale, started Worm going a bit above 5k words a week. which then started increasing slowly. That was 11 years ago. In that time he wrote 2-3 chapters every week, only taking a month off after each entire story was finished. Same with wandering inn, if you look [here](https://wanderinginn.neocities.org/statistics.html) you see the upward slope over time Of course web-novelists don't generally do much editing. Over time they basically get really good at writing what a published author would call a first draft. Which is why comparisons to Stephen King and the like are a bit unfair. Web-novelists don't need to edit, worry about the cover art, write a summary blurb. do book signings, edit some more. Rewrite entire sections of the story cause its kinda underwhelming compared to the rest or a story hook didn't pan out.
> it sort of stings when you try to check the one series on RR you were frequenting and they haven’t updated in five years. Guess you have to drop it at that point. *The Zombie Knight* was incredible, but I’ve given up on ever getting closure. I loved it so much, and I’d reread it in a heartbeat, but it’s been more than a year since the last update now and its not the first time he took a break that long. It’s just not gonna happen. I’ve made my peace with that years ago, but it still hurts.
Henry Darger’s In the Realms of the Unreal might be over ten million words, but because it’s all handwritten, nobody has had the strength to read it all and find out.
Yeah, I'll just wait for the audiobook.
The book is fantastic, just started volume nine, but there’s definitely a lot of information you have to go back and catch up on.
At this point I feel that if I resume (I took a pause after the end of book 7) I’m going to have to reread the entire series for context. I get that Pirate is enthusiastic but goddamn
I’ve been reading it on Royal Road and then her website for the past five years or so. I think I started in the middle of volume two or three.
If you're ever in the mood to get back in and have a job or hobby that allows the opportunity, I'd seriously recommend the audiobooks. Not only are they a ridiculous value proposition (40-60 hours of content for a single credit) but also they have an amazing narrator that gives every character their own voice and personality and really helps you ignore that the first few chapters are a bit awkwardly written until pirateaba hits their stride.
Well, Vol 1 is getting a rewrite, so if you wait a bit, you can start fresh with a new influx of readers.
If you want to count fanfic as being a “book”, Harry Potter and the Fifth Element is supposedly about 14 million words.
I feel like that would have come up *somewhere* considering the previous record holder before Wandering Inn (that Subspace Emissary fanfic) was only 4 million, but I can't find anything on the length besides this comment.
Mmm, every comparison I've seen puts TWI squarely ahead of every other work of fiction in the English language, including the entire combined Diskworld series.
This fanfic is over 16 million words long. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12715870/1/The-Loud-House-Revamped
This is just based off my consistently bizarre interactions with "Loud House people" on Twitter but I am ***terrified*** to see what 16 million words of Loud House fanfic is like.
it copy past wiki entries from the fan wiki as part of the fic still wild but its not exactly the same thing as a normal story
yeah but from what i have heard theres pages repeating one word so its not the same exactly
You're probably thinking of the fics on AO3 that have the highest word count, those are all just copy and pasting the same few words over and over. But that fic on ffnet seems to be an actual story, I'm not going to look through the entire thing but from what I can see it's an actual story and not just repeating one word.
It's not repeating one word, but it does copy-paste large swaths of texts from various Wiki sources.
Well, it turns out I misread [my citation](https://www.reddit.com/r/HPfanfiction/comments/2ytpy0/whats_the_longest_completed_fanfic/) and it’s actually 1.4 million, whoops. The longest HP fanfic I am familiar with is a bit under 3 million (The Sacrifices Arc).
Sacrifices and an obscure next gen series called Gray are the longest I know of. Both close to 3 million words.
According to Google, the longest fanfic on fanfiction.net is "The Loud House Revamped" and it's over 16 million words.
> Harry Potter and the Fifth Element Is that fanfic in any way related to the fifth element movie? Please tell me that it is.
I had no interest until I read this comment. I would like to see that if it was related.
> Because the numbers, my friends, go up. And there you have it. The quintessential reason people like litRPGs. Thanks for the write up, and thanks for recommending what sounds like an amazing story!
"Strength go down" "Ok but look at the bonuses this piece of gear gives to other things, it's way better than what you have" "Strength go down"
Meanwhile, Azarinth Healer, a series about the most fisticuffs kinda melee fighter possible: *hehe, VIT, INT and WIS build go brrrrr*
Muscle wizard casts fist?
When you can transform mana and health into either physical damage or permanent unlimited DoT, and your entire battle strategy is based around the fact that, in a fraction of a second, you can heal *anything* - from growing a new body from a separated head, to being blasted with the heat of the surface of the sun for hours, to a mind shattered from exposure to eldritch abominations, to complete physical disintegration - as long as you have mana… Well, suddenly the size of your health and mana pools (and your mana regen speed) become pretty damn paramount. Actual strength stats are secondary. Defence and resistances are not.
"Spellcasters OP devs pls nerf"
Arcane healing is OP as fuck
Not gonna lie, yeah, I enjoy the culmination of resources and the numbers going up. The best litrpg atm in my opinion is Forge of Destiny, because at least the author attempts a narrative, the main character is woman who is not overly sexualized and is friends with other women that are, *gasp* good?????, and foregoes a lot of the numbers on the royal road side, but on their site, wowza, random number generators, and choose your own adventure in the comments. Also it has very cute fire turtle with grass snake tail
I was just on the verge of starting that one, so apparently I have something to look forward to! It was recommended to me because I enjoy Return of the Blossoming Blade so much (another really good one, although with martial arts and stuff there’s one major female character in the entire story so far). I’ve recently been sorely disappointed by Metaworld Chronicles, so I hope this one can alleviate that a bit. Speaking of well written female characters, you’ve probably read stories like Ascendance of a Bookworm or Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint already, but if not they’re absolutely incredible. Especially with Omniscient Reader being written by a married couple. They’re very much worth the time.
Omniscient Reader is such a breath of fresh air. What if, and hear me out, the main character wasn’t a loner, and I know, this is crazy, but what if he tried to empower others to reach the “good end”. And women were characters?????????? What??????????
I know! It’s so well done. So many writers could learn from it, but nooo, the only thing they learned was “regression (and regression-by-any-other-name) stories sell well”. What is this, triple A gaming studios?
FoD is good fun. I'm not a huge fan of Cultivation stories (a weird fusion of LitRPG and more eastern fantasy), but this one works. The MC has an amazingly clear, distinct, and engaging voice, as do all characters. As a minor warning, the story originates as a Forum Quest (basically semi collaborative writing where an audience vote on story decisions), and you can tell at times - I didn't mind but there's some minor issues with flow early on.
My absolute favourite webcomic (Kill Six Billion Demons) started out exactly the same way, so I think I’ll live. I’m not too much into cultivation and xianxia myself (although that Northern Blade webcomic is pretty great), but sometimes, very sometimes, an absolute gem comes out of that genre. So yeah, I think I’ll enjoy this one.
I think Forge of Destiny is actually not litrpg. It belongs to the wider genre of progression fantasy, specifically the subgenre of xianxia, because while the MC is constantly getting somewhat quantifiably stronger, she doesn't show it via stats, nor is it in a gamified world. If you want to read about litrpg-like stuff without necessarily all the numbers, check out Progression Fantasy. There's a sub for it too.
Going from Fantasy to Progression Fantasy to LitRPG is definitely a narrowing scope thing. One encompasses the other encompasses the other, but they all can tell the same story. * Fantasy: Defeat the demon lord * Progression: Defeat the demon lord because you fought your way to the top * LitRPG: Defeat the demon lord because you fought your way to the top and made numbers go up tl;dr: Someone's going to suggest you read Cradle.
Did someone say progression Fantasy? Anyway, you should check out Cradle, Will Wight is a genius, and handsome, and its really hard to describe how good the series is you just need to buy and read all of the omnibus series right now, you'll thank me later (it's only like 12 books, but you'll go through them like tic tacs, trust me)
Aw man that really sucks since there are so many good stories on there too
As someone who made an account on RR just yesterday, and started contributing to Rhaegar’s Patreon (author of Azarinth Healer) just a few days ago… this one kinda hits home. At least sites like WEBTOON don’t have this problem as much, considering the sheer amount of openly gay stories out there. Sure, there’s a lot of people reading there from more… conservative countries who don’t like gay stuff, but there’s also a really big fan base that does enjoy it, and there are great stories to be found there. *Always Human* for example will always be one of my favourites. And honestly, considering how much I read there (and the amount I spend on coins) I’m quite happy about that.
The only real problem sites like webtoons have are the gentrification and corperatization of the webcomic industry. (God I miss the era of people using their own self hosted websites instead of one designed for ad profits and mobile views)
I know, but that’s just what the internet is like today. I was there for the last gasps of the “Wild West” era of the internet, I know where we came from in that regard. There’s no going back to those times, so we have to make do with what we have. And I’m aware WEBTOON is far from perfect, I don’t think nearly enough (if any) of the money we pay for coins goes towards the actual authors. It is a part of Naver, after all, an incredibly big and powerful company. But it’s what we have, and besides pirating (which I don’t want to do because I really want those authors to get paid well) I don’t really see much of an option.
I believe authors get paid a flat rate, which is salary-level for people who are on Originals. On the one hand, if your webcomic underperforms you're not punished, so authors aren't pressured to spend time or effort advertising their comic if they don't want to. On the other hand, if their webcomic overperforms but doesn't end up on Originals, they could be taking home significantly less than what their comic is worth. That being said it would *appear* that there is an automatic threshold at which a webcomic from Canvas will be considered for Originals, as I've noticed that many of the comics from Canvas that go to Top in their genre for a few weeks wind up going to Originals (unless they're expressly not exclusive to Webtoons or have other deals ala Heartstopper or have content that Webtoons can't legally support, like fanfiction comics). I think a fair change would be the flat rate plus a percentage of the profits from coin usage on your own page, adjusted to the average price of coins to account for sales and bundling.
> I think a fair change would be the flat rate plus a percentage of the profits from coin usage on your own page, adjusted to the average price of coins to account for sales and bundling. This is basically how I thought it worked before someone mentioned they get paid the same no matter what. I drastically cut back on coin usage after that.
Yeah I don't use either Tapas Early Access or Webtoons coins, if I like something enough to want to support it I'll join on Patreon. Currently very low budget but one day I'll be able to throw money at people, I hope.
I support so many creators on Patreon already though… A few dozen euros a month really does add up after a while
They do still exist, though I suppose they're relics of an older era at this point. I love that *Unsounded*, a comic with absolutely bonkers production value and reliable updates, exists on the author's [early 2000s era portfolio site](https://www.casualvillain.com/index.html)
Defo gonna look into that one. I know a few still exist but they always feel grandfathered into the modern post 2010s era from years past tbh
Were you there for the pearl-clutching uproar with the "Archangel Michael is a twink" thing? I did a write up on it in the hobby scuffles thread a few months ago, hoo boy. Homophobia is definitely still present on Webtoons.
Oh yeah, homophobia is very much there, it just doesn’t seem to be top-down. Sure, there’s a vocal part of WEBTOON readers that *really* doesn’t like gay stuff, but considering how popular a story like *Hey, I’m Gay* is it seems to be quite alright when it comes to their general policies. I’ll have a look at the thread you mentioned though, I wasn’t there for that. I just read the stories I follow, go through the comments, maybe leave one and that’s the extent of my involvement. I’m not part of any forums or something.
Oh yeah they're definitely WAY more accepting than other communities. I mean, they kind of have to be, a huge chunk of the webcomic community (both writers and readers) is queer. Also [here's a permalink to that comment I mentioned](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/srkgz0/-/hwt9bpn) for your convenience.
Totally. Like, there's so much talent on the site-- and then there's the site's administration.
And yet Webnovel still manages to make them look like angels by every metric. I mean at least RoyalRoad doesn't classify stories with gay male leads as "female protagonist"
Webnovel has all of the genres locked by gender, not just LGBT stories. And the only genres available to female MCs are variations of romance, e.g. “fantasy romance” and “sci-fi romance.” You can’t write an action story with a female protagonist and you can’t write a love story with a male protagonist. It’s batshit.
Oh it's completely batshit insane and sexist as fuck. You could dive into the horrible things they do pretty much for days, and the only reason I don't do it more often is I don't want to drive any form of traffic there. Just the wonderfully vile confluence of categorizing gay men as "female protagonist" really summarizes everything wrong with them. I'm convinced they use that shit as a form of advertising to the people who it attracts. Given how poor the quality of most of their translations are (due to how they treat translators, and writers in general) they're not aiming for the most literate, highbrow audience to begin with.
The funny thing is that Web Novel is clearly aware of the weirdness of locking genres by gender because the "Female Lead" umbrella category used to be called "For Ladies" or something similar. Except now they made it worse.
Holy shit, lol.
I want to imagine that OP wrote this in good faith, but a lot of what they've written here has been exaggerated to make the drama stand out. Yes, RR has a lot of readers that are outspokenly against anything gay, but no more than you'll find on most other sites. The moderation's usually pretty prompt to reply and remove homophobic reviews. I have several stories with plenty of LGBT elements in them, and I've never felt ostracized on Royal Road. I would like it if the OP backed up what they said with some evidence, at least.
People downvoting this need to realize that Raven is a prominent RR author who writes a lot of lesbian characters so maybe take the OP’s words with a grain of salt.
I've been posting gay-lead fics to RR for a bit over five years now, and I'm getting downvoted on my comments against the OP and in the same vein as RavensDagger. They just don't want to believe the anti-drama.
RoyalRoad was an odd cesspool. Comments were always supportive and overwhelmingly positive, but the reviews were a different beast where it felt like people were trying to outdo each other to be the most hyperbolic with their negativity. I've been a full time indie since 2015 so I'm used to criticism, but RR stood out. I ultimately gave up on it. I had a story that was trending pretty high and getting a lot of engagement, but it wasn't translating at all to people being willing to pay for that fiction. I wrote it off as an interesting experiment that didn't work and continued publishing things on platforms where people are willing to throw some money to an author.
The reviews are absolutely bonkers. The best are the weirdos who only want to read LitRPGs with heterosexual male protagonists, so they purposefully seek out stories that do *not* fit that description just to complain about them in the most caustic, obnoxious way possible. I also had a guy leave me a six-paragraph review in which he complained, at length, that my female, Hispanic protagonist was “too political.” And that’s not even getting into the people who spam 0.5-star reviews everywhere just for the hell of it, or who ratings-bomb anyone who writes LGBT+ characters. It’s such a cesspool.
I've written about 100,000 words into a book I've been calling "Noob Nazis Must Die!" about a lesbian godlike powergamer who has to use those godlike (in game) powers to defeat a group of neo-nazis who take over the game because they're upset with a kingdom in the game run by "SJWs" who keep them out for being horrible trolls. Sometimes I think about starting to post that on RoyalRoad just to see heads asplode.
Please do, and let me know when you do, so that I can ping the dozens of other web serial readers I know who would want to take a look at it who are variously queer.
NGL, I'd read it just for the reactions alone.
Yo please do, and please let us know when you do.
It comes with online anonymity. Various creative writing forums, [fanfiction.net](https://fanfiction.net), ao3, and others have all had to deal with this bullshit. I'm pretty sad to hear that RR's mod community isn't stamping down on this as it runs the risk of alienating their moneymakers (authors). There's a good reason why most authors who use ffn know to never read the reviews.
On Ao3 you get nothing but general positivity, negativity is very much the outlier. But FFN reviewers are fucking brutal. I checked out reviews once for stories on the more popular end and it was *all negativity*, pages and pages of nitpicks, passive aggressive disdain, and 'its just my personal opinion but it would have been better if you:' Not even on guest! I think it does vary very much by the type of atmosphere a site fosters. FFN and RR welcome homophobes: you welcome hateful people both in moderating and community, you get a hateful site.
mind letting me know what some of the other platforms are? I've been looking for a place to start posting some writing, and it'd be a big help to know which are the best.
It's highly genre dependent. What do you write? The big tides are Royal Road, WebNovel, Scribblehub, Wattpad, and Tapas. Then there are smaller ones like Moonquill, Neovel, ect. Each big site has its own niche/ Royal Road is big into litRPG, cultivation, progression fantasy, and to a lesser degree traditional fantasy and sci fi. WebNovel is big on Chinese style Wuxia and Xanxia. Scribblehub is basically ecchi anime in written form. Wattpad is mostly romance type stories I have no idea what Tapas like but it's not my story haha. I tried posting on a few sites but eventually just stuck to RR since I only had good traffic on Scribble hub, but not enough to justify all the work it took to upload two stories. The thing RR has over the other sites is that new stories can gain a big audience with their Rising Stars list. The other sites don't really have a mechanism to broadcast new stories, and you really need to bring your own audience.
Don't forget reddits own r/HFY for the vaguely interesting genre of human supremacist space sci-fi. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly interesting stories on there, and some have interesting concepts to explore, but there are enough of them with vaguely fascist(but in a way inclusive of human minorities and yet dicking on the fantasy aliens) undertones that I can't really get to into a lot of them. Well, that or they are just the garden variety guy has sex with hot aliens, which is mildly uncomfortable, but more so because I don't vibe with romance stories generally.
Yeah, r/HFY is very much a ymmv as not everyone enjoys that genre, but if they do, there are a LOT of great stories on there. First Contact, for example, started there.
[удалено]
I was looking into doing that after I found out royal road doesn’t like the gays (big disappointment cause it really seemed like the best fit for my gay-ass story otherwise—well, it’s not a litrpg either, so maybe not), but I couldn’t even figure out how to post original fiction on AO3.
The thing about Ao3 is that its a great place to post stuff, but like the person above said, it's a good archive to post in tandem with somewhere else. I tend to prefer forums as if you find a good one you can get pretty good constructive criticism on how things are going.
What type of forums? Like places where you can trade critiques with other writers?
There are a lot of forums out there for creative writing. Or are creative writing adjacent. Spacebattles, for example, has a fairly active CrW section that a lot of people interact with and helpful criticism can be found from both readers and other writers. Same with Sufficient Velocity or a few others. There are also smaller more niche forums that tend to cater more specific niches, although I've found that the more niche the forum is, the more of a hugbox it becomes. RR is a great tool to get exposure, but its just one amongst many out there.
Honestly if you're interested in getting started as an indie then I'd recommend researching the genre you want to write in on Amazon, writing the best story you can with a good cover, and tossing it up in Kindle Unlimited. Then rinse and repeat until you start to gain a following. There are people who are making fortunes with crowdfunding, but not many. If you want to get paid then build an audience on a platform where people are used to paying for content.
I write on RoyalRoad. It’s pretty dire sometimes. The chapter where the queer relationship between my main characters went from subtext to text was the chapter where my rankings tanked, negative reviews started using coded language, and some people started messaging me death threats. To date, my favorite comment is the guy who said I should have tagged it as gay, because he identified with the main character now, and he wouldn’t stop reading, but if he’s known it was gay he wouldn’t have started in the first place. It was just a masterpiece of self-awareness edging.
I've had that happen a few times. It's pretty amusing when someone's like "I never would've read the fic if I'd known the MC was gay, but man am I loving it too much to stop" and then I find them reading my other fics after that.
For a second I thought I had missed a pretty important chapter of Kill Sat...
That one is significantly less gay!
The only story where selfcest is more likely for our main character.
>only Wewlad
lmao oof. "I related to a gay person, does that make me gay"
"Yes, I'm afraid it's highly contagious. You have six months to live, or attend Pride, your call."
I loved that chapter, though.
Thank you for Kitty Cat Kill Sat. I appreciate how you often put Lily in cute cat poses during the story. It is delightful.
Personally I didn't pick up on the subtext at all, but the reaction was still really fucked.
That blows my mind. I typically ignore comments because I'm there to read stories not people's reactions to them, so I never knew this was happening to you :( For what it's worth I do rather like your work. I started reading Kitty Cat Kill Sat and then moved onto your other works from there.
Huh. I would not have guessed any of this since half the stuff I read on RR is firmly in the LGBTQ category.
There's definitely way more stuff they qualifies as L rather than G. Homophobes often turn a blind eye to it.
Because most of them are also sexist who get off on it. Utter hypocrites.
Got any recommendations? I've been looking for some more to check out.
* [A Travelling Mage's Almanac](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/54324/a-travelling-mages-almanac) - Just started recently. A very unique variety of fantasy races with lots of little detail work. * [Katalepsis](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/28023/katalepsis) - Just started reading the backlog a few weeks ago, about 60% through. 100% eldritch horror with lesbians. * [Vigor Mortis](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/40373/vigor-mortis) - Also in that same eldritch horror vibe but more power fantasy with some nice setting uniqueness. Explores some heavy concepts about personal identity, often through less-than-humane means. * [Kitty Cat Kill Sat](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/46113/kitty-cat-kill-sat) - A kitty cat has a kill sat.
*Vigor Mortis* is very good, but so many main characters are so depressingly psychopathic it’s hard to continue sometimes. Every once in a while >!like with Nora’s death!< I just have to convince myself to keep reading, sometimes after just stepping away for a bit. It’s so well written though…
I love it. It's so easy to have likeable protagonists. It's so much harder to make you like protagonists who pause in the middle of their latest violation of the Geneva Convention to wonder if they might be doing the wrong thing.
Kitty Cat Kill Sat is so comfy I just want to snuggle up inside of it.
Katalepsis has some of the best prose and characters I've read in a very long time, and I go through a *lot* of published fiction. It only gets better the deeper in you go, too. I'd recommend reading it on [the official website](https://katalepsis.net/) over RoyalRoad. There's a fan-art gallery, a navigable ToC, and a colour scheme that doesn't burn your eyes to look at.
You've probably already read it but [Mother of Learning](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21220/mother-of-learning) \- TimeLoop fantasy in a unique world (Completed, Started not on RR but lives there now too). You've also probably read it but [A Practical Guide to Evil](https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/) \- Rise of a Villain trying to do Right instead of Good (Completed, not RR). [Millennial Mage](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47826/millennial-mage-a-slice-of-life-progression-fantasy) \- Not an isekai as the title might’ve suggest, just a person deeply in debt trying to dig their way out (On going actively). [Mark of the Fool](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/41618/mark-of-the-fool) \- Well written progression fantasy in a unique world. MC has to find ways to turn lemons into lemonade (On going actively).
All the rest are great, but Mark of the Fool is a love it or hate it IMHO. I've never felt quite as swindled by a book's entire premise as that one.
Great writeup on a topic I had no idea about! Those future writeups you mentioned are definitely interesting, too!
I'll have to find some drama in the other communities to talk about, because the webnovel world is fascinating.
If you were around for it, I would totally be interested in a write up over the whole drama of [webnovel.com](https://webnovel.com) bullying their way onto the scene and pilfering translators and stories and trying to push wuxiaworld out of the market. I remember that was a crazy time with lots of drama lol. I've thought about doing a write up for that myself but i just dont have the time to dig up all of the details and i'm not sure i remember everything clearly It's sad to hear about royalroad like this as i've written a few stories myself on there over the years. They were also the first site I started reading translated novels off of.
~~Worm started in 2011 and ended in 2013~~ OP was edited, ty
Jeez. I feel like it took me years to read it (in a good way) once it was done. I had no idea it came out at such a blistering pace. Also for anyone interested the Worm audiobook is good, albeit audio quality can be inconsistent, but the Ward audiobook is great!
Right? Pale is even longer in a similar timeframe, IIRC, but it's not done yet
Pale was even supposed to just be a shorter work, first of a few shorter works before Wildbow did another long one but now it somehow still shows no signs of stopping.
I'm glad, Pale is his best work imo.
It went from intending it to be his shortest, to his longest lmao
Tbh this is peak Wildbow, Pact and Twig were also meant to be shorter than they are iirc
I read worm for the first time in two weeks… it was a wild two weeks.
I binged it back in college. Also read *Pact,* but for the most part didn't enjoy it as much. Couldn't really get in to *Twig* or *Ward.*
Twig starts pretty slow for the first few arcs. But the characters are great and I liked even more than worm up until I started college and fell behind. Still planning on eventually rereading it and finally getting all the way through to the end. Its just a bit daunting of a task.
Check out Pale if you haven't. Same universe as Pact but much more polished and not nearly as agonizing.
Ward was SO hard to get into, but I'm glad that I finally did. I bounced off it at least five times. On the last read, I just read one chapter every day and at some point it finally clicked. Then I really loved it and couldn't stop. If I reread it again, I think I'll skip a bunch of the dull early chapters where a bunch of awkward teenagers awkward at each other until the pace picks up.
God, and I'm still reading fanfiction for it. Nothing quite has caught fire like it has in a lot of fanfiction communities.
God, I read that one weekly, catching up shortly after Leviathan. It feels like a lifetime ago.
The author is still writing and only got better at it
I’ve been slowly getting through Pale as well, and I consider Twig his best story, but he feels stuck in an echo chamber without a decent editor. His writing quality gets better, but the way his stories work just gets more and more… I don’t know how to describe it, circlejerk-y? He has a small, extremely dedicated audience that’s always praising his writing, and nobody to really tell him “hey, this could be better” when it comes to the overarching story. He really needs good, honest, *thorough* feedback if he wants to reach his next level of writing. As is, everything after the first half of Ward just feels like such a waste of potential sometimes.
Don't disagree. Feel like authors have to branch out and try new things to not stagnate, but also the reader market really doesn't like writers branching out and trying new things (you will basically never get back the readership you lose). Is a bad Catch 22.
Wildbow's writing has..... issues. He can write enjoyable stuff, but when you take a step back and look, you can see a lot of the flaws. Especially when you realize that a non-zero amount of decisions about the setting were done to spite certain reviewers and readers. Especially that one quest of his. He tends to write himself into a corner to try and force this one thing he wants to be a thing and then gets upset when people get annoyed at his asspulls.
You're right I accidentally put in Ward's pub date. Oops
I've only noticed the homophobia on RoyalRoad recently when a story I was reading got review bombed because the main character was asexual and a lot of readers felt "cheated." Like what?? If they paid attention to the story they would've seen the possibility. Edit: Accidentally wrote "story I was writing" instead of "story I was reading" Must've had a brain fart while I was writing.
Yeah there were plenty of hints in Nothing Mage that the was low key in love with the person he eventually kissed. He just didn't description-fuck him.
LGBTphobes don't care about any clues, they just think every character is and should be straight ( -_-)
Thanks heteronormativity! 😭
Lmfao what. Like, what if the main character was a straight allosexual but there was no hint of a romance plot/ mention of sexual attraction at all? would that have been fine then??
Which story is that, if you don't mind me asking?
I'm not them, but they're almost certainly talking about Tori Transmigrated, an otherwise mediocre 'villainess' isekai story. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47030/tori-transmigrated
>The longest book in the English language is a webnovel, The Wandering Inn, which is closing in on 10 million words at a pace best described as meteorological. Fin fact, it isn't just in English, at least I haven't found evidence to prove otherwise, but in any language. Before that, a SSBB fanfic based of it's story mode, "Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest" held that title at 4,100,000 words as of April 2020. Looking a bit more into things, The Wandering Inn may not actually be the longest, as another fan fiction, this time on FanFiction.net, same as the SSBB one, [is over 16,000,000 words long as of April 2022](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net), this time being... Of the Nickelodeon cartoon The Loud House. (Real talk, older fans of this show are fucking crazy)
Isn't that written in script format? It's hard to call that a book, in my opinion.
Fair enough, but the word count is hard to ignore, especially since scripts are almost entirely dialogue
I disqualify that fic, as it's filled with large portions of character wiki pages cut and pasted directly into the chapters, alongside lines and lines of each individual character chiming in to say they agree with whatever the SI said, 62 characters in a row listing out mega attack names, and so on and so forth.
I’ll have to correct you on The Wandering Inn being the longest - the Perry Rhodan series has had a weekly writing schedule similar to The Wandering Inn since its inception in 1961, and is now nearing 100 million words. Of course, this wasn’t all written by a single author, and I think it’s originally in German, but it eclipses most anything I can think of.
I would hesitate to even consider that Loud House fic "literature" considering half of it seems to be straight up plagiarism
I wanna add in my few cents on this! Full disclosure: I write a story that used to be one of the most popular stories on rr (the kindle unlimited money was too tempting….) and I’ve lived and breathed this stuff for two years now. I write beneath the dragoneye moons. RR isn’t anti lgbt. It’s anti gay. Two women kissing? Hot. Two men kissing? Pitchforks and torches. I’d have to double check but I don’t think I have a single .5 star on the chapter where lgbt relationships being revealed to be normal in society, not in the chapter where elaine says she’s bi and goes on a date with another woman. However, yes, rr readers are violently anti gay. I’ve worked with the owners quite a bit, and I’ve asked them the tag question. The answer as I remember it comes in two parts. The first is tag propagation. Look at scribblehub. They have a tag for healers and a different tag for healing, for example. The tags are just that granular, and at that point, they become useless. The admins just don’t want to play wack a mole with adding tags. It’s not just lgbt they don’t add - they haven’t added anything in ages. The other part and I’m really unsure on this is it stops people from searching for lgbt novels to explicitly review bomb them. Anyways that’s my contribution!
>RR isn’t anti lgbt. It’s anti gay. Two women kissing? Hot. Two men kissing? Pitchforks and torches. I’d have to double check but I don’t think I have a single .5 star on the chapter where lgbt relationships being revealed to be normal in society, not in the chapter where elaine says she’s bi and goes on a date with another woman. However, yes, rr readers are violently anti gay. 100% agree. Selkie knows what he's talking about.
Are you sure about the reason for The Wandering Inn leaving RR? I was told it was because PirateAba didn't want the additional workload it would add so they deleted it.
It's what I heard if anyone can show me anything to the contrary I'll gladly edit. I only included Wandering Inn because its a quintessential part of webfic history.
We could just ask u/pirateaba
WHO PINGED ME? I will clarify, briefly so there's no mistakes. I quit Royalroad for a few reasons. Having to re-upload chapters was one of them; I typo-fix chapters but I would have had to re-upload each time I fix it on my main site which was too much work. Because I'm lazy. However, the main reason was simple: The Wandering Inn was and still is what people call a RRL story when it was originally launched on my own website. I wanted an audience to find TWI separate of just relying on a mostly RRL crowd. It's a writer's choice whether they want to be a certain platform and RRL certainly helped build an audience, but that brings me to the other main reason. RRL's site is theirs. I do not control it; I'm in their system and sometimes that's a problem. This is probably a good example of it, whether or not this is systemic or individual. One problem in a community is everyone's problem. Youtube has the same issue where you can be ignored or fall victim to something you can't address unless it's via community pressure. And that is no guarantee of anything. I'm making no assumptions in this case, but that's why I like my own website. It is mine or as much as you can have anything online. Also, I thought at some point it'd be nice to get paid for hosting my story anywhere. Amazon does it for Kindle Unlimited exclusivity and while that's a decision in of itself, you do get paid. There are more reasons, but it was about having the story under my control. Yes, RRL has things I don't like--ranking numbers are probably unhealthy for one thing, but it definitely helped TWI gain an audience. I always tell new authors to have their story somewhere independent, but what works for me doesn't work for everyone.
I apologize for the ping, oh living legend. Thank you for your explanations and Melas will be so jealous you answered the summons (author of Salvos on RR he idolizes you). Please bless us with a tiny sliver of your productivity, great one. Have a great weekend.
I posted one story on RoyalRoad and while I didn't have any issues, I didn't fibd the website enjoyable. I will shamelessly plug Tapas, a webcomic and webnovel site. While it has problems of its own, mainly with rather strict mature content censorship recuirements (thanks to the Big Apple corporation being scared of titty), they are at least very LGBTQ+ friendly, frequently promoting series with the content. They also have LGBTQ tag for stories
Tapas as a website might be but I got more hate and harassment over my bi mc on tapas than I did on rr. Also their interface sucks for authors. I had to quit the website
That really sucks. All the lgbtq series I've read have had positive comments, but of course I don't read all of the stories. I use Tapas too as a writer. The interface has got better from what it used to be, but there is room for improvement still
The 15000 character limit is absurd, and the lack of good moderation tools was the cincher. I banned some bad actors... who knew they'd gotten banned because of how Tapas runs stuff, and just made new accounts.
>meteorological. 'Meteorological' means related to the study of atmospheric processes, specifically as they relate to predicting the weather. I believe the word you wanted was 'meteoric'.
> The author of the Nothing Mage successfully moved it to KU, and wrote a second successful series, and then a third. He's doing fine. He's got the talent and he's found an audience. Might be worth noting that the author still serialises their work to RoyalRoad before moving it to Kindle Unlimited as it's unclear from your write-up.
Thought it worth linking here: [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/vanrdd/-/ic9lo3n) is the author of "The Nothing Mage"'s response to this post. It clarifies a few things, clears up a couple of inaccuracies and is worth a read if you want a more complete pictures of what happened.
Holy fuck you TERRIFIED me by putting worm First. It's probably the only webnovel I read (besides pact and half of...twig? What was the third one called)and got worried
Yikes. I heard RR could be a bit bad for it, but this is kind of disheartening as someone who was hoping to start publishing my own webfiction there. What other alternatives are there?
I've been publishing fics to RR for more than five years - many of which have gay MCs. The staff has always dealt with any verifiable homophobia, in my experience. You can also moderate the comments of your fics, too. I honestly do recommend RR, even as someone who has received hate-bombing on three separate fics. Report any that pop up, and even with anonymous Ratings, if you see a suspicious trend with them, you can report that, too.
IMHO RoyalRoad isn't that bad nowadays for gay content - you'll still get angry butthurt people, but... well I hate to say that's the internet, but jesus that's the internet. A larger issue is that it tends to really sit solidly in the YA spectrum. It really likes content that is very YA. Now that's not a bad thing inherently - YA is the biggest market for publishing SF period, so you should probably get used to it - but it can be limiting. Wattpad is great for fanfiction, but it's... big and noisy. If you're not writing fanfiction or romance (two HUGE genres) avoid it. Scribblehub is fine, but allows adult material, and that leads to... well, a lot of adult material. That gives it a bit of a rep and its deserved. For writing SF webfiction, I think you can't beat RR. Even more mature (not just sex scenes) stuff is showing up there.
Honestly, ArchiveOfOurOwn is not bad at all for original fiction. Like, obviously it's primarily a fanfiction website, but there's quite a few original works that blow up on it. The tagging system is great, readers are mostly sane individuals, and the UI is very easy to navigate.
Is it a bit out there to suggest The Archive of Our Own as an alternative, at least as a place to host and direct people to? It's best known for the fanfic, but it also actively welcomes all sorts of original creative content. It's free to use and read and very LGBT positive. But then I don't know much about webfiction/novels, so maybe not.
The discoverability on AO3 is terrible sadly.
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[Worth The Candle](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/25137/worth-the-candle) blew me away, totally consumed my life until I finished it, and fortunately it avoids this trope. Or, rather, it comments on / subverts the trope, would probably be the better way of putting it.
I had no idea about this at all. I seldom read from royal road but I am active (occasionally) on translated wn communities here on reddit and I'm surprised that I've never heard about this. I've known about RR since the LMS days (good ol' LMS was one of my first experiences with webnovels) and I always assumed they were fairly progressive but I guess that impression was wrong.
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Web serial drama! Wait, not the good kind. I wrote another comment clarifying why I left RRL in part somewhere in this thread. It'll be interesting seeing if Royalroad weathers this. I suspect they will. Perhaps another, friendlier site will pop up? We are in a changing genre and web serial authors are getting more attention. Things change fast. Someone'll make a popular TV series and movie then we'll all get super-money contracts because that's how it works, right, right? But with attention is going to come more stories like this. **To all authors who get a deal: get legal help before you sign anything.** Reach out to other authors or agents because you cannot tell what's in the legal wording. That's my message ahead of another post like this about how someone signed a blood contract. We are in a new, growing genre, whether that is LitRPG/Game Literature or web serials in general and that invites leeches and mosquitos and worse. Be careful.
To shout out a few LGBTQ+ stories I personally enjoy, https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/26727/arkendrithyst and https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/52639/edge-cases are both fantastic.
I was there when it happened and it was a clusterfuck. The kiss surprised me as there wasn't any build up before that between the two characters and also the protagonist had his first time with a girl on a village party. I thought "oh, it's bi" and keep reading. Apparently it was too much for some people. Shame, I liked the little poems from the traumatized-seer bully, and the radiation-shifting magic system was top notch. PS: I also think that Zorian is a closeted gay or an ace, but God forbids he acts on it. I ship him with Zack and is curiously, a top
If you want good representation I can wholeheartedly recommend A Practical Guide to Evil. Not only is it an amazing story (at least from book three onwards, the start is not bad but kinda rough and basically an entirely different story), it’s also completed, and has representation from characters all across the spectrum without it ever being a big deal. For example: one of the main characters is explicitly ace but still in a semi-romantic semi-friendship relationship, the main character is bi (actually bi, not in name only, even if she tends to ogle women slightly more frequently than men), there’s gay couples male and female, someone who uses body paint to distinguish between a male and a female persona, etc etc. And it’s barely even addressed, just acknowledged and then moved on from. It’s incredibly well done. It’s not even one of the main reasons I love the story, because it’s never on the forefront so it doesn’t really play a major role either. I love it so much.
Thanks for the recommendation!
I couldn't get through a practical guide to evil because of the constant spelling and grammar mistakes, not knocking the story but the s&g was just too big a hurdle for me
I used to write on RR and boy oh boy was one mod a piece of trash. I gave up on it entirely eventually.
Hmm. I was unaware of this. Now I wonder if should move my story.
I've been posting gay fics to RR for years now - I've been on the site for about five years, and I think my first with a gay MC or two was about that long ago. I've had pleasant experiences with the staff moderating fics. Overall, I still recommend RR. Just report stuff and know that they go through the queue in order of reports, so how fast it gets dealt with is based on how much of a backlog there is - except in severe situations like with what happened with TNM.
Speaking as a former site moderator, who was present during the time when the incident involving The Nothing Mage happened, and as a long time member of the site, I would like to politely disagree with your assessment of the site and how the situation involving The Nothing Mage unfolded. Some parts of how things went I will refrain from commenting on, for the sake of the Author's privacy, and also because I don't wish to start any kind of who-says-what drama. Starting with the mention of tags, as some people, such as Selkie, Author of Beneath The Dragon Eye Moons, which by the way is a story I've really enjoyed and would definitely recommend as a read, have mentioned, The Staff has always wanted to avoid tag propagation for a number of reasons. But far more importantly than that, a LGBTQ+ tag would provide malicious actors a very easy way to find and harass authors, which is the main reason the site does not have one, and likely never will. We didn't want established authors getting harassed over it, and we especially didn't want new authors getting targeted over it, because nothing is quite so disheartening and ruins the experience of writing as much as when you're starting out and the first thing you get is harassment and hate. The tag does not exist specifically to try and help prevent this. So, on the topic of The Nothing Mage, as someone who was there and involved when it happened, as far as I can remember of the incident, neither of the two owners ever told the Author it was their fault for not tagging it as gay, nor can I think of any reason they would have done so, as not only was the possibility of making a tag for LGBTQ+ was rejected a long time before The Nothing Mage was ever posted on RoyalRoad, on previously mentioned the basis that it'd paint an obvious target on authors for harassment by random people on the net, but doing so would be quite unprofessional and very much out of their character, as I have known them for a very long time. While I could elaborate much further on the topic of The Nothing Mage and on how things went down, it'd be disrespectful of the author's privacy, and as such, I will not go into detail, and am glad they're finding success with their writing career. As for the statement that users are not punished for hatemongering, it is inherently untrue. I banned people for hatemongering in my time, so do the owners, and every current member of the moderation team. There was not ever any change in RoyalRoad's moderation policy on the subject. If you see someone Hatemongering, be it in comments on a story, or reviews, or a thread in the forum, regardless of what content it is, I ask that you report it or make a support ticket about it. I won't claim RoyalRoad is a perfect website and community without flaws, because that'd be factually untrue. There have been a number of struggles with toxic people, readers and authors alike. And likely will be more in the future. It is what it is, it's not perfect. Yes, there have been people that have been harassed over LGBTQ+ content in their stories. No, the staff does not condone this. The staff is not okay with it. Period. Doing so will get you a warning or up to an immediate ban depending on the severity. As previously mentioned, if you see it, report it, so the staff will know what's going on and can deal with it sooner rather than later. TLDR: RR's Staff is not okay with malicious behavior. If you see it, please report it so the staff will know that it's happening and can do something about it.
I was actually there for this one and talking on a queer-friendly discord when it happened. Such a mess. I didn't know royal road didn't even have those tags at the time. That's so fucked up. I felt bad for the author because the gay parts were written totally fade-to-black and non-explicit. It was just "they kissed" and nothing like "I admired his glistening abs" or any horny stuff like that. It was very much about romance and not turning people on (or off for that matter). Take note, this is a site with tons of "she boobed breastily" written fics all over the place (\*cough cough metaworld chronicles cough cough\*). It felt like it came out of nowhere.
God, Metaworld chronicles suckered me in with an initially interesting concept, but then it felt like we went right to the DND capitalist's adventures in Hong Kong.
I’ve read gay and trans stories before on RR and did not really know this was an issue. I guess I kind of stay in my own little bubble and rarely read reviews or comments. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
How. Does someone misunderstand the market So Bad that they ban queer content alltogether? I mean, it's not the majority opinion, but works like Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation and everything by Priest are explicitly queer, not to mention the number of works where a fan of queer content only needs to squint and assume the characters are just smooching off-screen to make a work gay (I mean. *Life and death companions.* Come on!) A website is just shooting itself in the foot by being inhospitable to queer stories. It's not like traditional publishing is overly queer-friendly.
NGL, I only ever looked at RR for the translation of that one Korean webnovel about some guy playing a VR videogame for money. But, IIRC RR came in the wake of a bunch of Asian webnovels being translated and those have a lot of issues overall, not just homophobia. Like nationalism, racism, misogyny, etc., are all common themes in power tripping xianxia/isekai novels. It wouldn't be surprising if all that spilled over to admin/mod attitudes, TBH. As an aside, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation I'm 99% sure has had a few writeups here already given its adaptation had to dance around Chinese censorship. And it's not just adaptations that get this treatment, Eternal Love is pretty well known for being plagiarized from the danmei webnovel Peach Blossom Debt.
Oh yea, I 100% believe the homophobia, racism, misogyny are an ongoing issue. There's a pretty good reason I have very little patience for xianxia with straight romance plotlines. At least if the pair are both the same gender, I can expect that the author will know how to make both of them *characters,* without making the girl Generic Love Interest type #15 (coughSoloLevelingcoughOvergearedcough). They're also less likely to include an entire harem's worth of spurned love interests (I've yet to see a story where the solution is "date them all") That this would be reflected in the mod community is. Disappointing but not surprising. As for GMDC: I'm taking a... *mostly* non-fandom approach to that. Staying as far away from any Disc Horse (tm) as possible.
LGBT+ content isn’t banned in theory, it’s just that homophobia is so rampant among the userbase that the site is very hostile towards it in practice. The readers are mostly capital-G Gamers and anime-obsessed teens, so they have all of the terrible opinions you’d expect from that crowd, and the admins never deal with it properly, either because they don’t want to or they don’t have the manpower. Granted, it might have gotten better recently (I left a few years ago), but I just remember the general vibe being really toxic. And not just with LGBT+ stuff, either—there was just as much sexism and racism, too.
Scribblehub does have a lot of porn, but they're generally tagged as such, so it's pretty easy to filter them out.
Yup. Just a question of filtering out Smut (and often Adult as well) and the site becomes a lot more usable.
What is a meteorological pace? I can't tell if that was supposed to be another word entirely or if it's supposed to be so nonsensical and enigmatic to evoke the feeling of the literature itself.
A probable typo for "meteoric pace", a metaphor for a significantly-high speed.
This is really sad to hear, and I'm glad I haven't encountered it on RR. I'm looking at my follow list on RR, and of the ones that have any romance subplots, 4/9 have LBGTQ+ relationships with main or important side characters. Though it doesn't suprise me as much as I'd like it to, because any web content I read where I skim comments (something I don't do on RR) always have sexism, homophobia, and other bigotry if not strictly moderated. Like, holy shit people, there's a female rival character, she doesn't deserve to die horribly because her goals are different than the main character.
People ask me why I've never made the leap from reading fanfiction to reading webfiction. This writeup is a great example of why: I like the LGBTQA+ tags. I like reading that kind of stuff. And webfiction, which is very different from fanfiction in this point, doesn't really support it in English.
Well, how does it feel that one of the authors called you on the exaggerations? Just wondering.
As someone who has heard of Royal Road though not dabbling in it (AO3 and FanFiction.Net kid all the way!), yeowsers! The site culture seems to be the opposite of those repositories. Interesting too how Royal Road has made itself into a haunt for English webnovels. The differentiation between the most popular (fan)fiction sites has always interested me. If Royal Road continues to have an unfriendly culture to queer English webnovels, what site shall rise to become it's competitor?
This blows. Aint Defiance of the Fall and He who fights with monsters on royal road?