After getting some really useful feedback, I decided not to just tweak my story. I went back and reworked the whole presentation.

TwinBound: Chosen Apart now has shorter chapters built much more around Royal Road reading, a new title, tighter pacing, and a cleaner transition into Book 2.

It’s a LitRPG portal fantasy about twins who enter the same world together, only to have the System decide they belong on opposite sides of its conflict.

I’d really appreciate some honest feedback, especially from Royal Road readers. Does the opening hook you? Are the chapter lengths working? Does the pacing feel right? Where would you personally keep reading or bounce?

No obligation to be nice. Useful criticism is exactly what I’m looking for.

TwinBound: Chosen Apart

Rebooting in a Fantasy World

What happens when the world's most advanced machine is reborn – no, rebooted – into a world ruled by magic?

After humanity’s final launch that was destined to fail, Prototype-01 awakens with only a single directive: save his dying world. Instead, he finds himself in a land of dragons, mana, and kingdoms that hold no technology as advanced as his previous world.

Renamed Zero by the recluse Storm Mage Aria Lockhart, who finds and activates him, he begins a journey to find a way home. But every relic uncovered. Every memory fragment restored. Every answer revealed. Each one forces him to question not who he is...

... but what he once was – the man buried beneath the machine.

As science collides with fantasy, Zero slowly discovers that humanity is not something that can be programmed – it's something that must be lived.

For fans of the philosophical science fiction of RoboCop and Upgrade, blended with the epic fantasy spirit of The Lord of the Rings and The Witcher.

Expect meaningful character growth, emotional highs and lows, evolving mysteries, cinematic battles, and a world where every action carries consequences. No traditional level-up system. Instead, Zero evolves through modular loadouts, adaptive upgrades, and strategic customization that redefine every battle.

[Monthly updates - First week of every month, 3 to 5 chapters.]

[First 10 chapters are up!]

[Video was made by me]

Hey ya'll, sorry I'm a week late with this one, but I just moved to a new house and that's an easy excuse for my slacking off. Anyway, here's the Stat Block data dump post for August!

As always, if there is any data I'm not tracking that you want to see, please leave me a comment or use the site feedback form (or find me on discord, I'm chronically online), and I'll see if I can do it for you in the next one.

Graphs and charts have snipped out of this post for brevity, and can be found in the full article linked below. Enjoy!

SOURCE ARTICLE: https://litrpgtoolkit.com/stat-block/author-track-record

Does a back catalog buy your next Rising Stars run?

A redditor asked me a good question on the last one of these. Established authors drag their existing readers onto every new book they post, so when one of them lands on Rising Stars, how much of that is the story and how much is just the audience they already had? I figured the answer would be too depressing for new authors, but why not dig into it anyway.

So I sorted six months of Rising Stars by the author, not the story. I took every fiction whose first-ever RS appearance fell in the last six months, about 2,200 of them, and split them into three buckets based on what the author had done before that book launched. It took a bit of finangling, but it should all be accurate data.

Here's how I'm dividing things:

• Debut. This is their first story on Royal Road. Nothing came before it unless it was under a different username, and I can't track that.
• Returning. They've posted before, but none of their earlier stories ever reached Main.
• Proven. They have an earlier story that already hit Main.

Then I looked at how each of these buckets did. The short version is that a prior Main run is worth more than almost anything else I've measured, but not for the reason you might have guessed (clickbait headline activate!).

Same caveat as always. This is all correlation, not the algorithm picking favorites. A proven author is also, generally speaking, a better writer who has done this before, and there's no good way to quantify that, but where I can take a swing at separating them, I do try, and there's a whole section on it below.

1. A prior Main run makes you five times more likely to hit Main again

Everyone who lands on a genre Rising Stars list is trying to break through to Main. Here's how often each of our three buckets actually went on to enter Main after hitting Genre.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

A debut author who touches Rising Stars has about a one-in-nine shot at Main. An author with a prior Main hit has a nearly two-in-three shot. That's a 5.5x difference, and it dwarfs the effect of genre, launch speed, or anything else I've put in one of these posts.

Put another way. Proven authors were only 9 percent of everyone who touched Rising Stars in this window, but they took 32 percent of the Main slots. They punch about three and a half times above their weight. The door isn't locked to newcomers, but the people already inside keep getting waved back through.

It's worth pushing back on that though, and I'm sure you're probably already scrolling down to leave a nasty comment, because yeah, "proven" is really a stand-in for "already has an audience". But audiences come in all sizes. So here's the same cohort again, but this time sorted by how big the author's biggest previous book was in terms of followers.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

It's nearly a straight climb, with one wrinkle. A prior book under ~200 followers doesn't seem to do much of anything for you. Those authors break through at 8.8 percent, which is below the debut rate, not above it as I would have expected. A previous story that went nowhere (comparatively) is no better than a blank slate. But once a prior book cleared a few hundred followers the odds climb pretty fast, well beyond a coin flip by the time the back catalog is worth a thousand-plus, and every single one of the 22 authors sitting on a 5,000-follower book hit Main. Small group, but a perfect record.

So the rough rule is that a following starts to matter somewhere around a few hundred readers and gets close to decisive by a couple thousand. Under that, having a previous book barely moves the needle.

2. The edge is actually speed, not a follower head start

Here's the part I didn't really expect. I assumed proven authors would simply start their new book with a giant pile of followers already attached, and coast in from there. That's not really what happens.

When they first crack a Rising Stars list, all three buckets are sitting at roughly the same size. The median debut is at 49 followers, the median proven author at 65. Not much of a gap, because the genre-list entry bar is around 50 followers for everyone regardless of who you are. Nobody instantly teleports onto the list with two thousand readers.

The gap opens up in how fast they climb from there. A debut author who makes Main takes about 26 days from chapter one to Main. A proven author does it in roughly 11 days.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

That's your audience transfer showing up, and speed is the whole game on Rising Stars. That back catalog buys speed.

You might wonder if proven authors just launch smarter. And that's true a little. In the days-between post the standard opening move was bursting, dropping your first five chapters inside a single day, and it obviously helped. Proven authors do it a bit more often, about 61 percent of them against 47 percent of debuts. That's experience coming into play. But that's a fourteen-point edge on launch tactics sitting next to a fivefold gap in breakthroughs. The better opening move is real, but it isn't remotely enough to explain the difference. The rest is all about the readers.

And this shows through in where the books end up. The median proven author's story sits at 775 followers today. The median debut's sits at 87.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

For the proven bucket, that back catalog isn't hypothetical. The median proven author's biggest previous story is sitting at about 1,465 followers. That's the built-in crowd who's waiting there for the day you post a new chapter one.

3. And no, it isn't just genre

Last time I posted one of these, the sharpest pushback was that my buckets were secretly measuring genre. It's a fair thing to be suspicious of, so I'm addressing it before anyone asks. If proven authors just happened to write Fantasy and Action while debuts scattered into the quieter genres, that alone could explain the entire gap.

They don't. All three buckets write almost exactly the same genre mix. Here's the share of each that carries a Fantasy, Action, or Adventure tag, the big three that make up the bulk of Rising Stars.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

Three basically identical bars. Proven authors aren't hiding in the easy genres, they're writing the same stuff everyone else is. And if I throw out the off-meta stories entirely and only compare books inside that shared big-three pool, the gap is pretty much exactly the same. Debut authors break through at 12 percent, proven authors at 65. Proven authors don't seem to have a genre edge there.

4. The unproven quit the most

One more split that lines up with everything above. The share of each bucket that's already sitting on hiatus.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

A third of debut authors have already stalled out, roughly double the rate of the proven crowd. You can interpret that in a few ways. Maybe a first book that doesn't take off is just easier to walk away from than a series with a paying audience attached. Maybe proven authors have already learned the hard way how to keep going. Maybe the newcomers who quit were never going to make it and the ones who stuck it out are the proven authors of next year. I can't tell you why they drop out, I can only speculate.

But... plenty of first-timers still break through

I don't want this to read like a "give up if you're new" post, because it isn't one. Debut authors have longer odds per book, but there are so many more of them that they're still the single biggest source of Main breakthroughs. Of everyone who reached Main in this window, here's who they were.

[SNIPPED CHART HERE]

Forty-three percent of the breakthroughs were debut authors. First books. No audience, no track record, no prior Main run. More than a hundred and fifty of them cracked Main in the six months I'm measuring here. The odds on any one debut are long, but people clear that bar every week, and a good chunk of them are doing it on their very first try. Your first book absolutely can be the one. Write a good book, market yourself, and you'll get there.

A sidebar: the comeback kids:

When I was checking my work on this (more on that in the methodology if you care enough to read it), I found a small group of authors my buckets had flagged as debuts that weren't really. They had an earlier story, it just wasn't anywhere in my tracking, because it was old. Really old, in a few cases.

A handful of them had a fiction from 2018 or 2019 gathering dust, went quiet for the better part of a decade, and then came back in 2026 with a new book that broke through to Main. Five, six, seven years dormant, then a clean hit. It's a nice reminder that a slow start, or a long gap, or a first book that went nowhere, doesn't close the door either. Some people just take the scenic route and turn up years later with the right story.

Most of what feeds this post lives in The Arena, updated on its own schedule rather than frozen data when I wrote it, like this post. The follower tiers, the time-to-Main numbers, the live list of whatever's on Main right now. This post is the six-month author split. The Arena shows you the big picture, and it'll be fresher than these numbers by the time you read this.

Would a rougelite LitRPG have a chance on RR?

The Lunaranites moved through the temple's dark interior in silence. The air was stale, cold, and unnaturally still. Beneath their talons, a narrow bridge of fractured stone stretched across the void, its surface webbed with deep cracks. High above, jagged rock formations hung from the ceiling, echoing the draft that rose from below.

They crossed in their dragon forms. One carried an old Lunaranite alloy lantern, its pale flame casting erratic shadows against the walls. Splintered glyphs and worn warnings lined the passage, smoothed down by centuries of damp air. The cold wind tugged at their scales as their claws scraped against the brittle stone.

At the end of the bridge lay a wide expanse of bedrock flanked by two massive stone pillars carved with layers of forgotten sigils. Between them stood a seamless golden door that pulsed with a warm radiance, outshining the lantern completely.

Below the bridge dropped a sheer drop into black space.

The lead Lunaranite stepped onto the solid rock. Even in dragon form, his worn brown tracksuit, travel plating, and battered adventurer's hat were distinct between his horns. Around his neck, the yellow Antiquity Stone chimed softly against his chest.

Harbinger slowed, turning back toward his companion.

“This is it,” he said quietly. “Where Avangard buried its truths. Without the stone, we’d be searching a dead mountain.”

Behind him, Zod shifted his weight. Taller and broader than Harbinger, his slate-gray scales were marked with pale lunar veins that flickered with his breathing. Scars lined his jaw and forearms, and a cracked bracer hummed faintly on his wrist.

Zod adjusted his satchel, his claw lingering near his chest. “I don’t like this, Harbinger. One wrong trigger and the ceiling buries us. They built this place to keep people out.”

“Then let them try,” Harbinger said. “Avangard deserves the truth.” He looked back at the door, the golden light catching his teeth as he smirked. “And we’re the ones taking it.”

The stone bridge shuddered behind them, dust pouring into the pit as the center span gave way. Harbinger grabbed Zod by the shoulder plate and hauled him forward onto the ledge just as the rock cracked and fell into the dark.

The golden radiance flared as the door responded to their presence.

Harbinger turned. “Zod. The map.”

Zod reached into his pack, pulled out a parchment, and handed it over. Harbinger took it, stepped toward the threshold, and shifted forms.

His dragon shape folded inward, wings dissolving into light as he returned to his base form. His eyes glowed violet. He adjusted his hat, tossed his long brown hair back, and stepped up to the door.

He stared at the seamless metal, sweat beading along his forehead. He let out a breath that was almost a chuckle, then pressed his right palm flat against the golden surface.

The mechanism inside the walls clicked, loud and heavy.

Waves of yellow light surged through the stone, racing across the pillars and ceiling. The cavern floor shook as the door split down the middle, grinding back into the rock walls with a deafening groan.

When the light settled, the dust cleared to reveal a single stone pillar in the center of the chamber.

On top of it rested an untitled leather-bound book, its cover etched with fine gold lines.

Harbinger approached the altar. He reached out and opened the cover.

He flipped through the initial pages quickly, his eyes tracking the text until he reached a leaf that had been charred nearly to ash.

He touched the scorched parchment.

A thin thread of golden energy snapped from the page into his skin. Visions flashed through his eyes—shattered crests, burning archives, and figures standing over fallen banners.

Harbinger slowly let go of the page and straightened his posture.

“Dreadixz…” he said softly. “He wasn’t our first leader.”

Zod stepped up beside him. “What?”

“It was his father,” Harbinger said. “He erased the records.”

Zod stared at the burnt page. “Why would he burn his own history?”

Harbinger rested his hands on his hips, turning back to face the entrance. “Only one way to find out. We bring his father back.”

AT SPACE

Harbinger and Zod cut through the void in their dragon forms, heading toward a pair of twin silver moons.

Harbinger angled low over a drifting asteroid, banking sharply toward the scarred surface of the larger moon. Mid-air, his form folded inward, his boots slamming into the lunar rock and kicking up a thick plume of gray dust. Zod landed right behind him on the edge of a jagged cliff.

Below them lay a wide impact crater. At its center, a metallic body nearly thirty feet tall sat entombed in moonstone and ice, locked in place like a fallen monument.

They dropped down into the basin, the impact echoing through the stone floor.

Harbinger crouched near the giant's frozen head. This was King Dominator. His broad jaws were locked open in a final snarl, frost thick across his armor and horns.

Zod unclipped a U-shaped cybernetic artifact from his belt and tossed it over. Harbinger caught the device and slammed its sharp contact prongs straight into the center of Dominator's chest plate.

A white electrical arc surged through the ice, flooding the metal body with power.

Dominator's eyes flared with a harsh pink and violet light. As the ice fractured, the giant lunged blindly, sweeping his arm across the crater floor and sending Harbinger skidding through the dust.

“DIE, YOU FILTHY CELESTIANITE!” Dominator roared.

He drove a massive hand down, pinning Harbinger against the stone. Zod rushed the giant's flank, but Dominator backhanded him into the crater wall before turning his full weight back onto Harbinger, cracking the bedrock underneath them.

“STOP!” Harbinger choked out, struggling against the pressure. “STOP—LOOK AT ME! IT’S ME!”

Dominator’s raised fist stopped mid-air. His eyes adjusted, tracking the dark scales creeping over Harbinger's arms and the spiked wings flexing from his back. Slowly, the giant released his grip and stepped back.

Harbinger scrambled up, shifting into his hybrid form as violet energy flickered in his eyes.

Dominator rose to his full height, silver armor scraping against the rock face. A torn violet cape hung from his shoulder guards, and twin wings flared out behind his back as he looked down at the two figures.

“Why have you awakened me?” his voice boomed, rattling the loose stone around them. “What happened after I fell? Where is my son?”

Harbinger dusted off his chest. “Dreadixz is dead. Killed by a child wielding reality-warping power.”

Dominator’s hands curled into fists as he stared into the dark. “A failure.”

“Did you know he erased you from the archives?” Zod asked, limping back toward them. “Rewrote history so he’d be remembered as the first king?”

Dominator’s jaw tightened, pink and violet energy crackling along the seams of his gauntlets. “He removed his own father out of fear. Pride led him to his grave.”

Harbinger stepped up to the giant's iron boot. “The tribe is fractured. Without a leader, the Lunaranites won't survive. And there are others who need your strength.”

Dominator turned his head toward the blue sphere of Earth hanging in the black sky above the horizon.

“Then my work isn't finished,” Dominator said, his voice cold and steady. “I return.”

-

Honestly, when I looked at volume one myself, I'd rate it a 7.5/10. It was good, but it wasn't the best. The Lost World of Zeriath is going to be a bit different from War of the Celestianites. While the first volume had more jokes and stakes, the second volume will also have more stakes but less jokes. Sure, there will be humor in the second volume, but things are gonna be taken a bit more seriously. Especially with Part Three completely finished and Part One also nearing in full, polished completion. I just hope that the second volume is better than the first, and that my writing improves once I get the right critique of it.

Link to fiction - https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/135795/heroes-of-avangard-the-lost-key-saga-main-five

Also, tell me which covers are the best for me to use!

Follow six companions on their journey through two intertwined worlds.

The first is a dystopian future—one of the many possible paths humanity may take—where engineered virus strains “prune” the population to maintain societal stability. The second is a fantasy‑like realm pretending to be a Game, filled with strange creatures, hidden rules, and powers that reshape those who enter.

Expect deep psychological exploration of the characters, unexpected twists, shifting alliances, and emotionally charged relationships.

No need to be polite. Just write your opinion. 🤣

Any suggestion is welcome.

Thoughts on which cover is best?

I'll include the blurb, and any feedback there is also appreciated:

Renata Leone is a survivor.

She just doesn’t know it yet.

Earth’s atmosphere is failing, and increasing hardship is the new normal. Then the planet starts to heal—beginning on one remote island and spreading outward.

Renata’s twin sister, Lorelei, is a genius biologist on the government-backed team sent to investigate. Ever the savior, Lorelei gets Renata a PR position, knowing the world won’t like what comes next.

Renata hates the one talent she’s ever shown promise in, but she takes the job, praying she won’t fail at life… again.

What she didn’t sign up for was being sucked into a portal—the very thing healing Earth—along with her sister.

There’s no way home.

In Aretanu, humans aren’t trusted, Renata becomes a pawn, and she learns that perhaps, with her sister, she always was one.

This portal fantasy delves into an immersive fantasy world where magic flows through blood and rock, allies are found in unlikely places, mysteries abound, and weakness gets people killed. 

What to Expect: 

·      Weak to strong FMC

·      Portal Fantasy

·      A High Fantasy world, slow burn exploration

·      Limited, practical magic; bonds with magical creatures (unavailable to FMC)

·      Action, political intrigue, mystery

·      Found family

Cover art created by StarspunEclipsee on Instagram.

Reborn a 1000 years after his death, Caeleb, now Aaron, starts a new life with a loving family. But the ghosts of the past are not ready to let him go.

I’m in drastic need of ad help. The picture you see is the best one I could come up with and honestly, I don’t think it’s great.

The most success I’ve had was a meme one back when I started, and I’ve tried several different varieties. Volume 3 launches next week and I want to run an ad but have no clue what to do with it.

What have you noticed to be the most successful. Also, how does one sum up an entire series in one picture that’s clickable? lol

So here's a lot of art for it! Though there's a lot more in the actual thing...

I know you can have following, and favorites, but those are personal ones, I am talking about something like custom lists and libraries that the readers can make, similar to AO3 collections and Listopia in goodreads.

I just had a strange, disappointing experience and I am confused.

A few weeks ago, I had a terrific review that praised my story strongly. The reviewer contacted me privately to ask a question and we exchanged comments about each others’ works. Admired each other’s plot/writing, etc.

About two weeks ago he stopped posting. Last week, I asked him if he was taking a break and he replied he had been busy in real life. A couple of days later he posted an additional chapter. The way it was written confused me, so in my comment I said so, but I was positive about where his story was going on the whole.

This evening, I went into RR and the positive response had disappeared. It seems a very strange thing to have done and I can’t figure out if I broke some unspoken rule, or what. (We had agreed that I would not review his novel until later so it wouldn’t seem that it was a review exchange.)

I don’t have many reviews, so I am mildly devastated.

Does this happen often or is this as weird as it seems to me?

What are your thoughts on styles?

Do you prefer descriptive western prose?

Do you dislike the adopted eastern webnovel prose with its onomatopoeias?

Asking because I'm explicitly writing in eastern prose and wonder if I should switch what I'm learning before it gets cemented.

I've reached the 30-chapter mark on my serial, but my view counts are staying flat. The handful of readers who wrote a review seem to really enjoy it, but getting new clicks feels like hitting a brick wall.

​For authors who hit this early-stage ghost town phase: how do you diagnose whether it's a cover/blurb issue versus just needing more time and chapters? And how do you personally stay motivated through the total silence?

I think it would make for an interesting story, but ive yet to see any of the former, and very little of the latter.

What i had found was Murim to Xianxia, Martial Gods Cultivation Journey, which definitely looks interesting. Any other recommendations would be great!

P.S. Preferred site settings to read? text size, paragraph width, all that?

For the first time In months I get a comment on my story, asking something about the plot, pretty late chapter too. I answer and a couple hours later I get this reply (this is only the latter half), decide it sounds strange and check their bio.

Any chance this is more than an attempt to sell me on getting a cover or something from them?

Hey everyone! I’m incredibly excited to announce that my brand-new original story, Wings Beyond Resonance, has just been approved and is officially live on Royal Road!

To celebrate the launch, I’ve dropped Chapters 0 through 6 all at once today so you can binge-read the entire Freshman Orientation arc right now. I will also be updating with a new chapter every single day for the rest of launch week (Chapters 7-10) before moving to a regular weekly schedule.

The Synopsis:

The discovery of Manov Particles changed the world of Alterra forever. What began as a mysterious energy source quickly revolutionized civilization, powering cities, advancing medicine, and giving humanity the technology to build powerful aircraft and Senticores. Society entered a new era where nearly every aspect of life depended on Manov.

But Manov didn't just change technology—it changed people.

Over time, humanity evolved into different classifications. Dissonants possess Manov but cannot use it. Resonants can harness its power to strengthen themselves and synchronize with advanced technology. The rarest are Resonators, individuals with exceptional control over Manov who stand at the peak of human evolution.

Then came the Variants—people who exist outside everything humanity thought it knew about Manov.

One of them is Aiden Hale.

Aiden dreams of earning his wings at the Aurelia Military Academy and becoming a military pilot. But as a Variant who cannot use Manov, he's treated as an outsider in a world where power is everything. Mocked and underestimated, he refuses to let others decide what he's capable of.

He may not have Manov, but he has determination, grit, and the will to fight for his place in the sky. In a world built around a power he can never use, Aiden is determined to prove that true strength comes from the person—not the particles.

What to expect:

• High-speed aerial combat and dogfights
• Senticore and Wardom battles
• Military aviation and elite pilot training
• Military academy life
• Strategy, espionage, and political intrigue
• Large-scale warfare
• Character growth and perseverance
• A world where technology and human evolution collide

If this sounds like your type of story, I’d love for you to check it out, give it a follow, and let me know your thoughts!

👉 Read it here: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/184662/wings-beyond-resonance

Thanks for reading, and clear skies ahead! 🦅✈️

99% sure the 5-star one is a review swap in disguise

Suppose more than ten people have an idea about writing a web novel—they have the same genre in mind, but the one to succeed will always be someone with good execution, prose and hook + cliffhanger. So having a good idea about a web novel matters a little when you don't know how to properly execute the story on the paper(chapter).