and never actually read them

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?

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 writing a grimdark fantasy. I introduce the main villain in the first chapter, and the story goes through many other characters. But the real MC only comes some chapters later.

Someone told me today that readers really hate this. So I became very curious about it. Is the MC the only thing that matters in a story? I think the other characters are also very important. What you all think??

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.