Taking a Walk Along the Royal Road

It’s a bit of a surreal feeling looking back on the last two years and realizing that, after what feels like a lifetime, I’ve done what I set out to. When people set out to “become an author,” they often have a lot of (completely unfounded) ideas about what that will look like. I was no different.

One of the biggest stars in my sky was writing a series. In the beginning, it was a fantasy epic. Spanning decades, containing a massive cast of characters and an intricately woven plot. Let’s all just pretend I wasn’t convinced you have to have a meticulously built world, too. That’s a discussion for another time.

Eight years and some odd months after I said to myself, “I’m going to be an author,” the final chapter of my first ever completed series went up on Royal Road today. I’ve written plenty of books. 14-ish, now—if my count is correct (it likely isn’t, I don’t pay attention to these things). I’ve written two novellas, and I’ve lost track of the short fiction somewhere along the way. Writing a series is different. Different in a lot of ways that I hadn’t expected.

I think it’s worthwhile to take the time to reflect on our lives. On the lessons we’ve learned doing the things we set out to do. To reorient and give ourselves a direction for the future. Also, writing essays is fun (I highly encourage it, especially for anyone who wants to be a writer). So here we are, looking back over the past couple of years, and asking what writing and actually finishing Legend of Ascension has come to mean.

Buckle up (it won’t be that exciting).

Expectations

Maybe it’s a symptom of my own (at times) over-inflated ego, but I firmly believe that to be an artist of any kind that one must possess a certain audacity within their heart. My own aspirations for this endeavor were nothing, if not audacious.

Initially, I wanted Legend of Ascension (LoA from here out) to be a nine-book series. Hence “The Nine Realms” on the Royal Road version of the story. Each book was to be 100-120k words long, so right about a million words when all was said and done. Seemed reasonable. Never mind the fact that my lifetime total since getting “serious” about writing was only about 700-750k at that point. I’d written that much already, right? I’d completed (at the time) eight entire novels! I’d basically just be doing what I’d already done. Turns out writing a series is a different sort of beast.

Also, in the way that my aspirations often get away from me, a not insignificant part of me thought I’d be an overnight success. I had been putting a lot of practice in over the years. I’d been studying craft, I’d been participating in critique groups, rejections from magazines were at the point where I was getting more personalized ones than forms. I’d even gotten some short fiction published. And of course that would all lead to me swimming in my pool filled with hundred-dollar bills aboard my yacht.

Clearly, that didn’t happen. At least I remained grounded enough to maintain some connection to reality. As high as my aspirations may have been, I knew what was likely to happen. I would release LoA into the sea of fiction already swimming on the Internet, and it would sink to the bottom. Unnoticed, insignificant, and forever unseen by all except myself, and maybe the five to ten people that chanced upon it.

That didn’t happen either. And much to my dismay, I found myself in a weird sort of limbo, unsure of what to do or how to proceed.

Reality

What happened when I launched on Royal Road was I started getting views. Within a day, I had something like 20 followers and a couple hundred views. A part of my let that spark of audacity turn into a flame. A flame that was quickly extinguished, but it did burn, if only for a time. This was in December 2023, and Recently Updated was still a decent enough source of traffic. I was updating daily, and on New Year’s Eve I hit Rising Stars. I bought an ad, thinking that this was it. This was my big break.

I think my Rising Stars run peaked at thirty-seven. I had about seven hundred followers before I dropped off. It took me another few months to crack a thousand. I crested one million views in March or April of this year; about fifteen months after I launched. I never made it to two thousand followers before I stubbed. My biggest month on Patreon brought in $180.

So far as I could tell, I was in limbo. Surrounded on one side by obvious flops (what I’d reasonably expected) and on the other by runaway success (what I’d audaciously hoped for), I didn’t know what to do. Combined with the early reception that was a lot harsher than I’d expected or was in any way prepared for, I almost quit. Those half-star ratings hurt.

This was about the time I started getting more active in COTEH, and honestly, I don’t think I would have kept on without the support of other authors. I got some great advice regarding the future of my book from crown, and I decided to press on. I’m glad I did; I’m on Amazon now because of that advice.

However, another problem reared its head around the time I decided to stick it out. A problem that only grew the more I wrote, and the further in I got. That problem was scope—length—and the fact that a million words is a lot.

I started running out of steam. The undertaking I’d set myself too was so much bigger than I’d realized. By the time I was finishing up the third arc of LoA and starting work on the fourth, I found myself increasingly grasping to keep things moving. To keep them engaging and entertaining.

A common complaint I see levied at a lot of long-running serials, all much longer than mine was at the time, is that they get bloated. They start to feel pointless. I was starting to see that in my own writing, and couldn’t see a way to deliver on the intended nine books without falling into that same trap. That’s when I decided to cut it short. Of course this left me with a different problem, one of “how do I condense five books into two?” I decided that was a problem for future me, trusted my skills and instincts, and forged ahead with that in mind.

Lessons

When I began LoA, the concept of an offramp wasn’t one I was familiar with. Fully intending to write nine books from the outset, a huge part of arc one was laying the groundwork for the overarching series plot. I will be writing all future projects with offramps from now on. A second-order takeaway is that now I have a much better idea of what the writing of a series (well, trilogy, given how I’ve done the Amazon release) entails. That experience alone has given me a great deal of perspective that I lacked before. As they say, experience is something you get only after you really need it.

Another important thing that I learned was the need to temper your expectations. And to realize that when you’re entering new territory, you really don’t have a good baseline to build reasonable expectations around. This has served me pretty well with the Amazon release. I’m very happy with it, even though it hasn’t exploded in popularity (like I secretly hoped it would—again).

LoA was always meant to be my learning project. I knew I was entering unknown territory back when I first found out about the Royal Road to Kindle Unlimited pipeline, looked at all my frustrations chasing the world of traditional publishing—which is even worse now than it was then—and thought to myself “I can do this.” I knew there was going to be a lot to learn.

I had no idea.

The original version of arc one had a ton of “anti-market” stuff in it. And readers pilloried me for it. Lesson learned. Also, at the time I’d only read Cradle and Forge of Destiny. Yeah, reading Cradle was the thing that breathed life back into my writing by giving me permission to write the things I’d always wanted to, but didn’t because I was chasing tradpub and I knew they would never sell to an agent. Yes, this was what I should have been writing all those years and will continue to write. But the lack of genre knowledge showed. And I like to think the genre knowledge I gained by reading ever more progression fantasy is a lot of the reason basically anyone who stuck through those rougher early chapters stuck around for the long haul.

Read your genre comps. It’s more important than you realize.

And probably the most important lesson I learned was the necessity of having a process that works and is sustainable. The absolute grind of writing a web serial has taught me a lot about my own process as a writer, what my limits are, and how I can maintain a much higher output than I ever imagined I could. A lot of that comes down to refining my writing process.

I’d always “sort of” outlined. Usually a page worth of bullet points, with a loose story structure in mind. A few scattered notes for characters, and maybe a list of location names for my worldbuilding. The rest was mostly discovery written. As LoA grew, so did the amount of minutiae I had to keep up with. So did the requirements for planning in order to keep up with the breakneck pace of serial publishing. Anyone who’s familiar with my outline and notecard screenshots in COTEH has an idea of the level of detail I go into when planning a book now. That process is a direct consequence of writing LoA. I couldn’t have done it otherwise.

The Future

The first volume of Legend of Ascension, The Shrouded Peaks, is out on Amazon. Getting there was its own mountain to climb, but again, it’s one that I’m glad I did. Sales aren’t anything spectacular, but they’re better than I have any real right to expect. Common wisdom is that you shouldn’t expect to make money off self-publishing. Hell, to hear most people talk, you’ll just lose money.

My modest Patreon, built from my Royal Road audience, funded like 90% of the Amazon release. I made that last 10% back within the first month, and I’ve still got two more books to release (The Dawn Palace comes out August 12th). What I have is a stable foundation to build a career as a self-published author.

My next series, this time a LitRPG, is already in the early planning stages. Maybe I’ll share some early stuff if you ask nicely. I have a much better sense of how to calibrate my expectations, how to write in my genre, and how to best engage my audience. The future is mine to take hold of. And as I keep learning and growing as an author, there’s really only excitement (and more than a bit of audacity) for what I can expect.