The Year of the Snake, now coming to a close, promised introspection and wisdom. To help with this, my project for the year was writing a serialised novel on Royal Road: a four-volume series about ancient alien power facilities hidden inside a gas giant, complete with robot staff, errant human refugees and explorers, and an anxious off-switch masquerading as a housekeeper. It was tremendous fun and offered some interesting introspection, though the wisdom arrived as a single, serviceable nugget that has been stated elsewhere, but bears repeating here:

Whatever you do, don’t be boring.

Royal Road has the particular distinction of being all about “engage the reader”. There’s no performative aspect à la BookTok, there are barely any awards or contests, and readers can read for free, meaning they have zero investment beyond their desire to know what happens next. It’s an engagement sandbox that Scheherazade could have only dreamed of. Interestingly, a lot of stories on the platform cheerfully smash through several writing rules.

Start with the protagonist waking up? Practically a must for isekai.

Head hopping? More like head-hopscotch.

Adverbs? Sprinkle liberally.

Errors? Nah, your good.

But don’t ever be boring. These readers will drop a book the moment their attention starts to waver, and on Royal Road you can see this happening in real time (a very useful tool for introspective writers seeking wisdom). For instance, the reader numbers dropped to sixty per cent at my Chapter 8, suggesting there was a problem with the previous chapter. I went back to check and indeed found Chapter 7 to be meandering, confusing, and plodding. The problem lay in the structure, which swung erratically from exposition to complication to more exposition, ending on alarm. I took away a few hundred of the dullest words, put the complication in front of the merged exposition, and added an argument.

And indeed, the drop-off disappeared as newer readers started flowing through Chapter 7.

Royal Road won’t teach you beautiful prose, but it will show you whether anyone cares what happens next.