How to post on Royal Road: from account to Rising Stars

Royal Road describes itself as "the home of web novels and fan fictions", and its knowledgebase is unusually specific about how publishing there works: what the approval check looks for, what each ranking measures, and what the site itself recommends for growth. This guide walks that path using only what Royal Road's own support pages state, and where the platform publishes no number, it says so instead of borrowing one.

Account, first fiction, first chapter

• Register an account, then click Write in the navigation bar to open the Author Dashboard.
• Click Add New to start a fiction submission.
• Fill in the Title and Description, select genres and additional tags, and enter your first chapter's title and content. Author tools are limited during submission; the fuller toolset unlocks once the fiction is approved.
• A cover is optional: upload one at 400x600 pixels or larger and let the cropping tool fix the aspect ratio, or skip it and the default fiction cover is used. Covers must respect artist copyright and the site's mature content rules.

The description doubles as the synopsis, must be at least 50 characters, and cannot be added later, so write it before you submit (the craft is the same as any selling description; see how to write a book blurb). A fiction needs at least one genre to be submitted and can carry up to four; genres display ahead of the more specific tags in listings and rankings.

The approval check

Every new fiction passes a manual staff check before it goes live. Expect 12 to 24 hours, at most 48; the knowledgebase states that around 10% of submitted novels are rejected on average. The check covers plagiarism, links in the synopsis, fanfiction tagging, sexual content, political or religious content, and disturbing content. Three practical consequences:

• Donation links, Patreon accounts and shortened links such as Discord invites do not belong in the description. Donation buttons are added later, through the dashboard, where the platform wants them.
• If the story is posted elsewhere, staff may ask for proof of ownership, for example a note edited into the other site's description.
• If the story uses someone else's world, system or characters, it must carry the fanfiction tag or it will be rejected. Fanfictions cannot buy internal advertising or add donation requests unless the original author gives permission.

A rejection arrives with the problems named; fix them and resubmit, and the fiction is checked again.

Chapters, schedules and the surrounding tools

Once approved, chapters are added from New Chapter under the Content tab. The chapter editor's core fields are Title, Author Notes and Chapter Content, and the options around them are worth knowing by name:

• Scheduled release publishes a chapter automatically at a set date and time, converted to your local timezone. It is not available before approval.
• Public schedule is a setting that shows readers the date of the next scheduled chapter: the platform's own version of announcing your cadence (see choosing a release schedule).
• Drafts can be written ahead and scheduled; silent release skips the follower notification for a chapter; lock comments closes a chapter's comment section; polls can sit above or below a chapter.
• A visual table editor exists for stat boxes and the like (LitRPG formatting conventions), and volumes organize the fiction page.
• Royal Road counts a "page" as 275 written words for its page counts.

Fiction status is partly automatic. Ongoing is the default; Hiatus is applied automatically after 35 days without an update, and Inactive after 180 days; Dropped and Completed are set by the author. A completed fiction under 20,000 words is automatically tagged as a short story. There is also Stub, for fictions no longer fully available on the site, typically because of an exclusivity contract such as Amazon's Kindle Unlimited; stubs are excluded from certain ranking lists.

Tags, content warnings and content rules

Tags are a fine-grained system of themes and tropes: readers search by combinations of tags, and the knowledgebase's own example of misuse is tagging a story Hard Sci-fi when it clearly contains magic and fantasy elements. Genres and tags are expected to be accurate more than exhaustive.

Content warnings are actively checked at submission, each with a published definition: Sexual Content, Profanity, Disturbing Content, Graphic Violence, AI-Assisted Content and AI-Generated Content. The content guidelines behind them are stricter than most serial platforms: "Erotic fictions are banned from the site", and the Sexual Content warning is permitted but not when sexual content is the fiction's core element (verified against the guidelines on 2026-09-27). The same rules separate AI-Assisted work from AI-Generated work in tagging and keep AI text confined to chapter pages.

Ratings and the discovery lists

Readers rate fictions, and the lists those ratings feed are documented in the knowledgebase:

• Best Rated ranks all fictions by combined rating and review score, with weight on both the average rating and the number of ratings.
• Trending uses "complex calculations to try and pick the popular stories that aren't too popular", and is limited to 50 fictions per genre.
• Rising Stars lists "the newest, hottest fictions on the platform", and the knowledgebase is candid that the ranking "rotates often and staying for more than a week is hard".
• Popular this Week, Latest Updates, New Releases and the Ongoing and Complete lists complete the set, each with a genre filter. Some rankings refresh every 15 minutes, others once a day.

The recommendation engines only list fictions that are Ongoing or Completed, which makes kept-schedule status a discovery input, not just a courtesy.

What Royal Road itself recommends

The knowledgebase's upload recommendation is the platform's own growth advice, and it is concrete: publish no more than two chapters a day, and on consecutive days; vary the hours you publish to reach readers in different time zones; do not release in bulk; and note that "sporadic uploads get less attention than uploading consistently once every 3 days". On length: the minimum is 500 characters per chapter, the recommendation is to stay under 10,000 words, and "2,000 words tend to be a good stopping point". Royal Road also runs the Writathon, a writing event it holds twice a year.

The Patreon ecosystem around Royal Road serials

Royal Road's own monetization surface is deliberately external. In Donation Settings on the author dashboard you add a PayPal or Patreon link; Royal Road takes no percentage, because the money is held externally; and the donation bar then appears on the fiction page and at the bottom of every chapter of approved fictions. Donations are disabled for fanfiction, and PayPal itself requires recipients to be 18 or older.

Everything deeper is the advance-chapter economy: patrons pay to read ahead of the free release, and the buffer becomes the product (Patreon advance chapters, Patreon for authors). The Stub status marks where that road ends for some serials: the story moves to Kindle Unlimited for ebook income, and the stub explains the missing chapters to new readers.

Realistic expectations

Royal Road does not publish audience, traffic or earnings figures for the platform or its authors, so any precise number you meet elsewhere about how serials perform there did not come from Royal Road. What the platform's own pages do establish is the shape of the odds: approval is fast but rejects around 10% of submissions; Rising Stars turns over so quickly that a week on it is notable; recommendations require Ongoing or Completed status; and the site's own growth advice reduces to a consistent cadence, correct tagging and chapter lengths you can sustain. Those are the levers you control: the schedule, the chapter ending, and the canon you keep.

For how Royal Road compares with the other English-language routes, see where to publish a web serial.