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Guys, here's my new ad for Royal Road.
What do you think about it?

>>25041683
If you have that much money to throw away for nothing, give it to me

>>25041729
Don't care, didn't ask.
Just tell me if you would click on it.

>>25041736
Of course not. I won't even see it, since I'm using adblock, like any sane person.

>>25041736
> would click on it.
Nope, it frankly looks awful. There's no art style, it looks like something knocked up in 3 minutes in Paint.

>>25041683
Post it, I want to see how comically low the CTR rate is on that

>>25041847
You've just wounded my honor, so the challenge is accepted!!!

>>25041683
its hard to even tell what it is

>>25041892
At least it represents the story accurately

>>25041683
bad lettering, dynamic blur is ok
looks like nothing, no call to action, no wit

ESL grammar (or sounds like it)

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>>25041917
here my input
ever thought about doing something like this?
>>25041683

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>>25041921
Yeah, my original plan was to remake this image using the Volume 5 cover and add that the book was over. But then I was struck by inspiration, and sorry, but I have to follow my heart!!!

>>25041936
- lacks dynamic action
- got noisy text
+ for face which draws attention
+ for sales pitch volume complete
+ for originality and intrigue
it is better than the other one you shows going by my marketing hat

>>25041683
Idea is good. Readability is dogshit. Use more readable text and one of the faces from your new covers.

>>25041936
You have attracted attention. Now it's time to do something with it. Write something worth reading this time.
When you start your new story: Trim the narrative to the essentials. Find elements that work. Remove self-indulgences. Remember you're writing slop; you can have a larger vision, but you need to drag the readers every step of the way. Play to the audience. Bait and reward them, arc-by-arc, until they are well conditioned.

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>>25042000
>Write something worth reading this time.
COPE AND SEETHE

>>25042022
Only /tv/ crossboarders use the word cinema to describe anything

>>25042000
>You have attracted attention.
stop encouraging his delusion, he really hasn't. he got two comments on his series finale chapter. realistically he can leverage like 10 people if he made a new chapter to shoutout his new story. he'll functionally be starting from complete scratch again even if he launched today, much less 2 years from now like he said he intends

>>25042032
das is Kino

Intelligence agencies are jewing us into buying 4cuck pass. I remember a few months ago when I was replying constructively to /wng/ anons aplenty but now half of my mental activity is spent solving captchas. Fucking gookmoot

>>25042032
/tv/ never uses that word, it's more a twitch meme.

>>25042069
If telling triangles apart from circles consumes half of your brain power, I don't think you have enough left over to even put sage in the right field.

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>>25042069
I make dozens of posts a day, every day (not just here all over). The pass is a no brainer. My time is worth far more than the cost of a pass.
You can do the math and see that it's like ten captchas per penny or something ridiculous. I haven't been able to solve a captcha in years. I'm not wasting brain cycles on that when I could be describing the interior of an adventurers guildhall for the billionth time.

>>25042088
what weak ass captchas are you getting? theyre genuinely time consuming these days

>>25042096
It's just you. Everyone else's changed weeks ago. You must be from a place full of shitposters.

>>25042096
Verification n0t required for lit for me often. On the more active board it requires them and I solved like 20 today.

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>>25042096
Sorry, I'm too cool for that shit

>>25042104
im from a city in the US

>>25042109
Exactly.

>>25042114
so where is exempt? Venezuela? lmfao

>>25042088
I have OCD and I like seeing "Captcha Done." before sending a reply but it resets every 20 seconds so it fucks with my train of thought
>>25042090
This

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Pain is the prime element of character development. How much are you willing to make your protagonist suffer?

>>25042121
>but it resets every 20 seconds so it fucks with my train of thought
Have you considered...only getting and solving the captcha when you're ready to post?

>>25042130
On a scale of zero to Robin Hobb, probably somewhere in the low-to-middle range. It is something I need to get better (worse?) at.

>>25042130
I took my MC, who I explicitly promised would survive and later do great things, to within 20 seconds of death after permanently crippling him, twice. It was basically torture porn and I wouldn't write it that way again.
Now, I will say that NOBODY ever complained his power was unearned after all that. Not a single time, no matter how much bullshit I pulled out without foreshadowing and after timeskips. This suggests that "earned power" doesn't have to be direct. Suffering at some point early in the narrative stacks, like currency in a bank, to be spent later on powerups. Think Solo Leveling, too. The MC suffers and nearly dies in the first double labyrinth/portal thing, and after that his powerups are mostly unearned. But it feels okay because "well he nearly died and now he's on that system grind so it's fine."
The main problem with this is that readers don't like reading suffering arcs, but do like OPMCs, so you have to strike a balance unless you just start with them OP.

>>25042130
Winnie readers don't want that. They just bitch and moan if the MC is even slightly inconvenienced.

>>25042153
They also really don't like it if he isn't a hyper-rational omniscient genius who progresses through the plot like he has a strategy guide.

>>25042148
> readers don't like reading suffering arcs, but do like OPMCs
Just look at the current Rising Stars, literally half of them have "OP MC" in the title.

>>25042140
I consider three layers of pain for character building, basically: the active, the passive, and the retroactive suffering. Exemplified by a trauma being retroactive, a curse being passive, a wound being active. They can be mixed during certain events for greater shock value, ultimately it's like pulling teeth whenever an opportunity arises.

>>25042158
Well yeah, but you have to go really absurdly overboard to get complaints about that.

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I've read up to chapter 14, when MC accepts to take an apprentice, and I got to say, this is very nice, wholesome, and relaxing. Hardly any violence, no swearing. Obvious Frieren influence, which also is 90% slice of life and only 10% fighting assorted monsters and somewhat organized demons (equivalent of videogames bosses).

Primal Hunter had me believing RR only wants to read about murderhobo protagonists killing everything they see in the most brutal way possible. I'm glad this is not entirely true. Maybe my (in process) magical girl fiction will meet some degree of success when I finally manage to publish it.

Thank you ArcaneCadence for proving wholesome webnovels can be popular too!

imagine shilling AbstruseRhythm's shit for free

who said I didn't pay him?

>>25042198
You can't afford to, with patreon nosediving

>>25042201
mean

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>>25042069
I don't know bwo they don't seem that bad? you're fucked if you're on mobile though. worst part is the AI people use to spam or argue with people probably get past it no problem.

>>25042204
lol mine are like 4 pages of "find the page with 2 4 spiked stars" and the pages are all full of stars either 4 prongs or 5 prongs each and blend in with each other. or like 'find the correct shape' and it's a bunch of weird shapes all rotated differently. might get anywhere from 1-3 trials of that for a single captcha too. it's an actual slog

>>25042209
Mine used to be like that but they've been slowly getting easier, I think it's got something to do with aged cookies as maybe if you shitpost a certain amount, I don't phone post becasue the mobile ones are exactly as you describe though total ass.
Half the boards either feel dead or full of bots anyway.

>>25042209
Those took effort for the first two times, nowadays I don't even have to consciously look at the pictures to pick the odd one out and it's just tap tap tap. Man, the world must be so harsh for non-geniuses

>>25042090
I've never seen that icon near your name that says Pass User. Or rather paid attention to it, I'm sure. It even says the year. Doesn't that deanonymize you? I'm assuming you can toggle it on or off but still strange to have an identifier like that built in

RR is so stupid, why iare isekai and litRPG separate tags? 90% of isekai is menuslop.

Whatever happened to that Ink'cord event? I was busy thorough december and couldn't even check RR's main page. I remember it was supposed to be a simultaneous +50 fic release, a lot of them braindead slopmaxxing but a few had interesting premises too.

>>25042230
didn't that discord blow up due to people somehow learning of it's connection to an incredibly shady publisher with slave tier contracts?
shadowlight publishing or something?

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>>25042231
What the FUCK??!??! Requesting all RR loremasters itt

I swear vengeance... Ink Sect... betrayers of the Dao... mark my words...

who cares about all the meta dog shit

talk about winnies

>>25042235
loremaster here
Immersive Ink mods were in bed with grossly exploitative publisher Shadow Light Press, helped funnel clueless authors into them. The contract SLP was giving to authors is genuinely funny to read through. Drama ensued and Immersive Ink admins deleted the server. Got big enough people like Daniel Greene covered the topic, was very funny
Go find the infinite reddit threads if you care about the details
>Daniel Greene covered it
And I think he deleted that video lol, couldn't find it. he mustve been threatened with legal action

>800 words summary
Your blurb is more important than your first chapter. If you SOMEHOW manage to mess it up, your audience will be as lively as kirk.

>>25042263
>Your blurb is more important than your first chapter.
Disagree. Tons of people don't even read blurbs, they just go straight into chap 1 so long as your story has the right tags and stats and recs or whatnot
There's maybe a case for it being more important when you're at the 0-150 follower stage, pre RS though

My webnovel takes place in a medieval fantasy setting with massive cities built using magic, comparable in size and population to modern megacities. Superhero mages and monsters and supervillains literally fly around destroying large areas of the cities as they fight. Can I get away with labeling my fiction under the Superheroes tag because of this?

>>25042270
Why wouldn't you be able to? This doesn't even seem like an edge case.

>>25042270
Would you be fine if you went to see a capeshit blockbuster and got some fantasyslop with medieval hillybillies? No, you'd get a refund

Also, it makes zero sense to build huge cities if there's magic that can level it all and kill a billion people in a blink

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>>25042262
Somehow I'm still in that discord (right pic) and now can see it's completely nuked jej. I also remember summarizing this full list of Ink's launchapalooza fictions. One does not need to imagine what terrible fate befell them.

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>>25042292
>magic that can level it all and kill a billion people in a blink
You mean like pic related?

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>>25042227
So isekai autists can filter out menuslop

>>25042039
>2 year hiatus
what the fuck do I read now

>>25042307
F Gardner

>>25042307
Sky Pride

>>25042270
Do they have costumes? Do they have secret identities? or are they just part of a guild?
You could do it but if the only tropes of super heroism you have is powers and antagonism towards "evil" I expect people who want cape shit to seethe at you.

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>>25042220
It's designed for flexing, but other than being able to brag and skip the captcha, and the secret 4chan gold board, it doesn't do anything. I believe posts are still tracked by IP, but yeah my posts are probably tied to the email and crypto wallet used to pay for the pass. It's still possible to buy one semi-anonymously. Oh, and bans for posts using the pass mean the pass is "banned" until the ban expires, of course. So there is some tracking going on of the pass/IP that's banned.

AFAIK pass info hasn't ever been leaked in any kind of data breach so in terms of posts being deanonymized, I think it's the same as it's been since the FBI took over when /b/ messed with football. Nothing I post is even close to illegal so I'm not too worried about it, even though I'm careful and paranoid as a rule.

Actually I'm much more paranoid about getting my author persona tied to 4chan, that would be worse than having my post history tied to my IRL identity in my opinion.

What are the gu?

>>25042404
something something mistress

What are the essentias?

>>25042418
People with a hole in their souls.

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>"unique" magic system
>exact same utilities as every other

>>25042429
My unique magic system is unique because I just ripped off Starsector ship combat

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>>25042429
Hopefully by the time you notice, you're already invested.

>>25042440
QRD?

>>25042440
>rapesector

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>>25042447
heatbar instead of manabar, decays instead of regens, can do active cooling where it goes faster but you can's use magic, if you go over limit you go into forced active cooling period but it's slower and cripples you for the duration
active and passive defenses, active defenses have varying coverage and positional adjustment properties and build up heat proportional to incoming damage, passive defenses are basically battletech type ablative armor at the basic level (naturally higher tiers tend to diversity with unique characteristics)
really it's not that much of a deviation from conventional magic system, which you wouldn't expect since it's based directly on Starsector, but the small differences are enough
different damage types are more effective on different things
i also ended up adding in more or less spellslot-type magic as a way of doing missiles, which in SS are limited-ammo high-power

>>25042468
I was there to see it come into being, Sneedault Chuckoyan, Buckbreakers, etc. I actually made one of the most widely known posts about the ongoing debacle regarding the code.

>>25042479
in case you don't understand what is going on in that image, tldr:
Noah Tahl inserted code into his mods that caused the ships from his mods to selectively do more damage to ships from the mods of people he didn't like, to take less damage, so on and so forth. He then tried to play damage control when this got discovered and was seen seething in discord about learning how to obfuscate code. The screenshot is from a mod called Buckbreakers, which is a joke mod that, among other things, is meant to mock Noah. It goes far beyond that but this is the main explanation.

Pouring one out to kemonofags

>>25042579
down again? for the gorillionth time, eh?

>>25042404
the southern barbarian demon insects implanted into humans

the savage miao tribes puts six times six insects into a jade box and the one survivor will create the life extinguishing poisoning that can even fell mighty soul ascencion elders

the only way to cure is to have sex.... tragic
that only our protagonist is the only male in 1000 mu radius and the jade like beauty inhaled it

>>25042404
pokemon but with more dao flavor

>>25042617
I like dao, dao just makes everything better

>>25042630
the dao is everything, but the dao is also nothing...

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>>25042429
Mine is unique

>>25042631
the dao of nothingness does not include the infinite

>>25042728
Looks like windows XP popups, could be a metanarrative about being stuck in a retro gaming system

Any decent (westfag) academyslop?

>>25042429
my system revolves around blowing bubbles

my system is evil and self-defeating and the only winning move is not to play

my system is about designing your own system, the more you post about it on imageboards the more powerful it becomes

>>25042932
then you must be the master baiter

>>25042873
Certainly not Song of the Gift-Giver (*barf*).

I think Bunny Girl Evolution has an academy arc though. You'll have to pirate because it's stubbed (or patreon/amazon/ku I guess).

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>>25042429
My main character uses xianxia sword magic in a westslop setting THOUGH

>>25042990
BGE is already stubbed? Man those sloppers work fast.

>>25043030
Unironically kino
Also want a classical magic missile shitting wizard in xianxia

>>25043062
reverend insanity begins with fang yuan only capable of casting magic missile 1/day

>Still no good new reincarnated as a babby web literature
>2025+1
I am gonna make through this year if it kills me.

>>25043150
no fuck off and go kill yourself

>>25043202
Is regression okay with you?

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My foolish readers will never realize the romantic interest was actually the author's self insert (me) all along...

>>25043315
gay

>lost my blurb draft
>totally demoralized
>give up and push my launch back to tomorrow
I'm betraying my readers but fuck, I just can't. Totally fried at like that exact moment. I will try again tomorrow.

>>25043315
i do this

>>25043352
This is called continuous foreshadowing. Each of his recent posts has foreshadowed the next. We already know what his next post will be, don't we folks?

>>25043202
Plenty of reincarnated stories start with them as a baby. Then they all do a time skip because everyone knows it's a fucking stupid idea to write about it.

>>25043352
Nigger get real you lost a BLURB draft and you're giving up. Meanwhile I memorized every word of my blurb to give randos an elevator pitch whenever there's a chance. We are the webnovelling elite and we don't need squatters in our midst. Either quit or pay the sponsorship fee to keep posting here.

>>25043410
Nobody cares what failures do

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I'm like constantly sabotaging myself when I try to write. I wanted to make a story where the MC is isekai'd in the world of a ridiculous trash game, and thought that'd be pretty funny. But then I realized, in introducing the premise, I'm effectively telling readers to expect dumb dogshit! The MC reincarnating in a bad game doesn't mean the story itself will be bad! But these retards are not going to be able to put it in the context like that.

>>25042130
I kill my protagonist every other chapter.

Do you think its possible that Cormac McCarthy ever read a web novel before he died?

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>>25042813
It's to reflect that technology evolves.
This is a prompt-like interface for secret things the public is not aware of.

Can anyone shill some decent FeMC isekai novels? Haven't found anything decent on RR in ages.

>FeMC stories by female authors
Overcoming trauma, depression, abuse, insecurity, social anxiety, mental illness, self-harm
>FeMC stories by male authors
Dude with tits battle junkie fucks anything that moves and butchers the rest

>>25043543
Bookworm.

>>25042096
It's far worse on mobile.
You basically have to solve 3 in a row and the most annoying ones that actually require reading the instructions carefully and paying attention.
If you get a single one wrong you have to do 6 correct in a row.

The staff have never liked mobile users and it's consistent with how this place works to make it especially difficult to use 4chan on mobile. It's also why mobile ip addresses get ban appeals auto rejected.

>>25043559
Ew.

>>25043283
Big nope.
>new world
>new womb
>new wee wee
Only!
Regression is just a half assed time loop.
>>25043409
I have already read all the good ones and I don't mind the whole time skipping schtick. The main gripe I have with the sub genre as a whole is that a majority fail to progress their characters past young adolesce. I think the main reason is they have no idea how to write an interesting adult.

Out of curiosity, how simple/complex is (You)r plot? How would you rate it solely on complexity?

>>25043603
I have very simple plotlines which I then make sound intensely complex with my convoluted writing style.

>>25043559
mine does both

>>25043584
In Reverend Insanity MC reincarnates as a 15 yo boy who then acts and behaves according to his age. Such a peak novel.

>>25043704
A Regressor's Tale of Cultivation retroactively refuted that CCP edgeslop

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>read I Became the Youngest Son of a Romance Novel
>Every chapter is just the MC being molested in some way by his mother, sisters and maids

>>25043777
SS isn't great but if you're going to do it then making the boy a victim who is basically powerless against the older women is the right way to do it, dominant shota is totally cringe.

>>25043777
kino

>>25043777
Is mother a virgin???

>>25043763
That's garbage

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>>25043559
>Dude with tits battle junkie fucks anything that moves and butchers the rest
Kino. I will now read your book.

No, your fiction didn't flop because it is off-meta. It flopped because it sucks and is also off-meta.

>>25043979
i know

>>25042180
Arcane's Patreon revenue has decreased like 2k in the past two weeks.
https://www.patreon.com/ArcaneCadence
What happened? They've been updating as consistently as always.

>>25044021
if it gets a manga adaptation it will get bigger

>>25044021
Just america imploding

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>>25044021
The stakes didn't become bigger, they just became

>>25043833
unsubstantiated claim

>>25044035
what happened? I'm completely unplugged from social media and the news
I just hang out in this thread and a couple other hobby generals on 4chan

>>25044057
America invaded Iceland, now they want the iceys to gtfo

>>25044063
most archmage enjoyers were icelandic?

>>25044021
Probably a lot of people don't want to continuously sub. Maybe they'll come back after several months when they feel it's more worth the money. There are many other reasons it could be that has nothing to do with the story itself.

>>25043559
>FeMC stories by female authors
>Overcoming trauma, depression, abuse, insecurity, social anxiety, mental illness, self-harm
I'm pretty sure Seras is female and they write self-insert power-fantasy every single time.
Also for Male authors you need to specify on
>Dude with tits battle junkie fucks anything that moves
That they fuck any woman that moves. It's the lesbianism doesn't count as my waifu being tainted clause.

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>>25042180
>Frieren
I love Frieren. I'm really glad more novels are going with a comfy slice of life atmosphere with some fighting to keep it interesting.
It's a archetype I see done a lot in Japanese Web Novels.
Maybe just the natural progression of taste is after reading a lot of action fighting Web Novels, you become fatigued and the idea of slow paced adventure become less boring and nice change of pace.
Or perhaps more people are getting into Web Novels in general and we're seeing more tastes develop.
Murderhobo slop will probably still reign supreme though.

>>25044021
I think it's just coming down to a more expected sustainable level. Even the stories that do hit that freak level of success take years to get there. MLA took 3 months lol.
It's probably also partly that the story lost the shiny new feeling charm for many and so they unsubbed? It only has a few chaps ahead so unsubbing and keeping up with free releases isnt that painful unlike say Zogarth's millions of chapters ahead. Idk there are a lot of explanations.
The bigger mystery is still how the hell it blew up like it did.

>>25044021
Funny to say this as a webnovel writer but I don't get how people read them as ongoings.
I can handle about 1 to read on a chapter by chapter basis because I'll read it when on the loo. But beyond that I'd rather just read multiple chapters

>>25043410
I'm not giving up, I'm fighting through an unironic japanese cold. I WILL draft a new blurb today on top of two more chapters and I WILL launch on patreon today.
That's a good point though. I embarrassed myself at comic con last year not having an elevator pitch memorized. I'll add that to the to-do list.

>>25044037
What web novels manage that constantly escalating excitement trend? Seems fundamentally impossible.
Web novels in general to me seem to follow a slow and steady enjoyment burn but with kinda weak climax sequences. Exceptions being the more trad novels like EE and WB. Seems like a natural consequence of deprioritizing build up for chapter to chapter interest

>>25044173
I follow about ten ongoings and read about half of them chapter to chapter (double that if you count J-Novel Club translations). The other half I'll wait for chapters to accumulate and binge them. Right now that's Just Add Mana, Dungeon Diver, Taste of Magic, and The Magpie and The Archmage (on JNC it's stuff like Isekai Walking, Notorious No More, Otome Heroine's Fight for Survival, etc). Usually it's stuff with slower pacing where 'things happen' across chapters rather than within chapters.

There's nothing wrong with reading either way. A lot of it depends on readers' preferences. The customer is always right in matters of taste.

>>25044181
True, but most WNs still have exciting moments. MLA has 0 scenes that aren't just "MC destroys opponent instantly". It's just weak aurafarming.

>>25044173
It's fine if the chapters come often enough. Weekly releases or less frequent you can forget about for a year before catching up

>>25044225
Most winnie sloppers have never been fans of pro-wrestling so they don't know the basics of this kind of thing.

Any cool isekai webnovels where at least a big chunk of the plot is the mc trying to bring modern technology into a fantasy world? Preferably western stuff

>>25044297
No, holy shit, fuck off

>>25044310
Anon was asking for a rec, why are you throwing a fit, retard? That's what this thread is for.

>>25044225
I thought aura farming was its whole appeal? If it's bad at that why is it so popular?

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>>25044297

>>25044326
the aurafarming has gotten weaker and weaker as the chapters progress, and the catgirl has zero aura

>>25044332
Okay but you said it has 0 exciting scenes and is just weak aurafarming, so what did it do well to attract its freak levels of success? It sounds like you read it so I'm just wondering, I think MLA is interesting as a case study

>>25044355
>so what did it do well to attract its freak levels of success?
the world and characters are plausible
You read the first ten chapters and it feels real, not just a playground for the protag.

That's the key to any OP MC story imo.

>>25044297
Charles Stross Merchant Princes
It's not a webnovel but nothing you find will be as good at that as it is.

>>25044371
>the world and characters are plausible
that's all it takes?

>>25044377
No you also need to do everything right and get lucky at the same time.

Any recs for something as SOVLFVL as shadow slave? I've been wadding through tons of chinese trash but nothing hits the spot.

>>25044388
>you also need to do everything right
Launch strategy you mean?

>>25044399
Everything.

>>25044401
Including story? Because you seem to think the story isn't very good at one of the only things it should be good at. You say it's never exciting and the aura farming is weak and I would figure an OPMC lives or dies on that
MLA also didn't get any shoutouts etc so it didn't do everything correct strategy wise either, at least not by standard RR advice
I don't know what set it apart to make it blow up but something had to have

you just need a cover with your protag who resembles the latest fotm anime femc

>>25044423
For all we know, the author might have had like 500 facebook friends and told them to check it out, or talked about it at his school. Not every path to success is only through RR itself.

>>25044355
Excluding the main points, those being:
>right place, right time
>luck
>dearth of OPMC from the onset of the fiction, and on the wake of Frieren's success
It also has:
>clean writing, with perfect grammar (albeit soulless, but good enough)
>doesn't try anything too adventuruous or ambitious, so it has wide appeal
>socially awkward MC, man with tits (so still perfectly self-insertable)
>first few scenes are stereotypical and done to death, but done well enough (and anyone that craves OPMC isekai only wants to read done-to-death scenes)
I'd wager the fact that it's dropping Patreons is implicitly because the author did not think much further than doing the classic aura scenes, and the current story is dreadfully directionless. I mean, here's an almost complete summary of the first 'book':
>OPMC archmage wakes up in her favorite vidya and aurafarms a banker. She saves a catgirl from slavers, then they go to the big city by train, where she aurafarms a petty noble. The end.

>>25044166
is seras a woman or female?

>>25044530
>>OPMC archmage wakes up in her favorite vidya and aurafarms a banker. She saves a catgirl from slavers, then they go to the big city by train, where she aurafarms a petty noble. The end.
not trying to refute you but how important are plots with intricate twists and turns or even just basic setup-payoff cycles in this scene? OPMC already bypasses so much of the typical progression DNA which more readers seem to be willing to waive if there's enough hype moments and aura farming

>>25044572
"Progression" for OPMC slop is basically the MC slowly revealing how OP and cool they are while everyone fawn over them.

>>25044572
Well, I'm just trying to explain both its success and decline, and I believe they're two sides of the same coin. It succeeded through its aurafarming, among other things, and, presumably, declining because most plot threads and aura moments just seem to fizzle out without any large payoff. Almost all battle scenes begin as a cliffhanger and end within minutes of the next chapter, because her not dominating her opponent is antithetical to the OPMC trope, and the 'playing with her food' trope is easy to overdo.

>>25044375
>decide to check out Anons rec
>Character wakes up
>There's a bathroom scene where she looks in a mirror
>The prose is all wobbly like it's been written by a teenager that's trying too hard
Jesus. Those are some of the most vomit inducing first pages I've ever read. In a tradpubbed book series, no less.

>femc
>written by a man
erm, no

>>25044166
>I'm pretty sure Seras is female and they write self-insert power-fantasy every single time.
Seras is a he/they gay man.

>>25044615
Wrong

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>>25044639

>>25044659
That isn't Seras, that is Serasstreams, a completely different author

>>25044530
>socially awkward MC, man with tits
MC is flat as a board
so man without tits*

>>25044659
what does he/they even mean, isn't it usually they/them or he/him when it's pronoun shenanigans? I'm not clued up on this gay stuff, why is he mixing and matching? dog/fish? table/orange?
he's a guy but doesn't mind being referred to as they sometimes?

>>25044396
Reverend Insanity

>>25044661
I'm gonna make a new pen name, SleycaStreams

>>25044674
He/They is between male(he/him) and neutral(they/them).

>>25044712
It's a free country. No one can stop you.

>>25044676
That's funny, I gave it another go before you suggested it, but the "Gong Zu Wong, you court death" with no context on the first chapter just turned me right off, as it does every time.

>>25044750
NTA but the first few chapters are unremarkable, it only becomes slightly interesting after the extortion stuff and the meat paste thing which pits him against the people and systems of his society
+ I'm not of those foaming-at-the-mouth RI worshippers but it's good fun and worth reading for what it is

>>25044613
why can women write mmcs but men can't write fmcs?

>>25044799
who says women can write mmcs?

>>25044799
men are too rational that is why they can't write female MC

>>25044768
I'll try to push through, I had the same issue with shadow slave due to the prose.

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>>25041676
Almark Vol 1: Institute of Magic, JP: Noboru Yamada (2019/2022), EN: Roman Lempert (2025)

I don't know quite know what Yamada was going for with this series based on the first volume, and considering it was originally serialized online, maybe he didn't either at first. The story starts with Almark, the protagonist, being the five year old son of the vice-captain of a famous company of mercenaries. His father doesn't believe he has the temperament to be a lifelong mercenary and wants him to attend magic school, for which the usual enrollment age is nine years old. Circumstances dictate otherwise and at eight years old Almark kills two mercenaries in combat. Soon after he's on the battlefield with the rest of the company and would kill many more over the course of a year. After a near-death experience, his father forces him to leave and Almark begins the nearly two year long journey to the magic school alone. There would be much sorrow and hardship and he'd be forced to kill many who betrayed him along the way. That's the prologue, about 7% of the book, which isn't all that long, so a lot is told in summary.

I've presented this all for the purpose of asking a question. Knowing only what I've written here, what kind of character do you think Almark is? This is told from third person, so it's difficult to know for sure, but he seems unfazed by it all. Almark is arguably absurdly stoic and only ever seems to experience post-traumatic growth. To say he's precocious would be an understatement. Honestly, it's rather strange. It really makes me wonder what kind of character he'll become. Then when gets to the school he readily integrates with his classmates and able to get along with others. He could even be described as having a warm and compassionate personality. I don't know if it later changes, but I was surprised that his school life was almost entirely typical everyday stuff. Almark's goal is to become a great mage who can return to his homeland and bring an end to all the suffering he possibly can.

Again, I must reiterate how different of a character Almark is from usual sort in these circumstances. The usual sort is based on rage and possibly PTSD. Some examples would be: Red Rising, Will of the Many, Berserk, Vinland Saga, and Attack on Titan. The closest, though still not a good match, I can think of at the moment to relate him to would be Shimazaki from Shimazaki in the Land of Peace, which is a strange comparison to make.

Further confusing matters to me, the manga adaptation is seinen not shounen, which means it's marketed to men. The first volume of the manga only covers a bit more than a 1/4 of the first light novel volume. That seems slow to me considering that there's not all that much substance so far. There's potential here to go somewhere interesting, but I don't yet have the confidence that the author will able to take it there. I'll be reading them as they release to find out though.

>>25044166
> I'm pretty sure Seras is female and they write self-insert power-fantasy every single time.
There fact they have "self-insert" in the titles of there series might be a rather large hint anon. So either they are female or someone wishing they were a cute teenage girl.

Bwos I need help figuring something out. recently on youtube i've started to notice their are channels that seem to be producing web slop at a rapid pace.
like i'm talking 12 to 36 hour videos with the most web slop titles ever.
at first I thought it was like in the past where people would just put popular stories into a voice synth and treat it like an audiobook.
but then I started looking at the upload dates and reading the titles.
After comming across a channel with not 1, not 2, but atleast 6 different stories titled something like:
>NBA SYSTEM
>BASKET BALL LEGEND SYSTEM
>I SMASH 3 POINTERS WITH PURE POWER
>NBA COACH SYSTEM
ect I've come to realize that somehow chinese web sloppers have not only figured out how to use AI to make web novels that are essentially 1-500 chapters long, but they're simultaneously figured out how to turn it into an audiobook also.
Now this will never make as much money as getting a patreon and despite none of their stuff being copyright I've seen youtube nuke their channels occasionally ;
all this to say? are we cooked?

>>25044810
truth, it's why all the femc's written by men are autistic overly logical creatures

>>25044874
are the stories actually coherent and are they getting lots of listeners?
if it's nonsense slop then that's been possible since the very first AI generator. coherence and entertainment factor is what matters, which AI falls very short on even now

>>25041683
If you didnt post your stupid cover every day I wouldnt even know what I'm looking at.

>>25044874
>are we cooked?
yes, but only because the sheer flood of slop is ruining discoverability for new authors, not any other reason

I can't wait until I can proompt an AI with a list of tropes and styles and get a decent novel out of it. Surely by 2030.

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>>25044887
Counter example

>>25044890
>>25044874
nta but my friend linked me this the other day;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAkBADwkM5g
he actually listened to most/all of it (unaware that it was ai, other than the images)-- i assume every part of it was AI. guessing it's a little more curated than the chinese stuff being discussed

>>25044799
most that could, wouldn't

>>25044924
>200 views
your friend is just genuinely retarded lol

>>25044931
...he's a funny guy

>>25044853
This got dropped from publication as a LN, I don't know why they translated it.

>>25044887
i've met plenty of logical, autistic women. I went to a school for autistic people and while there gender ratio heavily favored men, the girls who were there were very autistic. Some more logical than me, even.

>>25044810
There is no need to have female characters in a fantasy/progression/cultivation/adventure stories

Girls are what make a story worth reading

>>25044957
truke, this is why jap winnies are the most successful, they have the cutest heroines

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>>25044924
That exactly the type of shit I've been seeing, I wouldn't say the CN stuff is more curated, they pump this stuff out. But I've not actually listened to any of this to figure out if it's coherent. and in all honestly of the AI slop I see getting spammed on youtube, the guys who do AI voice over of a movie or a k/cn-drama and just have it explaining the plot pull in more views? maybe because they have to do editing slightly of clips from the show? where as these videos seem to just make an AI generate random images from a sentence?
>>25044890
I've not poisoned tested senior, i'd say the views are low I've not personally seen a video with more than 10k, but I've not been looking and I'm not sure what youtubes stance on this type of AI slop is if any. I did see one channel get purged but I'm not sure why.
>>25044900
I wonder if there's anything anyone can do about the fact maybe all creative fields are going to be swamped with this stuff in a decade or so.

I recently got into Nasuverse and I am all out of reading material. Anything similar to that? Like LB6 of FGO or Heavens Feel/Tsukihime Remake?

>>25044976
1. are you sure you read everything?
2. do you want to play me in melty blood?

>>25044989
I can’t really play those fighting games, so I don’t have it. Terrible reflexes.
No, haven’t read everything, but I was curious if some online work has tried to copy the feel of this setting. I like Nasu’s writing style a lot, is there anything similar?

>>25044853
>8 years old child kills adults in combat
god, jap writers are retarded

>>25044945
When? Most recent publication I see is September 2025. There's been sillier. A recent one I wrote about didn't get its English translation until some years after the original author deleted everything due to a controversy.

>>25045070
You know it. Web fiction writers in general don't seem to be concerned in general with seeming as such.

>>25044900
The problem for AIslop posters is that once AI is good enough to produce an entire novel from a prompt, there's no reason for the type of person who WOULD read AIslop to go to a website to read someone else's AIslop: those people will all prompt their own novels tuned to their own tastes and remove themselves from the market. Similar to how people who can bring themselves to fap to slop stop commissioning art of their degenerate fetishes and just gen it up themselves, while everyone else is just annoyed at having to wade through the garbage. AI gen crap is self-defeating.

The type of person to produce AIslop and then try to push it on others is also the kind of person who has no sense of aesthetics, either. So they can't tell what they're producing is crap, or why everyone picks it out of a lineup like it's fluorescent colored shit. Nobody with a sense of aesthetics is going to bother turning AIslop output to make something good: has there been a single actual good AI gen'd piece of literature? I'd argue no.

As long as we hold at least some standard for aesthetic quality, AI is going to be an annoyance at worst.

>>25045070
American children have killed home invaders plenty of times before, it's not that impressive for a child to kill an adult. Give the pageboy a crossbow, he will unseat a knight once or twice that battle.

>>25045102
Yeah I'm sure the kid holding a sword on the cover was using a gun or crossbow
dumbass

>As long as we hold at least some standard for aesthetic quality, AI is going to be an annoyance at worst.

If AI can write a coherent novel, you have at most a few years before a standard for aesthetic quality is useless. Though at that point we'll all have other things to worry about

>>25045128
Haha!!! Mad because I refuted the exact wording of your post and not the spirit of it! Idiot!!!!

>>25045085
>>25045134
>slop
>aesthetics
no

>>25045138
get a job

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>>25044853
>I've presented this all for the purpose of asking a question. Knowing only what I've written here, what kind of character do you think Almark is?
Emotionless child soldier forged into the ultimate killing machine, held back by the fact he has the strength and agility of a child.
But honestly his father sounds to compassionate and worried about him to really have Almark be that, so I would have presumed he was a regresor /trans-migrator explaining his temperament.
I'm surprised to hear how straight Almark sounds to be played in the academy arc, I don't think it's a particularly good work but I honestly expected you to tell me he was a class room of the elite Ayanokōji type character. hiding in plain sight, analyzing all social interactions, higher goals in mind he keeps hidden from his peers,
Which isn't to say maybe the author isn't setting up some big break for the character history to create a dissonance between him and his peers, it could be a terrific slow burn.
Yu-Gi-OH GX's protagonist is notable for basically being a happy go lucky characters slow descent into regret, depression and eventually isolation. Do you think we'll seen Almark Alienate himself due to how he treats life and death, or do you think it's going to be Almark becomes a normal human.
Personally I think it sounds like Almark should have been a someone transported into the past to explain how he's so stoic, I really don't think from the description we're going to into child soldier territory in any serious way. Or a Spec OPs the line academy arc, where Almark convinces his class mates the only way to stop the goblins for good is to also kill all their defenseless off spring.

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>>25045149

>>25045139
Try to remember my post a decade from now!

>>25045085
I honestly wonder if the Age of AI will just turn all authors towards writing reverend insanity type protagonists in the vein hope AI is too censored to talk about the stuff fang yuan got up to.

>>25045083
I switched devices and forgot to put the trip back on.

>>25045153
Yeah, it's definitely not like Jonah from Jormungand, since stoic and emotionless aren't really the same thing. There really should have been have been Black Lagoon influenced works. Hiroe is ridicules in how he releases chapters. I could give the Black Lagoon light novel another chance, even though it's only a fan translation. I don't know.

>Do you think we'll seen Almark Alienate himself due to how he treats life and death, or do you think it's going to be Almark becomes a normal human.
I don't know. It could go a lot of ways and I may be giving the author too much of the benefit of the doubt to where it becomes something that doesn't make any kind of sense at all. I think it's most likely to be a DUALITY OF MAN kind of thing where it depends on the context of the situation.

> Or a Spec OPs the line academy arc, where Almark convinces his class mates the only way to stop the goblins for good is to also kill all their defenseless off spring.
That sounds more like Goblin Slayer. Spec OPs The Line is much more about psychosis and mindbreak.

>>25045134
I already don't read 99.99% of anything published these days because it's crap. Even if AI reaches the level of contemporary tradpub, it will not affect me. Even in the darkest possible future I will simply meet human authors in real life at conventions and we will discuss our works together, showing that we both created our own worlds and stories.

>a standard for aesthetic quality is useless
And yet the classics are the classics and everyone knows it. Soul recognizes soul. Hylics don't @ me.

>>25044530
>OPMC archmage wakes up in her favorite vidya and aurafarms a banker. She saves a catgirl from slavers, then they go to the big city by train, where she aurafarms a petty noble. The end.
Can't all effective plots be boiled down in this way?

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>>25045157

Any recommendations (fiction/fanfic)?

Anything good with a plot?

I like Reverend Insanity, Lord of the Mysteries, and pretty much any fic and fanfic as long as it's made seriously and not insulting my intelligence.
(I avoid system and "isekai" novel but I can admit than a few here and here can be readable when well done)

Examples of things I didn't like,
- the Legendary Mechanic > Mary Sue MC with the only purpose of showing that he is cool and the smartest man alive. The whole premise is forgotten
- Shadow slaves. To be clear I don't mind a slow start, but the "mc" had no agency for too long time for me to even care after a few hundred chapters. I know it should change but I will only read it again when it finishes.
- Supreme Magus/ hitman with a badass system. Too Melo-dramatic for the sake of it and I do like drama.
- usual harem novel. Why? Just why? I'm not a feminist, I just can't take seriously human being collected like pokemons without problems (especially in modern settings like most MHA fanfic)

>>25045354
>I like RI and LOTM
>and pretty much any fic and fanfic as long as it's made seriously and not insulting my intelligence.
>and anything that is [nebulous traits that are universally seen as good]
it's always funniest when the ESLs aren't meaning to troll

>>25045360
Forgot the part where we care about the prose online

I'm an esl? In any case... So what? You win a medal? You gain the lottery?

Or you stay as a sad being who need to feel better behind your screen for a no-accomplishment?

Get a life. But in any case, thank you. I remembered why I didn't bother with reddit, x, 4chan and whatever social media since AI web engines exist

You are just pathetic, it's just sad

>>25045381
>since AI web engines exist
this has to be a comedy routine you're practicing

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>>25045381

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>>25045354
I like this novel but , I warn you it's actually pretty in depth, I found myself having to reread parts to comprehend.

>>25045399
stop, just stop. it's honestly pathetic.

How do I recover from a Patreon freefall?

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How to succeed in webnovels:
30 hours on cover
3 hours on blurb
30 minutes on chapters 1-10

It's that simple.

>>25045427
It's a good novel? and I'm not joking I sometimes couldn't follow the prose or maybe needed to reexamine the chapter. I usually don't enjoy multiple pov stories so maybe that was a partial reason behind it.
He also seems to include a lot of supplementary material for world building it seems like, I like the idea but it's a lot to juggle. I'm used to simpler stories.

>>25045430
Come out as trans

>>25045430
Lie about being trans.

>>25045439
The story is indeed all over the place. I for one genuinely hope his next story is free from these first time missteps

Intravenal adderall is the only thing that makes me able to wrap up my chapters as of late. Do not use nootropics

>>25045466
I feel like I need the edge.

>>25045466
I've been trying to get some modafinil tho

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>>25045466
Detox and switch to plain caffeine—the tried and true classic.

>>25045466
I buy some kid's ADHD meds off of him.

helped someone with some work and got paid in cash. Tempted to buy weed with it and write while stoned.

>>25045354
Warlock in the magus world got a horrible ending but the amoral edgyness and crapsack world building gives it at time a certain depth that you find rarely.

>>25043584
If I end up making my reincarnation story starting at 12, I'll be sure to share it.

>>25045579
That's just an excuse to use weed

>>25045579
weed isnt really something you can write on

>>25043777
I will now read your webnovel

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>>25045466
I just take picrel. sometimes I'll crossfade with alcohol and edibles if I'm feeling it.

>>25043763
>muh talentless sadboi MC
>*has the same enlightenment he already had 100 chapters ago* *dies*
>"I have to do 'good' because... well... I JUST HAVE TO OK?? Don't ask me to define good or go out of my way to do it though."
>fights are total dogshit
>"people are completely different after regression because muh memories o algo even though souls are real"
>"what's a character growth?"
>"is that a true immortal? AIIIIIEEEEEE IM GOING INSAAAAAANEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
It's ok. The characters are cardboard cutouts and the arcs are incredibly repetitive.

>>25045399
That’s not actually a good thing. I wrote my story with the idea of explaining difficult concepts as simply as possible through the scenes themselves.
Care to point out the exact parts you’re referring to?
>>25045427
Not me.
>>25045439
That’s okay. You don’t need to remember everything, but by reading, you’ll become familiar with the names, and you’ll get the reference when these things actually appear in the story.

Well I'm caving in and buying a month of midjourney tomorrow morning to gen up some book covers and ads. I'm not cucking myself out of success for the cost of a meal at five guys when for 90% of readers they decide whether or not to read based on the cover thumbnail. Literally 1 second decision. I'm the same way so I know how everyone's thinking.

If it fails it fails. Oh well.

>>25045759
you realize there's free shit all around you right

>>25045831
He knows. He's just shitposting.

>>25045831
I tried free stuff and couldn't nail it down before running out of free tokens. I'm pretty bad at this stuff, but I want to get this launch right. I'm not shitposting, I'm just bad at new tech stuff.

It's taken me about a year to come around to the idea that covers, ads, other artwork actually matter quite a lot to a fiction's popularity. Hell, look at the OP image, the cover for Runesmith. If you see that, you know exactly what you're getting out of the story in under a second. It's really good. So I'm going to spend the $30, generate a cover and character designs and all that shit, maybe a small video to turn into a gif to tell people to sub to patreon, and I'll go from there.

>>25045870
>I'm not shitposting, I'm just bad at new tech stuff.
>I tried free stuff and couldn't nail it down before running out of free tokens
>So I'm going to spend the $30
Bro, just have some patience and use the daily free credits.

>>25045890
I've had a rough month and my window to launch and carry followers from my ending fiction to my new fiction is this week. I'm out of time. I'm also going to spend a couple hundred on ads, anyway.
Like congrats to you that you can get what you're looking for for free but I'm out of time and picky with what I want. Hell I've got a real artist I commissioned for the last series and he's on cover two of four and I have to hold his hand the entire way: great for getting it how I want, but damn I'd really hoped he could design a book cover on his own. I'm $600 in the hole with him and have another $600 to go after this. Now we're friends so I'm helping him out personally but shit the sheer amount of time I'm spending puppeting his artist hands, time I'm paying for with money as well, it's very frustrating.
I need to be focused on polishing my prose and thinking about narrative and pacing, not constantly handholding.

>>25045430
Sorry to hear it, EsotericTempo

I love YA labyrinths.

>>25046013
cute but not if they're fake and gay

>>25046013
>YA labyrinths
Do they include dungeon diving with cute beast girl sex slaves?

>>25045897
Go ask on /g/, some kindly anon can help you.

HermeticRhyme can change his username to MundaneDeadbeat now

>>25046285
I won't do that. I have plans to turn things around.

>>25045452
Sorry, but I had to be fair to my readers and lore-dumping as soon as possible to vaccinate them, preparing them for the rest of the story.

>>25045897
if you're sweating the $30, i can help; i'm a god prompter and an artist to boot

>>25045870
What do you want for your RR cover? I can advice on contrast, hook, visibility, attention, marketing psychology and do the ai thing in some minutes if you tell me.

This is not an effort thing really, the rune smith example shows that you don't understand it entirely.
If you are the yakuza reborn guy again, then I tell you that your concept of what a cover has to do is wrong.
The job of a cover is not to represent the content of the story the most accurate.

You got free tools for most of this as well.

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>>25045897
Just steal your ideas bwo. I put a cardcaptor sakura image into an AI and asked it.
>If you were human how would you tell an AI to generate an image like this? use the same formatting.
Got a lowres version, highres it. boom now I am the cardcaptor sakura.

>>25046322
not either of those anons but please can you share your thoughts on what a cover is meant to accomplish in the web fiction space? You sound like you've given it a lot of thought and can articulate some helpful stuff

>>25046349
get people to click for that it has stand out in a line of thumbnails and grab attention
the job of a "cover" is to funnel people onto your blurb page and chapter one

contrast (color, contour, breaking the lineup)
meta (has to be designed to operate against what others are doing)
attention psychology (human faces, certain color grab more attention)
emotional hook (cool, sexy or quirky interesting)
clear, not noisy (really text is optional too small for a book cover)

>>25046353
runesmith gets a 7-8/10 from me

-cool (future soldier looking kinda guy)
-red color contrast against other edgy sloppa covers that covered meta at the time
-red is very attention grabbing
-human face somewhat of a negative but it is there
-clarity (it is just some future armor with runes, clear, no text, one shape, good)
-simulated motion

in a sense gacha apps have it down to a t how to maximize it
>shouting guy face to the right
>red,orange, bright color contrasts

>>25046322
>free tools
What's the best free one?

>>25046381
Fucking google "free AI image generator" and pick your poison. When you run out of free credits for one, move on to the next. The amount of spoonfeeding in these threads is reaching grotesque levels.

>>25046367
it's not especially good...

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>>25046381
I used very bad image gen ai and try to make up for it with style. Image gen is ubiquitous.

Venice ai locked up a bit. There was a brief episode of another one I used. Best is to migrate to the best currently free tool. It might have been grok even.
Some I do on perchance, don't know about others.

For minor edits:
gimp (horrible counter intuitive for windows users, clone brush can be used to retouch ai errors a bit like extra fingers)
inkscape (for vector art and proper fonts)

you can probably do fonts and cover text with ai nowadays
I honestly can't be bothered and do lettering with ms paint because I got lazy and do this as hobbyist right now again.

>>25046387
it is functional 7/10, beware of chicken gets 8/10 because it went so hard against the meta

>>25046397
it's a 5 on a good day; not trying to give you a hard time, but i don't believe you're correctly applying the listed concepts in your analysis

>>25046381
>>free tools
>What's the best free one?
Leonardo Ai, is in my opinion the best. You have a little bit of learning curve learning what the settings do and change. free, but with my go to settings I end up with 4 sets of 4, sixteen total. take out the ones that AI fucks up (extra arm, weird fingers, etc) and its less. What I do, is go every 24 hours like clockwork to use my free tokens. I'm refining my prompt over time. as many days as it takes, is as many days as it takes. When I get my refined prompt making more or less what i expect, i just keep doing it. Save all of them. you can crop/canvas-size some things out sometimes, if you have any GIMP skills (I'm a linux guy). to get rid of a problematic hand for instance. again, its as many days as it takes. takes a while to get used to getting what you want. so when I don't need AI, I'm still playing seeing what settings do, what some prompt phrases do. its a war of attrition, and like any war of attrition if you keep doing it like an autistic sperg you'll get better at it.

>>25046381
unfortunately anon there are so many people trying to make money off of AI right now, it's a very difficult question to answer to boot the only people who would take AI serious enough to answer that question would almost always just move to local generation solutions.
With maybe the limited caveat of people wanting to run very big models like ones based on "flux".
Just go with one that gives you the most free credits and has a reasonable selection of models you can pick from.
preferable pick one that lets you remix other peoples creations or see their prompt and metadata.
some models have an anime tendency and clever prompters get past it but initially it might be frustrating.
tldr: i duno i just used civitai in the past
>>25046396
kino

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>>25046403
Runesmith went counter meta. Pure red tint against

Rank by most attention I give them (subjective on my part but informed by color and marketing psych)


Runesmith is a 7/10 or even 8/10

The red tint grabs the most attention, stands the most out.
The human shape elevates it above the pure stylistic and color "super supportive" which I rank the second most attention grabbing cover.
I would rate super supportive cover as a 6/10. Just purely on counter meta and red tint.

The dark lord edgy cool, is absolute generic 5/10 but functional and works.

Crafting gets 4/10 because it is simple and clear.

Runesblade gets 3/10 from me in terms of cover because it is unclear, noisy, doesn't consider meta. Etc.

>>25046396
https://diybookcovers.com/
that link is the best I found, free online. I will warn you, its a learning curve. I had to play for weeks to learn how the flow works. the order you touch things in, matters. Protip here, i don't use the example covers. I just use them to see what fonts I like. I load the sample cover just to see the font name. I start over and load my own image and size and style the font text over that. you need to learn to do a kind of "speed run" because the online app locks up easy and sometimes bad enough only a machine reboot solves it. You fight through that shit. when you get your "speed run" down pat, and you have every click and order memorized, there you go. Results are worth it. it takes forever for the fonts to all load. the free tool is halfway down the page, after the sample covers. it took we a couple hours a night over weeks to get good doing it.

>>25046353
rule number one for book covers, at least for WNs. you can do anything you want, as long as its a cute anime girl on the cover. Seriously, look at all the covers. Unless you know something, that's what everyone does.

>>25045616
its great for ideas. brainstorming how the next chapter will do its stated goal. also good for writing, though I admit its a lot more editing to go back sober and proof and sequence it.

>>25046322
NTA, but you mind if I bother you for feedback about my cover?

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>>25046424
Here example how I would design a runesblade "cover"

>>25046431
Thank you. Going to look at it.
>>25046438
Smart, this guy gets it. Had success with it too myself as in initial attention but blew it in execution.
>>25046460
This me procrastinating so go ahead.

>>25044810
>men are too rational that is why they can't write female MC
a mlie pushed by modern women and the feminista crowd. There always have been in the romance novel game a percentage of very successful male authors writing under pen names. The agents that admitted it, pointed out that the couple of male pen names tended to be more successful than their stable of actual female romance authors. Look at Nicholas Sparks, for instance. He's a chicklit sensation. women writing men properly is the almost nonexistent case, men writing women, happens. Don't fall for the propaganda.

>>25046466
If I had to rank my own work here.

In this example I meta gamed it against super supportive and the rune smith by using hard complimentary contrast. (blue to red)
I break shape and line up with hard white light against the meta. Makes it appear as if the cover breaks out from the thumbnail.

I got a human shape, psychological fact that it grabs human attention. Minus points for the face being small.

Plus is that it simulates emotion and motion. It is clear and not noisy.
A real photorealistic face might draw away from the platforms animu preference and it is not sexy those would make me rank my cover 8 or 9 in this specific lineup out of 10.
Runesmith gets a 7-8/10 as I said prior.

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>>25046466
Go nuts. Also attempt at an AI sloppa cover to come (used briefly before I made the one in this post).

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>>25046484
sloppacover

I feel like a lot of you are too stupid to be putting all of the time into 'market analysis' like you do.

>>25046488
sex sells, 6/10
minues for the woman being too small as proportion of the cover
the red hair is good as color

dislike the noisy text could do without the scratchy parts
>>25046484
generic 4/5 because it is noisy I remove one rank

>>25046494
wait that is a man...? uhhh

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>>25046466
lol runeblade example showcase like an app game with bigger face

>>25046492
stupid people should do more analysis, though
only geniuses coast by on intuition

>>25046500
This was due to issues with AIgen. It kept wanting to make him roided to the gills so the only way to get anything remotely on-model was to make it generate a trap. That, and the AI's inability to generate any sort of interesting mechanical design, were the two main factors for why I wasn't truly happy with that cover and came back to the original, real-human-art cover art.

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>>25046527
Boku no
I looked more at your story. The issues I flag marketing wise:

-unfamiliar concept in title
-unclear hook

those weight you down more than the cover, the cover should in my estimation do some damage
if you want to stay on concept

>Zanma - 1st Rank Machine Hunter
Not the best but it would tell everybody what it is?

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>>25046546

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>>25046556
>>25046546
Or if the puppet master is more apt

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>>25046546
The subtitle suggested isn't really fitting but I understand what you mean, you think brewing up a Korean-style bait subtitle would be helpful? I've been trying to work out a good subtitle for some time, for sure. I'm keeping ZANMA:PT as the main title though. The main conceit of the narrative is the puppetmaster and psychic powers part. It's intended to be a journey type of structure, PT stands for Puppetmaster's Travelogue.

I do have some AIgenned provisional possible ad material. The main concern right now is a better subtitle.

>>25046584
"Zanma:PT" is empty space hook and story wise. I launched 8 stories now. Two took off day one. (not mega success but they did find an audience, blew it on execution)

Puppet Master + something (that sounds awesome)

Last Puppet Master Zanma
1st Rank
Reborn as a puppet master that is my game character (would work better on royal road but is likely not generic enough to fit your story)

That berzerk style ad I like it better. It got color, face, motion (red hair griffith) it is clear.
Much better design than the noisy book covers. A bit... flamboyant but might work just not my personal taste.

Your title is hurting your story a bit, the cover is doing a bit of damage too. Not personal.
The content I can't tell. I did my analysis yesterday on how to write for royal road and will deploy that in my next testing phase.

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>>25046492
not all of us are as gifted as seras.

>>25046616
Seras is hilarious because they show you the harder path is viable too.
No good covers, no consistent release schedule. Just constantly write and post shit on different websites and you'll get an audience.
Their patreon is like $10k and half of the time it offers 0-1 chapters.

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>>25046584

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>>25046642

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>>25046601
>Puppet Master: (subtitle here)
ugh, I hate genericizing titles
killing myself TODAY (I'll see what I can come up with)
>Reborn as a puppet master etc
for once not isekai or litrpg or anything, so can't use that. he's a native of the setting, i facilitated the "foreigner that needs to ask questions" part by making it so he spent a decade on an island in a prolonged training arc, also because I didn't want to do "starting from zero" for the millionth time

>>25046642
I don't think I'll change the cover art AGAIN, I want to keep the original. I'm fine with the cover being neutral. Picrel is the full image. Maybe an even tighter zoon could work. I also have one other illust that is an option.

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>>25046655
The other illust. I have a bunch of variants of this one, backgroundless png, etc, so editing would be easy.

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>>25046655
It is your decision. I don't like this cover. When I look at it from a distance it looks smudgy.
You can have your preference and opinion, that is legitimate. It is not a negotiation and you don't have to give me a salespitch for what you like.

A good story doesn't sink with a bad cover, a good hook doesn't fail to attract attention with a bad story and won't sell a bad story.
I'm mostly procrastinating and vomiting my marketing and cover knowledge out here as distraction.

Your title is hurting your story. The cover is a small negative too. My Royal Road marketing knowledge so far.

This specific cover is your worst. It is smudgy, got too much detail. The human character takes a too small proportion of it.
It is salvaged in my opinion only by dark light contrasts and the red attention grabbing accents.

I can tell that you are emotionally invested in this. As gentle as possible, if I zoom out and see your cover as thumbnail
in my eyes it looks like pic related not like you see it in your eyes which like the concept.

>>25046675
This cover is worse than the prior. 2/10
it looks bad even if you enlarge it. Again, to couch the thing, my opinion.

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>>25046678
>...smudgy, got too much detail. The human character takes a too small proportion of it...
Painfully aware of this, yes. Too much black and white, background too abstract. That's why I zoomed way in on the illust for the cover I'm actually using. Zooming even further in is an option thanks to the high res of the original illust.

>>25046681
That one wasn't intended for cover art to begin with, but as concept art, so it's no surprise it wouldn't be well-suited. I tossed it out just to put the option on the table.

>>25046675
this is neat;
are the seals like 40k omnissiah/blessings?

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>>25046686
I rate the black and white as a bonus anon. For me the black/white, dark light contrast with red highlight (hair) are the redeeming feature of that cover.

This is the only reason what makes me rate it as 4/10 despite anything it depicts. To note in my book this one here attached is a 5/10, A 5 is competent and generic.
I would say that a 5 rating cover is neutral for your story. Below it hurts a bit. For you that is that you lose out on the clear human shape and that the human is too small.


Rock falls, everybody dies would get an 8/10 for cover from me. 9/10 overall with clarity of title
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/55418/rock-falls-everyone-dies

>>25046691
I'm not sure what the seals are yet, they're the one part of the design I don't have an explanation for other than that they looked cool. In part because MC hasn't actually built that puppet yet and hasn't put those seals on. He's on a v0.5 of that puppet right now so to speak.

The main gimmick is that its armor plating is made from Tridacna Pearl Resin, or TPR. The substance, besides being almost comically lethal to work with, acts as a psi-resonator, so putting TPR scales on a sword grip or coating the blade in it will make it much more responsive to psionic manipulation and harder to wrest control from the user by an enemy. Since all of its armor is made from TPR, it's naturally very responsive and zippy, and can do gundam-type "machine surpasses its own specifications to help its pilot" feats.

MC is currently in the middle of a stalker-like dangerous zone, an old cultivator battlefield, so I'm thinking of having him encounter people using such seals to record their feats or putting them over repaired spots in armor recording what the armor stopped in that spot. He notices that the seals, for some reason, have a faint psi-resonance, so he adopts the practice on the basis of "any tiny advantage is worthwhile, and they look cool" (since he puts on performances and shit he has somewhat of a theatre kid streak). If you want me to vomit technobabble about the puppet's overall design, I will, I have it all worked out.

>>25046711
Maybe have the federeal puppet association rate it as dangerous puppet.
It is not allowed to be out and about with those power limiters.

>>25046675
Fantastic as an end of volume bonus illustration, especially if marked up with labels on all the elements of the puppet and what they mean, but would make a poor cover.

>>25046621
Let's be fair, their success is mostly based around the fact they write stuff people enjoy reading.

>>25046711
Not him but I'd be interested in hearing more about it, this sort of thing is fascinating

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>>25046769
The foundation is the Hadou Frame, the main puppet frame included in Zanma's main inherited cultivation manual, the Hadou Armature Method. The Hadou Frame is an iteration on the extremely widespread and universal Hollow Man frame. Your average Joe Puppetmaster probably uses Hollow Man or Hollow Man-derived puppets, and nearly every major puppet design has the Hollow Man somewhere in its lineage.

>(The Hadou Frame) was to the Hollow Man as a grown adult was to a child, as an evolver was to one of the unevolved. Compared to any given puppet of its class, a Hadou Frame was, simply put, superior in every way, while retaining the extreme modularity that had made the Hollow Man such a widespread foundational design. After all, it was built directly on the Hollow Man’s design foundation. Even the most unique and iconic puppets of legend had the Hollow Man somewhere in their design lineage. All else being equal, with no equipment on either puppet, a Hadou Frame was larger, faster, more durable, and could squeeze out more power for the same amount of effort on the puppetmaster’s end. The price, naturally, came in as a cruel mistress, demanding over 50% more overall material investment for this roughly 30% performance increase.

The Hadou Frame has the inherent ability to fold up for transport, as it was designed with a traveling puppetmaster's limited storage in mind. Zanma adjusted the function slightly so that when the Pillar Templar folds up, it looks like a pillar, with the armor plates being the pillar's surface.

>TPR Armor
Besides its psi-resonance characteristics and besides being fantastic armor for its weight, it also has an "eye-dragging" effect. Basically the armor's reflective characteristics make it "jump out", it's hard to actually see the puppet's real frame, your eyes and aim will naturally be pulled towards the armor.

>Head
There is an actual reason for the spooky skeltal mouth. It can articulate because it's the muzzle of a "Particle Smasher", a shotgun-like particle accelerator weapon that goes up through the spine and fires out of the mouth. Other weapons can be mounted as well.

The three outer lights on the triangle are sensors, and the inner triangle houses three low-powered particle accelerators, basically head vulcans for shooting down projectiles or harassing targets. Behind the head, you can see an array of heat radiators. Zanma has a manual called Triskelion Aperturia that details various methods of coupling sensors and weapons in arrays of 3 such that they perform better together than separately.

>Arms
Swappable. It has a third arm on the back that can swing out with the shield. Some heavy weapon arms instead use the third arm for support.

cont.

>>25046742
Well yeah but that should be a fucking prerequisite. Like it's not even good grammatically correct writing just decently engaging plots and characters.
We have too many people who can't do that but think they can trick people into reading them if they metagame it enough.

It's fascinating how much AI fans are dedicating to spamming their images.
Even in a writing thread we have them doing it.

>>25046803
>>25046769

>Right Arm 1

Three Type-2 accelerators taken directly from disassembled rifles and coupled together into a single operational unit, with the power source unit being completely rebuilt and given additional armor to reduce risk of explosion. These are distinct from particle smashers because they handle their own acceleration internally. The ones on this arm are Type-2, meaning they are of a somewhat basic design with the refinement of having their own internal acceleration loop (as opposed to just a linear acceleration track, which are Type-1).

Zanma has tested Type-3 accelerators, but he can’t make them run smoothly in this configuration and their ammunition is a pain to find. The Type-2 accelerators used in this arm are of the particle-cluster variety, firing “blobs” of small particles through a lensing medium in order to help stabilize them, improving range and accuracy. The short-pulse particle beam that results from this creates a straight line with the occasional particle forking away from the main beam only to rejoin shortly thereafter, creating a somewhat electric illusion. For this reason, the uninformed sometimes call them “arc lasers”. (viz. reference - G-Self’s Head Vulcans)

This accelerator type is desirable because it allows for angle of fire adjustment, meaning all the guns in the array can hit the same spot. Under the Triskelion Aperturia paradigm, the accelerator array is seamlessly linked together into a cohesive unit. The first benefit is the seamless linkage with the puppet’s sensor array, and the second is that the fire rate is tuned exactly to cycle perfectly between the three accelerators. The acceleration loops are concealed inside the arm, as is the power unit, whose volatility led Zanma to bulk up the arm even more than usual. For this reason, despite technically being a “mediumweight” arm, it’s built more like a “light-heavyweight.”

The barrels are arranged side-by-side on the top half of the weapon-arm’s forearm, with the manipulator-hand attached to the lower half with a ball joint, having three fingers and two thumbs, one on either side.

It has an intimidating level of firepower for a First Phase Class 1 puppet.

To put it simply, it's three AKs taped together.

>Left Arm 1

"Hand Grapnel" - has a special structure with four vibroblade fingers, which can freely rearrange, even to create a drill-like spike. The hand in its entirety detaches and can be maneuvred directly by the puppetmaster, attached by a cable, but a psi-thread is enough for control. Arm is reinforced internally to withstand the strain of grabbing opponents. The vibroblade fingers have significantly better cutting capabilities when the hand is directly attached to the forearm, since the vibration generating mechanism is inside the forearm.
Despite its weaponized fingers, it also has fairly good technological interfacing capabilities.
Usually the left arm, to make it able to grab and brace the shield

...just write a good story, chaps

>>25046823
>just

>>25046823
I did analysis on what constitutes "good writing" on royal road and finally understand it.
All the guides are wrong, won't put my own stuff out. It will only lead to haters. I too don't have validation and a test case to claim with confidence that I'm right.

Royal Road good writing is a particular thing. They don't want "good stories" either but a familiar hook, easy accessible power fantasies.
Telling people to "write good stories" is a horrible advice.