I was reading a story today that inexplicably had only 100,000 views across well over 100 chapters of content (900 views per chapter) when I wondered, what stories are even longer but still have yet to see success on this site?

Breaking out appears to be something like... 5-10k views per chapter, probably on the higher end of that range. When thousands of people read the story for any given chapter. It seems like the longer a story goes, the more likely it is to gain an audience like that as people binge, catch up, and read serially. But I feel like there are plenty of stories that actually do not see that kind of popularity even after years of work and hundreds of chapters, but we just don't hear about them that often. So I set the challenge to discover what the longest story on all of Royal Road is that has less than 5k views per chapter. 

Sorting by longest, I think A Thief's Tale fits your description. It's the 15th longest story on the site, and has <150 followers/avg of 690 views/chap. This might be because it's fanfiction.

I unfortunately think that I also qualify for this dubious distinction lol. In the Shadow of Heaven is the 43rd longest story on the site, and has less than 200 followers / average of 975 views/chap.

Oh, those are all good cases! I'll rule out fan fiction just because that is typically going to reduce the viewcounts for all stories by its very nature, which means... javert you might be the winner unless there's a longer one lol

Wow! I'm brand new to RR and to hear that 900 views/chapter doesn't count as breaking out is pretty wild. 
I just made it over from Fictionpress and it's a different world over here. 

tacoriddles Wrote: Wow! I'm brand new to RR and to hear that 900 views/chapter doesn't count as breaking out is pretty wild. 
I just made it over from Fictionpress and it's a different world over here.

Yeah, Fictionpress is a super small community these days. 


It's even worse when you think that some Wattpad stories have literally hundreds of millions of views, and webcomics tend to surpass all web fiction by an order of magnitude. Even if Royal Road seems big, it itself is just a drop in the bucket. 

But 900 views per chapter is a bit deceptive itself; the first chapter, or maybe the first five, contain a lot more views than the rest of the book, so if you discount people who dropped a story early, it's quite a lot less per chapter. For reference, my isekai parody story has 1,500 views per chapter, but "only" receives 150-200 views after a new chapter comes out. That's still quite a lot, but it's drastically less than the views per chapter.

In my browsing of everything on the sitr I've encountered a few with less views per chapter than 900, with way more chapters than 100, but, and here is what prevents me from mentioning them, they often weren't worth reading, at least for me. 

Absolutely Thief's Tale, though i may say the quality has to do something with how little popularity it is getting, other stories are In The Shadow Of Heaven,  Grimstone , Decide your fate Games, Flow  , Exhuman , Dragon Knight Prophecy (reading this one myself, more traditional, so thats why it aint so popular i guess) , The Legion of Nothing (not too sure about this one, since it has its own site, and no idea how popular it is there), Red Twillight God of Hunger (very extreme example, 50K views, 2K pages)

There are even a couple completed stories on there, the list if someone is interested: https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?minPages=2000&orderBy=followers&dir=asc

Zethuron Wrote: Absolutely Thief's Tale, though i may say the quality has to do something with how little popularity it is getting, other stories are In The Shadow Of Heaven,  Grimstone , Decide your fate Games, Flow  , Exhuman , Dragon Knight Prophecy (reading this one myself, more traditional, so thats why it aint so popular i guess) , The Legion of Nothing (not too sure about this one, since it has its own site, and no idea how popular it is there), Red Twillight God of Hunger (very extreme example, 50K views, 2K pages)

There are even a couple completed stories on there, the list if someone is interested: https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?minPages=2000&orderBy=followers&dir=asc

Very sad to me that any completed stories would have very low average readerships, since completed stories tend to be much higher quality than ongoing or hiatus :(