For better data, in my opinion it's a lot more useful to track only the Top 10 of Rising Stars, but to do it for a period of several months. Rising Stars in the bottom half often gets stories that only end up with 100-200 stories... Most of my fictions have gotten on Rising Stars, for example, but none of them have become big hits, even the two that DID reach the Top 10. There's patterns that emerge and if you want a story that has a real sizable audience (these days 1,000+ followers), it's a tough battle for sci-fi.

If you really want to expand your audience, consider posting the story on other sites, such as Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity, or some of the many other web fiction sites out there; those two have the biggest sci-fi readerships though. Royal Road isn't really geared towards hard sci-fi and you'll have better luck posting as wide as you can than trying to try for a top Rising Stars story with a genre that doesn't have a huge audience here. 

Or, you can help grow the audience of the site and get that niche big enough. I think Katalepsis alone has done big work in making queer romance a notable niche on the site, and there's definitely a lot of sci-fi readers here, just not enough to propel a new story way up to the top.

B. Wrote: For better data, in my opinion it's a lot more useful to track only the Top 10 of Rising Stars, but to do it for a period of several months. Rising Stars in the bottom half often gets stories that only end up with 100-200 stories... Most of my fictions have gotten on Rising Stars, for example, but none of them have become big hits, even the two that DID reach the Top 10. There's patterns that emerge and if you want a story that has a real sizable audience (these days 1,000+ followers), it's a tough battle for sci-fi.

If you really want to expand your audience, consider posting the story on other sites, such as Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity, or some of the many other web fiction sites out there; those two have the biggest sci-fi readerships though. Royal Road isn't really geared towards hard sci-fi and you'll have better luck posting as wide as you can than trying to try for a top Rising Stars story with a genre that doesn't have a huge audience here. 

Or, you can help grow the audience of the site and get that niche big enough. I think Katalepsis alone has done big work in making queer romance a notable niche on the site, and there's definitely a lot of sci-fi readers here, just not enough to propel a new story way up to the top.

That's amazing. Congrats on getting into the top 10 of Rising Stars - that's like the holigrail. 

I'm listing on Spacebattles. Haven't done Sufficient Velocity though. I'll give that a bit of a try now. 

From what period tho. I can see you visited RS 10-12 times, but we don't know if it was weekly/monthly observation

Not a single satire to be found. 

Dead on arrival. 

Also, we would need to know how common each tag is compared to the others. Maybe female lead, to give an  example, has more chances to make it than male lead, but male lead is written much more often. 

TheKingofKirby Wrote: People on this forum say that all stories have an equal chance of making it to Rising Stars because a couple of "Top Rated" only have light litRPG elements.

Your data must be skewed.

What forums are you on?