Welcome to Royal Road™, a home for web fictions! In our amazing community, you will find many talented individuals who write as a hobby or even professionally, as well as the artists who assist them. Among our creators are many, many readers who provide valuable feedback and encouragement to our community of authors as they peruse Royal Road’s large and ever-expanding libraries of fiction!

Royal Road™ is designed to make it easy for writers to quickly and easily get their work up for readers to see. Here are step-by-step instructions to publish your first fiction (and all subsequent fiction).

1. Register for an account on Royal Road if you have not already. This can be easily done from our Welcome page
2. Click Write on the navigation bar, which will take you to the My Fiction page
3. Click New Story
4. Fill in the Title and Description. Select the genres and additional tags. Fill in your first chapter's title and the content of your first chapter.
5. Note: Please do not include links for donations, Patreon accounts or shortened links to other sites such as Discord servers in your Description.
6. Note: if you do not select fanfiction for stories based on others' work, or do not choose the Content Warnings appropriate for your story, the submission will be rejected.
7. Upload a cover image that is 400x600 pixels or larger (this is optional)
8. Click Submit
9. All new submissions are manually checked for appropriate tagging and plagiarism, so expect it to take between 12-24 hours for a submission to be approved. Please be patient.
10. Once your fiction has been approved, you can find it by clicking Write again on the navigation bar
11. Add additional chapters by clicking Add New Chapter

Your Work is Yours
At Royal Road™ we do not require that you post exclusively to our site. You can also take your work down at any time. Whether on other large fiction sites or your own personal site, you can post to Royal Road with a time delay or just a sample.

Premium Service

We have both a monthly and yearly subscription-based premium service available. The primary aim of this service is simple: to provide an alternate way to support the site's development and get an advertisement-free experience.

Reader Premium

This is the basic subscription for Royal Road™ users who want an ad-free browsing experience and push notifications (for convenience), as well as some vanity features:

• No Advertisements
• Push Notifications
• Premium Mark
• Post Border

Author Premium

Our Author Premium subscription has been created with one goal in mind: to provide our authors with high-level tools and data at a low price, which could amount to a much larger expense without our subscription support. Analytics, for example, requires dedicated machines to gather, store, analyze and serve the data. We have other services in the works for this tier, but they are currently unlisted as we are nowhere near the testing stage.

How?

The Premium service can be accessed using the following link: http://royalroad.com/premium

The subscription can be monthly or yearly, which you can decide by choosing the relevant tab in the top right corner of the pricing. The yearly price on both tiers of premium is the equivalent of 10 months, giving you 2 months for free.

The payments and the subscription itself is handled through PayPal. This means that you can easily subscribe or unsubscribe anytime directly through your PayPal account.

Unsubscribing

To Unsubscribe from the Premium service, go directly to http://paypal.com and log in to your account. You can find the recurring payment under More > Sitemap > Manage subscription Payments > My pre-approved payments.

If you can't find the page, or are unable to unsubscribe for some reason, don't hesitate to make a new support ticket at http://royalroad.com/support with the category "Payments" and we will help you as soon as possible.

Reviewing is a very important part of the Royal Road™ community. Writers love to hear from their readers so they can get constructive criticism and improve. Many of our rankings lists rely heavily on ratings from our users, so we encourage you to review whatever you read! Just make sure that you follow our reviewing rules and guidelines.

Rules

1. Try to be constructive. State what you liked and didn't like about a story, and suggest improvements if you think of any. Don't leave purely negative rants that are biased and unhelpful.
2. Stay on topic. Your review should address the story itself, and only the story. Unrelated content, including comments about the author's other activities, other users, etc., is not part of a review.
3. Be fair and respectful. Do not insult the author or other users. This includes discouraging authors from writing or telling them to drop stories
4. 3.1 Discouraging the reader from even giving a story a try or telling the writer to stop writing is viewed as taboo throughout Royal Road™.
5. 3.2 Directly insulting the author or the readers is strictly forbidden. You may criticize the writing in constructive ways if you have a genuine want to help, but do not direct your feedback at any author specifically, especially if it’s a personal attack on their character.
6. 3.3 This includes ideas that fall under the category of slander, hate speech, discrimination, instigation, etc.
7. 3.4 Do not intentionally depict a story as something entirely different from what it is. In other words: criticism without the intent to be constructive is a big “NO.”
8. 3.5 Genre Hate. Don’t give a story a low rating or insult a story simply for following a certain genre that you personally dislike. It’s fine to say how certain elements of the genre were poorly done or take away from the story.
9. Use appropriate language. Avoid profanity. Reviews shouldn’t contain excessive vulgarity, sexual content, or descriptions of gore.
10. No spoilers. Instead of using spoilers, you can allude to certain plotlines so that only people that read the story would understand without the story being spoiled for newer readers. Writing down the entire plotline in a summary format is to be absolutely avoided. Don't ruin the story for unsuspecting readers.

Ratings, Reviews, and Advanced Reviews

There are three levels of feedback you can leave for an author.

Ratings are plain 0.5-5 star scores. No written feedback or justification for the score is required.

Reviews provide an overall 0.5-5 star scores along with a brief overview of your opinion of the story, providing some level of critique and justification for the score.

Advanced reviews provide a score for the overall fiction such as Style, Story, Grammar, and Characters.

• Style: This refers to the general feeling of the piece as created by the author's word choice, literary devices, and unique way of writing
• Story: This refers to plot development and pacing (i.e. how well a story is put together)
• Grammar: This refers to the technical aspects of the writing, including spelling, grammar, and punctuation
• Character: This refers to the characters in the story, how well they are depicted, how realistic and three-dimensional they are

In an advanced review, you are expected to write a detailed critique that covers all subcategories being rated as well as a justification for the overall score.

Because the effort involved increases with more detailed reviews, advanced reviews carry more weight than regular reviews, which in turn are weighed more than plain ratings when it comes to calculating Average Fiction rating and Best Fiction rankings. Reviews and advanced reviews are also under scrutiny for their content and will be deleted if inappropriate or insufficient in content.

Other Rules

• This should be fairly obvious, but rating and reviewing from multiple accounts is prohibited. We have software to catch people who try to manipulate the ratings by doing this. Alternate accounts that do this will be permabanned and the original account will face a temporary ban.
• Review swaps are allowed on Royal Road™. In fact, you can request them in our Reviews forum. However, rating and review swaps promising high scores is prohibited. If you agree to a review swap, we expect you to actually read the other person's fiction and to write a thoughtful review with a rating that matches your opinion of the story
• Offering to release chapters based on reviews and ratings is considered ranking manipulation and is prohibited.

Review swap rules

• Both users must read at least 10,000 words (approximately 40 pages) of the other person's fiction before writing the review.
• The review must be a detailed “advanced review,” covering all four subcategories (Style, Story, Grammar, Character), and must contain both positive and negative points concerning the story in question.
• The rating must reflect the critique in the review. Giving nothing but high ratings or agreeing to give high ratings beforehand is considered vote manipulation and is against the rules.

Reporting Reviews

If you see any reviews that violate the rules above, please report them by clicking the [Report] button at the bottom of every review. Clearly, state the reason(s) for reporting the review on the page it takes you to and click [Confirm]. Our staff will quickly review the report and decide what action needs to be taken.

Reporting Fiction

If you find that a fiction violates any of our rules, such as plagiarism, hate speech, pedophilia, or missing tags for mature content, do not leave a review stating such, but rather report the fiction in question by clicking the [Report] button on the top right side of the story’s main page. Clearly state the reason(s) for reporting on the page it takes you to and click [Confirm]. Our staff will quickly review the report and decide what action needs to be taken.

Major Rules of Royal Road™

If you read nothing else in the help pages, read this and avoid getting in trouble on Royal Road™. Some of these rules are repeated in other sections of the help pages they pertain to, but we've gathered all of the rules in one place for you to keep in mind.

1. Hate speech and pedophilia of any kind are prohibited in all areas of the site, including within fictions that have mature tags.
2. Manipulating fiction scores and rankings is strictly prohibited. This includes but is not limited to, creating alternate accounts to rate multiple times and trading high ratings with other users.
3. Insulting and attacking other users is not allowed. You can disagree, but be polite and civil.
4. Plagiarism is not allowed. If you are writing a fanfiction, make sure it is appropriately tagged and give credit to whoever created the original story. If you have already published your fiction elsewhere and are moving to Royal Road™, please follow the instructions on our Migrating From Another Site page.
5. No spam. This includes links to other sites for no reason, nonsense posts, and repeat posts in multiple forums.
6. Political and religious discussions are not allowed anywhere on the site. It just creates too many ill feelings, and our site is not the place to argue about these topics.
7. Profanity and sexual content. Avoid using profanity and sexually explicit language unless your Fiction is tagged with the warning. Even then, the content must be within appropriate limits. Read up on the rules regarding Mature Content.
8. No derogatory English. This is a website dedicated to writing, and as such we want to uphold our users to a certain quality and allow them to improve. However, when someone uses derogatory English [writ lik dis] they are purposely trying to worsen the quality which is the opposite of what we wish (which is for our users to improve). Therefore if anyone uses derogatory English, their posts will be considered as spam/trolling and will be addressed accordingly.

If you see any content that violates these rules, please report it by clicking the appropriate [Report] button beside the post, comment, or fiction.

Each achievement has a different requirement, by completing the minimum requirement you will receive the achievement. Currently, we don’t have a list with all the achievements, but you can see which achievements you or others have by going to Profile and then achievements.

No. We've been over the issue multiple times. Here is a summary of why not, copied from the forums:

There are several problems with making the review content compulsory. First of all, it would significantly reduce the number of ratings on the site. This would pose several problems, including:

• We'd need to remove existing anonymous ratings, as the reduced number of reviews would mean that top list entries would be very, very hard to overcome, if not virtually impossible unless the site's viewership suddenly increased tenfold.
• At the same time, removing existing ratings would mean that we'd make a gigantic mess of the site. The top list would get completely scrambled, and manipulating the top list would become much easier due to the significantly reduced number of reviews to judge rankings by.
• Removing reviews, actually, does not stop drive-bys. An excellent example of this is Amazon. I recommend doing a quick research on the topic, as "spam reviews" are a significant problem with the system either way.

Additionally, most users that do not review, according to statistics, would not rate if they had to write a review to do so. Another problem with forcing reviews is that drive-by 0.5-star ratings would amount into a significant level of written hate reviews, which looks really bad and isn’t fair to the author. This would both make moderation increasingly hard and authors more likely to quit due to the negative feedback.

Apart from every single point on the question above being true for this question, making only 0.5-star ratings require reviews would not only incite more hate reviews, but it would also simply shift the most common negative rating from 0.5 stars to 1 star, essentially doing nothing to change the situation.

You can open a support ticket or email [email protected]

If you think someone is breaking the rules, click on the “report” button. It can be found at the top of any fiction or chapter page, as well as at the bottom of pages containing reviews, comments, or forum posts. If you can't find the report button, please contact our staff by opening a support ticket or send email to [email protected]

If you are browsing Royal Road™ and you find an ad that redirects you to another page or contains mature or otherwise inappropriate content, or even an ad that feels malicious for any reason, then please report it by pressing the Report Ad button on any visible ad, even if it is not the one that causes issues for you. If you're redirected by an ad, please navigate back to Royal Road without closing the browser and report the ad as aforementioned. 

We do not tolerate these ads, and we try our best to block them. The most efficient way to blacklist them is with your help, so please keep us updated.

If you are a Royal Road author, you get to enjoy our discounted prices for the paid advertisement. There are Banner, Leaderboard, and rectangular advertisement campaigns available at the moment, if you have further ideas you may also contact us directly.
All the information are available here https://www.royalroad.com/pages/advertising-faq

If you are not a Royal Road author and would like to use the same type of advertisement, you can contact [email protected] directly. 

In order to add a [Donation] request using Paypal or Patreon to your fiction page.

1. You need to go to My Fiction
2. Click on the Dashboard button of the fiction you want to add donations to
3. Then click on the Donations Tab
4. Add URLs of your donation button for PayPal or the link to your Patreon Page in the required fields.  

Royal Road™ wishes to support its authors and does not take any percentage of these donations, they are held externally via PayPal and doesn’t hold any responsibility for them.

The [Donation] bar will appear at the bottom of all chapters on approved fiction as well as on the Fiction page.

• Royal Road may revoke donation privileges at its own discretion.

Q&A

Q: Are there any requirements for requesting donations?

A: We have currently disabled Donations for any and all Fanfiction.

Q: My fiction is complete. Can I still request donations?

A: As long as it fits all requirements, yes.

Q: I’m underage, can I still request donations?

A: Unfortunately, PayPal’s current policy is that only members that are 18 years of age and older are allowed to receive donations. This is something we can’t influence.

We originally had a donation system for one-time donations, which came with the "Donor" achievement. We removed that because

• One-time donations no longer make a difference to a site the size that ours has grown to, and
• We didn't want to take donations away from our authors.

You can now support the site with a Premium Subscription for an ad-free experience, along with a cool Premium gold border.

No. All donations made to an author on Royal Road™ go directly to the author through whatever service they choose. Royal Road™ does not receive a share from your donors or from your Patrons, however, if you would like to support Royal Road™, please subscribe to the reader or author premium.

You can support the author in multiple ways.

1. You can comment on their chapters and give encouraging words.
2. You can give feedback or provide your services (proofreading, artwork) etc.
3. You can promote and recommend their fiction.
4. You can support them financially. If an author desires financial support, they are able to attach a PayPal and Patreon link which appears at the end of their chapters.

Or once an author completes their fiction, they might self-publish, and at that time you can also show your support by buying the book. Alternatively, you could send the author a private message.

If you would like to support Royal Road™, whitelist royalroad.com from your Adblocker or consider buying a premium membership.

You can also advertise or promote the platform to let more people know about it.

On Royal Road™ we have several fiction rankings to help readers find stories to read and give authors the opportunity of exposure to wider audiences. The explanation of each list is below, along with some tips for any authors looking to maximize their readership.

New Releases

This list is pretty straightforward. Newly approved fictions are added to the top of the list and older pieces pushed off.

Please note that all of our new submissions are manually checked before being approved. This is usually done twice a day, but if our admins are busy, it can take longer. There is no guarantee when exactly your fiction will show up here, so please be patient.

Latest Updates

Fictions are added to this list when new chapters are released and are pushed down in their rankings by subsequent releases by other authors.

For new fictions, this list is a great way to gain exposure to new readers.

Note that if a fiction is updated with a new chapter while still on the list, those updates will be grouped together as one entry.

Some tips to maximize your exposure on the list:

• Update regularly, especially early on when submitting new fiction. A successful technique that people have used to quickly gain a readerbase is to save up enough chapters for a daily release for at least a week, even if their normal writing pace is slower than that.
• Space out your updates. Let's say that you have 100 chapters saved up from when you were publishing on another site. Don't post them all at once. If you do, you'll only get one listing and very few readers will see it compared to if you spaced out your updates. We recommend waiting until your fiction has been pushed off the list before the next update. This can be under an hour during our peak traffic times, and 2-3 hours when traffic is slower.
• Update at different times of the day. Royal Road™ has a global user base, so if you update at different times, you will get exposure to users from different time zones.
• Related to the above point, we do not recommend trying to maximize exposure by posting only during peak traffic hours. Yes, there are more readers at that time, but that’s also when more authors naturally update. You will be pushed off the Latest Updates list faster, and it works out to about the same amount of exposure as if you updated during non-peak hours

Best Rated

These are some of the most highly-rated stories ever written on Royal Road™. The formula for this weighs average rating the most, with a correction factor for the total number of ratings. Basically, for two fictions with the same average rating, the one with more ratings is ranked higher, and the more ratings a piece has, the more the formula allows for the inevitable one or two low ratings that will occur.

Tips for getting onto this illustrious list:

• Keep writing. If you look at the current fiction on the list, most of them have over 30 chapters up, some over 100. It's a marathon to get on this list, not a sprint.
• Keep an eye on quality. It may be tempting to write as quickly as possible and immediately post the results, but readers will take points off of their ratings for things like grammatical errors and improper plot development. You don't have to hire a professional editor to look over everything before you post but do your best.
• Encourage your readers to review your work. You can't get onto this list, or many of the others, without ratings. Occasionally remind your readers that you appreciate receiving reviews. Remember, advanced reviews carry more weight in the rankings than regular reviews, which are weighed more than non-review ratings when it comes to calculating your ranking score.

Active-Only Ranking

This list uses the same formula as the Best Rated list, but only includes fiction updated within the last 35 days. Many readers prefer looking at this list so they can avoid fiction that’s been dropped.

Complete

This list uses the same formula as the Best Rated list, but only includes fiction marked as Complete. Readers may prefer looking at this list if they want to find stories they’re certain have an ending and won't be dropped midway.

Note: If you have a completed fiction, please submit a Support Ticket so that a member of the staff can change its status to Complete and add it to this list.

Royal Road™ is designed to make it easy for writers to quickly and easily get their work up for readers to see. Here are step-by-step instructions to publish your first fiction (and all subsequent fiction).

• Register for an account on Royal Road™ if you do not already have one. This can be easily done from our Welcome page or by clicking the “Login" button in the top right corner and selecting "Create an account" on the bottom of the login form
• Click Write on the navigation bar, which will take you to the My Fiction page
• Click New Story
• Fill in the Title and Description. Select the genres and additional tags. Fill in your first chapter's title and the content of your first chapter.
• Note: if you do not select “fanfiction” for stories based on other people’s work or do not choose the Content Warnings appropriate for your story, the submission will be rejected.
• Upload a cover image that is 400x600 pixels or larger.
• Click Submit
• All new submissions are manually checked for appropriate tagging and plagiarism, so expect it to take between 12-24 hours for a submission to be approved. Please be patient.
• Once your fiction has been approved, you can find it again by clicking Write on the navigation bar
• Add additional chapters by clicking Add New Chapter

Fanfiction means a story written based on an already existing original work. As such, the copyright laws for fanfiction are only applicable as far as Fair Use comes into play.

On the other hand, Original means that you are the first and sole creator of the universe your story is set in, as well as the characters and plot line. Note: Make sure to properly tag your fiction as either Fanfiction or Original.

Go to My Fiction, then click Dashboard on the fiction you want to add a cover to. Click the Edit tab, then upload your art. A cover image is required to be 400x600 pixels or larger. If you upload something larger, you can crop it via our tool.

If you have author premium, you can also add a banner to the top of your fiction page that is 1200x200 pixels, but it has to be exact as there’s no resizer for this feature.

Fictions are usually approved within a few hours, but it can take up to 48.

Note that all submissions are read through and carefully checked before being accepted or rejected. A moderator checks that a fiction does not break any of our rules, that the submitter is the author and that the piece is correctly tagged. Once that’s done, you will be able to post the remaining chapters without moderation.

Make sure you follow all of the rules so that a moderator is not required to reject your submission.

If your fiction is available elsewhere, note that we require verification to make sure that the person posting the piece on Royal Road™ is in fact, the author, or someone who has permission from the author. So providing said verification before we even get to reviewing your submission would speed up the process. To do that, you can edit the description on the other site/platform with the words “I will be posting this story on RoyalRoad.com” or some other message with the same concept that will help us in our verification process. Once you do this, open a support ticket at http://royalroad.com/support and post a link to where this verification takes place.

Note that we do not allow screenshot or image-based proofs. Also, you can delete the proof of ownership stated above after we verify and approve your fiction.

• Verified content: The content must be submitted by the author or someone with permission from the author. Any content that is available on other sites will be verified upon submission. Note the QA regarding how to speed up the submission approval process.

In case of a translation, you must have the original author’s permission, the copyright holder’s permission and the translator’s permission to publish it here.

• Original or Fanfiction: If your content is based on another author’s setting, characters or terminology, it must be tagged as fanfiction with the appropriate credit added in the description. Unless, the terminology is not specific to a certain fiction and is actually widely used, and/or the characters are mythical or historical creatures, (i.e. out of copyright) in which case you can avoid using the fanfiction tag.

• Mature content: Only if a chapter is tagged appropriately [Gore, Profanity, Sexual Content, Traumatising], can it include mature content.
  

Note that descriptions (fiction and chapter titles) cannot have mature content, even if the piece is tagged correctly. While mature content may be included, fiction that mainly focuses on said content will be deleted, as we view such as being in poor taste.

• Quality and language: There is no quality control over fictions, however, if it has derogatory English [writ like dis], or if it is unreadable, it will be rejected or possibly deleted right away.

Submissions in languages other than English are okay.

• Real world content: Avoid including real-world religions and politics. If a fiction is discovered to include insults toward real-world religion, the author will be warned or even banned. If you wish to include religion, either create your own or do it in the most respectful way possible.

Don’t include anything that depicts different “real world groups” in an offensive way.

Submit actual chapter content, not intros or author notes: Royal Road™ reserves the right to reject anything and everything regardless of the rules stated here. However, you are more likely to have your fiction approved if you followed all of the listed rules.

In order to delete your fiction you need to:
1. Go to the New Author Dashboard [beta].
2. Pick the fiction you want to delete.
3. Click [Delete] In the left side menu, under [Settings].

Fictions on the site have 5 possible statuses: Ongoing, Completed, Hiatus, Inactive, and Dropped[new].

After 35 days of inactivity (when new chapters are not posted), the state of the fiction in question will automatically turn to “hiatus.” If a fiction on hiatus is updated, the status will get updated accordingly after the next midnight GMT.

You can manually change your fiction status:

In order to do so, you need to:
1. Go to the New Author Dashboard [beta].
2. Pick the fiction you want to use.
3. In the left side menu, under [Settings] click [Change Status].

But note that you cannot change the fiction's status to ONGOING from HIATUS manually if your last chapter release was more than 35 days ago; releasing a chapter will automatically update the status. 

If your story has less than 20,000 words, it will be tagged as a short story, along with the complete status. 

These comments indicate how much the readers enjoy the story, and how they feel pride in being the first to comment. It is a great compliment to the author, and while they might seem like spam, these comments are not against the rules as long as they aren't posted multiple times in the same chapter by the same user.

However, If you are the author of a fiction with these comments, you can freely delete them.

Authors have moderator status on all of their fictions — that is, the right to remove any comment they deem unnecessary or inappropriate, without informing the staff about such actions.

If interactions with readers through comments on your fiction develop into a lengthier, less healthy debate, either side is free to contact the staff, preferably via the report button, or via a support ticket, in which case the matter will be settled privately and discreetly.

A page is equal to 275 written words, an amount comparable to published paperback books (where it varies between 250 and 300 words per page).  A page is equal to approximately 250 words when standard industry formatting is applied with 1" margins double spaced at 12 point Times New Roman or Courier fonts.

In order to gain as many readers as possible, we recommend publishing chapters at different hours, which will allow you to gain readers from different time zones. Also, do not publish more than two chapters a day. Instead, do so on consecutive days, which will allow you to maximize the exposure your fiction receives from the Latest Update list.

It’s better this way, rather than pushing out a bunch of chapters at the same time followed by a gap of several days without publishing. Consistency is key and will maximize your exposure.

The minimum word count on chapter length is currently 500 characters. There is no maximum limit, but we had a chapter with more than 90,000 words. So unless you want to break the record, we recommend keeping the chapter length at less than 10,000 words. 2,000 words tends to be a good stopping point as it’s not too long nor is it too short. Just try writing as much as you’re comfortable doing and try to keep to a consistent release schedule rather than having the same word count every time.

There is a small grid icon on the toolbar when you are writing a new chapter/draft. That icon will let you insert a table into your chapter.

We consider any single instance of mature content mentioned below enough of a requirement for the tag, no matter the occurrence rate throughout the fiction in question. Each tag has a description to help you gauge whether your content is severe enough to include it.

• Sexual Content tag: If your fiction contains explicit scenes of a sexual nature or strong innuendos and references to sexual acts, it should be tagged as such.
• Gore Content tag: Any explicit depiction of violence, blood, mutilation and any other imagery that is generally considered disturbing is to be considered gore.
• Profanity content tag: As soon as your fiction contains any curse/swear words in excess or particularly suggestive language.
• Traumatizing Content tag: If the fiction in question contains ideas, depictions or themes that are considered questionable by society at large, then the piece should contain the traumatizing content tag.

However, even with the warning, please make sure your novel DOES NOT centralize or use mature content as a core element.

Notice: Disturbing sexual content is not allowed. This includes written scenes or images that contain descriptions of pedophilia, bestiality, sexual intercourse between minors or anyone under the age of 18, etc.

And no mature images or artwork. The breaking of this rule could result in an immediate ban.

If you’re the author in question, then yes. We’ve even made the process easier via an epub exporter provided in the Author Premium subscription.

Regarding the same question, if you are not the author of the work in question, doing this with other people’s writing violates our Terms of Service and is a bannable offense. It would also be extremely disrespectful toward authors who share their writing with you. If you enjoy an author’s work, show your appreciation by following and rating his or her fiction and not by pirating it.

The Trending list is aimed towards providing more awareness to the fictions that have shown rapid growth. To get on this list, a fiction must have a cover and be at least one month old before its ranking can be calculated by the sum of star ratings and reviews over the last month compared to their total, which means that unlike the Best Rated list, negative ratings cannot push someone down on the Trending list. It actually helps push a fiction towards the Trending list and helps keep it there.

Any story that makes it onto the Trending list tends to get a large number of new views, follows, and ratings since this list is constantly shown on the front page. That is until the story is bumped down by its competition.

The Popular This Week list grabs the fiction with the most views in the past week and displays them on a slider below the latest updates on the front page. This list is often dominated by fiction on other lists, such as Best Rated and Trending, due to the amount of exposure those lists give stories.

Fiction updates notifications: 
To unsubscribe from email notifications from Fiction updates go to https://www.royalroad.com/my/follows
There, pick the series you want to unsubscribe from, then click the three dots [...] to open a menu.
Once the menu opens, click [Email Subscription] and make sure that the email icon is crossed to indicate that you have unsubscribed.  

Private Messages:
You can unsubscribe from receiving email notification about Private Messages here: https://www.royalroad.com/account/options 

Other notification types
You can unsubscribe from Comment Replies, Mentioning, New comments in chapters and Reviews for authors here: https://www.royalroad.com/account/notifications

Anything you write is automatically copyrighted by you, but that does not mean it’s registered in your country’s copyright office. You may use [copyrighted.com] or other available resources for this.

Feel free to write a Support Ticket with proof of your claim. Our moderators will verify if it is indeed an Original story or a Fanfiction based on your story. If your claim is proven to be true, and you do not wish your story to be shared on Royal Road™, then we will proceed in removing it.

Note: If a Donation button exists on the story, it will be temporarily removed until we have resolved the situation.

At Royal Road™, we do not require that you post exclusively to our site, and you can take your work down at any time. Whether on other large fiction sites or your own personal site, you can post to Royal Road™ with a time delay or just a sample.

No. Unless you contact the artist and ask for permission, or use creative commons pictures instead. Creative Commons provides free artwork, under multiple conditions. You will have to verify for yourself if the artwork that you want to use is available (e.g. give credit to the artist) etc.

If we receive a report that an author has infringed on anyone's copyright, we will take down the work in question.

Depending on your type of inquiry, you have two options:

1. You can open a [Support Ticket], which only the admins, super moderators, owners and you will be able to read.
2. If the report revolves around a post, thread, comment or something simple on the fiction page, it’s better to click the Report icon at the bottom of the post or on the right top side of the fiction.

The official app is still in development. Currently, you can use the browser for mobile and tablets.

If you have encountered a bug, copy the returned information, and open a support ticket. There, paste the returned information, or a screenshot (“prtsc” on your keyboard), as well as a description of what the issue is. Describe how you encountered the issue or any other relevant information that could help us replicate the problem ourselves.

Note that our average response time is 4 hours. However, a staff member can take up to 1-2 days to respond to you. Alternatively, look in our Forums (Assistance Requests) to see if others have had the same issue and if there is an unofficial fix for it already. Or report a problem using our feedback platform. 

There are multiple ways to contact the staff. If you are uncertain of the issue's importance, and it is a general problem, you can open a support ticket and a Super Moderator or an Admin will respond to your ticket.

You can also get in contact with the owners via the email [email protected]

You can check status.royalroad.com to see if the issue is specific to you, or if it is general. If it is a general issue, then note that the staff is already aware of it and is already working on a solution.

Otherwise, you can:

• Open a support ticket. (recommended)
• Send an email to [email protected]
• Report a problem using our feedback platform. 

Yes, as long as you do not use them for vote manipulation or for breaking any of our rules and policies. Disrespecting this will result in disciplinary measures against all accounts.

You can change your username by going to the user settings (drop-down menu when you click your profile image at the top right corner).

There go to the [Profile Information] tab, and then [edit] your username.

Alternatively, you can skip right ahead and go to https://www.royalroad.com/account/changeusername 

Please be aware that:

You can change your username only once every six months.

You can't choose a username already in use by a user.

You can't select a username that was used in the past 12 months.