16 Harsh Truths That Many of You Need to Hear

Source Credit

Original Author: BedivereTheMad

Original URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1kkefno/16_harsh_truths_that_many_of_you_need_to_hear/

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After reading, writing, and analyzing the genre for years, as well as talking with many writers, both new and experienced, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of odd misconceptions going around, and there are some truths that a significant portion of writers in the space need to hear. Before I get into them though, I’d like to put out a mild disclaimer:

When I say “succeed” or “fail” or some derivation of those words, I mean it in a more objective sense using metrics like money and followers. I’m not saying that subjective goals are bad or anything. If your definition of success is having 20 people read and enjoy your story, that’s perfectly fine. If that is the case, some of these truths won't be applicable to you. I just wanted to inform you of the perspective that this post is coming from to avoid any misunderstandings.

These aren't in any particular order.

1. You will probably not make a living through writing

This is somewhat less true for anyone living somewhere where the cost of living is low, but if you’re in a 1st world country, your odds of making a living through writing are very low. You can still set that as your goal, but don’t neglect the rest of your life to work toward it. Until you actually reach the level of success needed to go full time, writing should be a hobby and nothing more.

2. You need to read

Reading is non-negotiable. Period. And watching TV or reading comics only partially counts. You can certainly get a decent sense of story flow and character development and things like that through visual media, but there's a lot that you miss by avoiding written works. There are things that work in books that don't work in visual mediums, and things that work in visual mediums that don't work in books. If you want to be successful as a novel writer, you need to read novels.

They just don’t.

4. You can’t metagame the site

6. Luck isn’t anywhere near as important as some of you seem to think it is. The big stories are big for a reason.

Luck plays a very, very, very small part in the success of the bigger series in the genre. Take Primal Hunter, for example. Sure, you can argue that it got a boost since it was one of the early movers, and you can maybe attribute that to luck, but if it wasn’t good, it wouldn’t continue to be successful. Zogarth makes $75k/month on Patreon, and that number has been steadily going up the entire time he’s been writing the story. That's not luck. That's skill. There were plenty of other “first movers” that flopped. Just being in the right place at the right time doesn’t guarantee success. You need to have the skill and drive to make it succeed. Not a single one of those massively successful stories is successful just because it “got lucky” or “got picked up by the algo” or anything like that. Whether you like them or not, they have a lot of things going for them, or else they wouldn’t have been able to maintain their popularity.

7. If you can’t tell if your story is off-market or not, you don’t know the market

This one is fairly self-explanatory.

8. You aren’t as good at writing as you think you are

This is universally applicable to all authors, myself included, of course. To illustrate my point, I will use the [Dunning-Kruger effect](https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/dunning-kruger-effect).

The Dunning-Kruger effect is, in my opinion, very accurate. However, it is not entirely applicable to writing as a whole. Rather, you can apply it to all the little things that go into writing, and it’s an infinitely branching fractal. Within writing, you have characters, and within characters, you can maybe split it into heroes and villains, and within heroes, you can split it into true heroes, anti-heroes, accidental heroes, failed heroes, corrupted heroes, etc… That’s just a random example, but there are countless little aspects of writing, each with their own Dunning-Kruger curve. You can always improve, and as you write and read, you will likely improve at many of these aspects at once, but no matter how good you get, there will always be some areas where you are still stuck at the metaphorical “peak of mount stupid.” Therefore, you will always be a worse writer than you think you are.

I don’t say this to try and put you down and make you feel like your writing sucks. If you’re feeling that way, then according to the Dunning-Kruger effect, that means that you’ve actually already gotten past the peak of mount stupid, and have entered the valley of despair. Just know that as long as you keep writing, you’ll keep improving, and while your writing will never be perfect, it can still be good.

9. Your first book will probably fail

Having a smash hit on your first book is very rare. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

10. The readers can tell if you don’t like what you’re writing

Don’t try to force yourself to write something you hate just to be “on-market.” The readers can always tell, even if they don’t verbally acknowledge it.

11. Writing on-market doesn’t guarantee success

Even if you follow all the “rules” of the genre and write something that you think is totally on-market, you can still fail. OP Solo MMC LitRPG isn’t some kind of ticket to success. If your story is bad, it will be bad no matter how “on-market” it is.

12. Writing off-market almost guarantees failure

You will almost definitely not achieve great success writing off-market. If you’re not writing on-market, don’t delude yourself into thinking that maybe you’ll write well enough to be successful anyway. This almost never happens, and even the “off-market” stories that succeed are often more on-market than they might first appear.

13. Retention is the most important stat

Followers, favorites, ratings, views, average views, etc… are all cool stats to have, but they are all driven by one single factor: Retention. If your retention is bad, your follower count will falter, you won’t have many ratings or favorites, your views and average views will be low, your engagement will be low, your Patreon conversion will be low, and your Amazon sales will probably also be low (I only have anecdotal evidence backed by some limited statistics on that Amazon statement). I wrote a guide on interpreting retention data and you can find it [here](https://www.royalroad.com/forums/thread/145593).

14. It’s not the fault of the readers or market that your book performed poorly

A surprising number of people tend to blame the genre or the readers for their own failures. Don’t do that. Sure, maybe you’re not a fan of some of the tropes that they love, but that doesn’t make them wrong. If you just blame the genre or readers for your book’s failure, you will never be able to improve. You can’t change the market, but you can change the way you write to have a better chance of success. And if you're unwilling to change your style to fit the market, or you just can't stand the popular tropes of the genre... why are you trying to write in this market?

In a similar vein, if many readers are complaining about an aspect of your story, don’t brush it off as just being not for them. Check it out yourself and try to find out why they don’t like it instead of just burying your head in the sand.

15. Toxic positivity is just as dangerous, if not more so than toxic negativity

There’s a lot of toxic positivity in artistic circles in general, and writing is no different. Being told “You’re doing great!” when you are not, in fact, doing great, will set you back a lot further than if someone pointed out all the flaws in what you are doing. I don’t say this to encourage negativity, but to hopefully curb some of the delusion that is born of an overly positive culture. If your goal is financial success and you’re not achieving that, but the people around you are telling you “You’re doing great!” you probably need to find some new people who are willing to point out your mistakes. Otherwise, it will be much harder to improve.

If you want to see the ultimate consequences of toxic positivity, just look at what happened to [Concord](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord_(video_game)).

16. Prose doesn’t really matter

I was in denial about this for a long time, but I have to admit that prose doesn’t really matter. As long as your story is readable, it’s fine. Better prose will help you very little. The story is much, much more important.

[Dunning-Kruger Effect Curve](https://preview.redd.it/8icicnokk80f1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5f9c4c59c88f2934f7423395851fce4ece2dbc97)