I’m a long time reader and author on Royal road. They’re honestly the best service for getting your written work out there and they have tons of good novels across their site.
Highly recommend
👍
Love this app/website for all the stories and the sci-fi/fantasy community. So much better than the others ones currently in the App Store; check it out for some interesting stories :)
This App works beautifully well. I have had no issues with the things I want to do on it which is reading. It is great to see my most recent reads at the top of the app. Very intuitive.
Its a decent app. Only a few problems
1- Adds still show up despite having premium account. Not all the time, but frequently. They disappear if I go to the premium section of the app, but doing so frequently is annoying
2- Library section having multiple pages is annoying, prefer it like on the web site where I can just scroll down, i have a lot of follows and having to hit the “next page” button a bunch is vexing
3- Cant change the color of the fonts when reading without changing the entire theme, which is annoying. Little eyed dropper font color button doesn’t seem to do anything
All in all a decent launch for the app, if the above issues were addressed then it would be dang near perfect
Love the app. It runs smoothly and loads quickly. A few QOL things I would like to mention
- Wish it was easier to sort my history as I have read a lot of different things. Allowing me to sort by “hiatus” or looking for one’s I read the furthest into would be nice.
- I would recommend moving the premium advertisement to the top of the screen. When people start chapters you tend to start at the top. This would make it more noticeable while also preventing accidental taps when scrolling.
- I liked the advertisements of other light novels that were at the top of the website as i have ran into quite a few light novels that way. I actually like to see more advertisements of light novels you can find in royal road at the top or bottom.
Royal Road is the best place for both readers and writers to connect. I am both a reader and writer on the platform and have found it to be the most pleasant platform to post on due to the features offered, flexibility, and all the essentials are free.
One of my only gripes with RR was the clunky navigation of the site and the slightly inconvenient search function: this app fixes 99% of that. The missing 1% is simply about how the tags in the search function are not ordered, which makes it slightly inconvenient to look through what tags exist. Other than this, I can’t think of anything that someone could reasonably find even slightly problematic. Amazing app, insane to think that the app is already so well made.
P.S. Buy premium, it’s like three bucks. I know the ads are kinda great because they can help you discover new novels, but they have an option in settings that allows you to still see them if you want. I, and many others would 100% cry if RR became WebNovel 2.0
Amazing to have, waaaay better then a website.
Still some stuff I’d like them to change/add, like have an option to choose how many books will appear on each favorites/followed page cause it’s currently kinda small, and adding an option to show books on hiatus cause they currently don’t show up.
But there are so many quality of life things in the app, and it’s altogether amazing.
Still 5 start 9.9/10 even with the few gripes I have about it. And I fully expect them to fix the few gripes I have with the app soon, it just came out after all
The website version of Royal Road I have been using almost everyday since 2019 and continue to use almost religiously in the search for good stories.
First of all, in a world where corporatization and greed seems to eventually ruin companies that get large enough due to incessant and predatory monetization strategies, I am happy to say that Royal Road’s methods of monetization through ads and it’s membership programs are decidedly not incessant nor predatory in the slightest. In fact, some of the ads are paid for by creators on the platform itself looking to advertise their story which I think is a great and inoffensive opportunity for anyone willing to spend the money to do so.
Another thing I love about royal road is its detailed search features. A lot of sites cannot seem to get this aspect right in my opinion but royal road not only gets the detailed search features right, they make it super fun to use as a method of discovering hidden gems and stories that are just getting started. These features massively increase discoverability for new authors.
That would lead me on to my next point in saying that discoverability for new authors is incredibly good. So long as an author is willing to put in the time and effort to ensure what they are writing is of good quality and with consistent updates, their story is almost bound to end up on the ‘Rising Stars’ page, which is Royal Road’s method of showcasing trending stories on the site. I think the algorithm used for this feature is incredibly good at promoting most to all of the stories where the author has put a lot of time and effort into them. All that being said, this provides a degree of confidence that an author has a clear and distinct path to success on Royal Road, that other competing sites simply cannot offer.
The only downside I could see, although it might not be a downside depending on one’s perspective, is that there is no framework or structures in place for a creator to earn money from their work on site. This aspect is left to third parties like Patreon, KoFi, or PayPal. The upside to this, of course, is that everything you see on the sight is free to read which is something I feel might be unique to only a few web serial platforms with a wide readership.
Overall, I think this app is worth the download regardless of whether or not one has an extensive history with the site before this point in time.
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