Royal Road and IlorisNovel are not really competing for the same job. Royal Road is the strongest discovery engine in progression fantasy and litrpg, and it pays the author almost nothing directly. IlorisNovel is built around on-platform payout at a 7% cut, and its audience is smaller and newer. For most serial authors with a few hundred readers, the right answer is to run both in parallel rather than to pick one, with Royal Road as the funnel and IlorisNovel as the place the money actually arrives.
Are Royal Road and IlorisNovel really the same thing?
Royal Road and IlorisNovel are doing genuinely different jobs, and I think the cleanest way to look at the comparison is to stop treating it as a choice between two interchangeable web fiction platforms and start treating it as a choice between a discovery engine and a payout engine. Royal Road is the place where a progression fantasy or litrpg serial gets found by readers who already love the genre and who scroll through Rising Stars and the weekly trending list looking for the next Cradle, the next He Who Fights with Monsters, the next Dungeon Crawler Carl. IlorisNovel is the place where, once a reader is already reading your story and wants to keep going, you can charge them on the same site and keep 93% of what they pay. Those are not the same function, and the people who insist on framing them as competitors are usually picking the framing because it makes for a cleaner argument, not because it matches the actual lifecycle of a working serial.
The reason this distinction matters in practice is that the questions you ask of a discovery engine are completely different from the questions you ask of a payout engine. From a discovery engine, you want raw reach, a ranking system that surfaces new work, a critical mass of genre-aware readers, and a culture of comments and reviews that signals to the next reader that the story is worth starting. From a payout engine, you want a low platform cut, direct and predictable payment to your account, no exclusivity lock-in, and a paywall mechanism that does not bounce your reader out to a third party and break the reading flow. Royal Road is excellent at the first set and absent on the second, by design. We are deliberately building IlorisNovel to be honest about the second and to make no claim to the first, because the first takes years of audience accumulation and we are not pretending to have shortcut that.
What does Royal Road actually do well?
Royal Road is, in my view, still the single best place to launch a litrpg or progression fantasy serial from scratch, and I think any honest comparison has to start by saying that out loud. The audience there is the audience for these specific genres, accumulated over roughly a decade, with reading habits and tolerance for the long form that you do not find on any general-purpose serial platform. Rising Stars in particular is the closest thing the genre has to a real launch mechanism: a serial that hits the front of Rising Stars in its first month can collect thousands of readers in days, and the second-order effect of that is a Patreon and Kindle Unlimited run that pays for the next year of writing. There is no equivalent of that on Wattpad, on Substack, or on us. Pretending otherwise would make a worse article.
The comment and review culture on Royal Road is the other genuine strength, and it is harder to evaluate from outside the platform than the rankings are. Serialized litrpg and progression fantasy readers tend to leave long, engaged, critical comments on chapters, and they review books in numbers that traditional self-publishing platforms do not see. That feedback loop is part of what makes the platform a real writing school for the genre, because an author who is paying attention can iterate on what is working and what is not in close to real time. My feeling about Royal Road is that the rankings get the credit and the comment culture quietly does half the work, and a new author should not give up either one lightly. If your goal is to learn the craft of the genre on top of attracting readers, Royal Road is doing more than the other half of the equation for you, and that is a meaningful service.
Where does the Royal Road model leave money on the table?
The honest weakness of the Royal Road model is that the platform itself does not pay authors for the work of writing the chapters that bring all those readers to the site, and the standard advice the community gives in response to that is to monetize off-platform through Patreon and Kindle Unlimited. That advice is correct in the sense that it works, but the consequence of it is that every dollar a reader is willing to pay for your story has to pass through two or three separate companies' fee stacks before it lands in your account. Patreon takes a platform cut plus payment processing on every monthly charge. Stripe and PayPal take their cut on top of that. Amazon takes its share of the KDP Select payout. None of these are unreasonable on their own, but they are not seven percent on their own either, and the compounded total at the end of a year of paid chapters is bigger than most authors expect when they start. I wrote about the Patreon side of this stack in detail in the post on patreon fees for web fiction authors, and the underlying point is the same here: when the platform that brings you the readers does not charge them, the platform that charges them is going to take more than it looks like.
The other thing the Royal Road model leaves on the table is the relationship between author and paying reader, and this one is more philosophical but I think it matters. When a Royal Road reader becomes a paying reader, they do not become a Royal Road customer, they become a Patreon customer of the author. That sounds like a good thing for the author, and in some ways it is, but in practice it means the author's payment relationship lives on a different site than the reading relationship, and the two are bridged by a link in a chapter footer or an end-of-chapter author's note. Every churn in that bridge, every reader who clicks the link and bounces, every reader who forgets to resubscribe after a billing failure, every international reader whose card does not go through on the foreign currency conversion, is a paying reader you lost to the bridge itself, not to a lack of willingness to pay. I think the missing piece of the Royal Road stack is not a better marketing site, it is on-platform payment that does not require a bridge at all.
What is IlorisNovel built to do?
IlorisNovel is built around the assumption that the bridge between reading and paying should not exist, and that the cut to the platform that runs the bridge should be small enough that it does not change the author's decisions. The 7% cut is the single most important number on the site, in my view, because it is low enough that on-platform paid chapters actually outperform a Patreon for the same reader once payment processing on Patreon is accounted for, which means the author is not choosing between convenience and take-home; they are getting both. The payout is direct Stripe to the author's connected account, with no monthly platform fee and no minimum threshold theatre, and the author owns the customer relationship in the sense that the reader's paid history sits on the same site as their reading history. That structurally changes the math compared with the Royal Road plus Patreon stack.
The other thing IlorisNovel does that Royal Road does not is treat the writing tools as part of the platform rather than as an out-of-scope problem the author should solve with Scrivener or Google Docs. There is a built-in editor, a world builder that lets you keep characters, places, factions, and lore in one place, and a wiki that ties to chapter content so a reader can hover a named entity and get the context without leaving the chapter. For genres that lean on dense worldbuilding (progression fantasy and litrpg specifically) this matters more than I think most authors realize until they have lived without it for two hundred chapters. If you want a low-friction sense of what writing in that environment feels like, you can try the editor without making an account and have the world builder and wiki demo open in about thirty seconds. The point is not to win a feature comparison on a landing page; the point is that the cost of switching writing tools mid-serial is real, and showing the tool rather than describing it is the only honest way to talk about it.
Who should pick which, and who should run both?
A new author with no existing readership should almost certainly start with Royal Road, post free chapters on a reliable schedule, and use the platform's rankings and comment culture to find out whether the serial has an audience at all before worrying about monetization. There is no version of this argument where I tell a brand new litrpg author to skip Royal Road and launch on a smaller platform, because the readers are not on the smaller platform yet, and the bootstrapping cost of finding them anywhere else is too high. My advice, in that case, is to treat the first six to twelve months as audience-building on Royal Road and to not put paid chapters anywhere yet, because there is no one to pay for them. The free serial is doing the only job that matters at that stage, which is establishing that the story works.
An author with a few hundred reliable readers and a running serial is the point at which the question changes, and this is where I think running both platforms in parallel becomes obviously correct. Royal Road keeps doing the discovery work it is already doing. IlorisNovel becomes the place where the early-access or paid chapters live, replacing or sitting alongside a Patreon depending on the author's existing setup. The mechanics of doing this are not complicated: you post the free public chapters on both sites on the same schedule, you keep the paid early-access tier on whichever platform takes the smaller cut of the dollar (which is increasingly us), and you let the reader self-select which site they want to read on. Some readers will stay on Royal Road for the comment culture and never pay; that is fine, they were never going to pay anywhere. Some readers will move to IlorisNovel because they want the next chapter today instead of in three weeks; those are the readers the entire monetization stack exists for, and you want them on the platform with the lowest cut and the highest take-home, which is the case we lay out for writers on the platform page.
The case for picking one platform exclusively, in either direction, is much weaker than the case for running both. Royal Road exclusivity costs you the on-platform payout that the audience you are building there is, eventually, willing to provide. IlorisNovel exclusivity costs you the discovery engine that no newer platform has yet matched in the genre. Most working authors I have read about and talked to land on some version of the stack rather than the choice, and the article that promises a clean either-or answer is, I think, selling the answer rather than the trade-off. The trade-off is the actual question.
by Jacob Tam · June 30, 2026
Common questions about Royal Road vs IlorisNovel
Does Royal Road pay authors directly?
Royal Road does not pay authors a per-chapter or per-reader royalty in the way Kindle Unlimited or an on-platform paywall does. It runs a premium supporter program that shares a portion of the platform's ad and subscription revenue with top-ranked authors, but the meaningful payouts there are concentrated in the very top of the rankings, and the typical Royal Road author earns nothing directly from the platform and everything from Patreon and Kindle Unlimited downstream.
Can you cross-post the same serial on Royal Road and IlorisNovel?
Yes, and I think most authors should. The serials on each platform live behind different URLs with different readers, and there is no SEO penalty for republishing your own work, despite a persistent myth in the writing forums to that effect. The standard pattern is to keep the free public schedule synchronized on both sites and to put the early-access or paid chapters wherever your monetization actually lives, which on IlorisNovel is the on-platform coin paywall.
Is IlorisNovel a Royal Road replacement?
I would not pitch it as one. Royal Road has roughly a decade of audience accumulation in progression fantasy and litrpg, and the Rising Stars list still moves real readers in a way nothing else in the genre does. IlorisNovel is built around on-platform payout, a 7% cut, and an editor that includes a world builder and wiki in one place. Those solve different problems, and the honest comparison is not "which one wins" but "which one belongs in the stack and for what".
What does IlorisNovel actually do better than Royal Road?
The clearest things IlorisNovel does that Royal Road does not are a native low-cut paywall with direct Stripe payout to the author, a built-in world builder and wiki tied to the editor, and ad-free and tracker-free reading for the audience. The author keeps 93% of paid-chapter revenue and cashes out directly, with no detour through a separate subscription site, and no compounding stack of platform plus payment-processing fees on top.
Should a brand new author start on Royal Road or IlorisNovel?
A brand new author with no existing readership should almost always start on Royal Road, because the discovery loop there is the single best one in the genre and it is much harder to bootstrap an audience on any newer platform from a standing start. Once the serial has a few hundred reliable readers, that is the point at which adding IlorisNovel as the paid home of the same story starts to actually move money, because by then the funnel exists and the question is where the paying readers convert.
I run IlorisNovel. If you want to see what writing here feels like, you can try the editor with no account.