Inkitt or Royal Road?

[KUUPID]

Hello!

I was thinking of uploading one of my novels on a different writing site (I'm still iffy on this) just as a trial run to see if I could potentially gain traction elsewhere. I came across some sites and saw that a lot of people use Inkitt (and Wattpad, but I am not a fan of that site ). I was searching on forums, and saw someone recommend Royal Road. I have submitted my novel on Royal Road for now, but I wanted to see what people's thoughts were!

Is anyone on either site? How was your experience? Is there a great community like tapas or is it sort of toxic and inactive? I'm looking for a site similar to tapas since I love the platform in general. Thanks in advance!

[AnimeKitty]

Wattpad isn't that great anymore. Probably not the greatest for new writers either, as it's gotten a heck of a lot more toxic. I still publish on there, but have considered removing my works honestly. Might be best to eventually kiss it goodbye forever, even if it's where I started. I tried out Royal Road and it's not bad. I'm still new on there though. I feel like it has potential, but it's not somewhere that you'll gain a ginormous boost in popularity. They're really fond of the fantasy genre (especially isekai ) and LitRPG. I'm not sure about Inkitt, as I always heard more negative things about their writing contracts, which users have compared to scams. I'd say as long as you stay away from their contracts on Inkitt, you might do well there. Never had any interest in it myself. I think I made an account there long ago but abandoned it.

[cherrystark]

Inkitt is just another site for crappy romance stories. I have found one good author that I keep coming back for but it's a lot of werewolf/shifter romances. I would stay away from Inkitt's contracts for sure. An author I used to follow was so excited by the offer to go premium, she didn't read the contract and lost the rights to her story and it's sequel. And with their pay scale, she gets paid next to nothing.

[Toastbuster]

I’m not familiar with Inkitt, but I started using RR a couple months ago and have really enjoyed it so far. The community has been pretty good from what I’ve seen so far, and while I haven’t had a whole lot of interaction on my novel thus far, there is a decent amount of traffic and a couple follows/comments, so at the very least I know it’s not going unseen and is gaining a little bit of traction. The forums usually have a lot of good writing resources and people are generally happy to do review swaps.

[KUUPID]

Oh gosh, yes... I was on Wattpad up until this year and I never gained any traction. I didn't like forums (back when they still had it) and the only "attention" I ever got from Wattpad were people from Webnovel trying to get me to sign with them Yikes.

Ooh! I'm uploading my fantasy novel, so hopefully I can gain some traction. I liked their interface when I made my account last night, lol. It seems pretty easy to use! I'll just be happy if their community is non-toxic, tbh. I already have a ton of drama happening in my novels, I don't need more from fellow writers

[KUUPID]

Oof, so they're sort of similar to Webnovel (and sort of like Wattpad with the trending genres), I'm assuming Thank you for this... Whew. I do not want to be on another platform that's remotely like those websites, gah!

[KUUPID]

Yay! I'm glad to hear the community on royal road is non-toxic and supportive! That's something I'm definitely looking for!

[DesiredUsernameTaken]

Inkitt Deleted My Account, and Other Forms of Nefarious Vanity Press...

That's a great blog post about a writer's experiences with Inkitt! I thought of Inkitt before but it's a pretty suspicious place. If you don't try to go premium or go for a contract it may be okay, but I wouldn't personally want to help the site at all by putting a story on there.

[MShadowlawn]

Inkitt is a goddamned dumpster fire. They straight up tell you that you have to toil away in the mines of the forums in order to get any real traction, their book cover system is somehow as rigid as a board and completely broken at the same time, and I've honestly gotten no traction on their site anyway. All that, of course, is to say NOTHING of all the skeletons in Inkitt's closet, as mentioned in that wordpress article someone else posted. It's perhaps the only platform aside from Wattpad that I've posted on where I genuinely wish I never bothered to post it to begin with.

RoyalRoad's alright, I guess. I tried getting a boatload of review swaps and after I did that, it started doing okay... but I don't really think it was worth the effort, in hindsight. You should do better if your work's in the isekai/gamelit/litRPG/etc. neighborhood genre-wise, but I don't consider it a silver bullet and I'd say Tapas has a far better community hands down. Taking a trip into the review swap section of the forum(That's right, they have an entire section dedicated to facilitating review swaps! Should've been a colossal red flag in hindsight.) is like seeing an encampment swarmed with starving artists, and it honestly makes me uncomfortable to do so. I'd just take a fire and forget policy with RR if I were you.

Controversial pick here, but I always found my analytics to be the strongest on Moonquill, though I've heard others say that MQ's kind dead activity-wise. MQ also has a self-publishing program that I personally have found to be utterly unmatched by any other site or publisher out there.

[KUUPID]

Yup, I've been looking into Inkitt as well after I saw the comments on this thread. Yikes. I hate that these platforms just take advantage of us writers. It's a problem that's often overlooked and there really needs to be a change in the industry(?)/ community. Thank you for sharing this blog post! I'm definitely going to check it out!

[jkb4753]

recently i had a friend swear by dreame and radish. this person seems like a reputable source.

we've talked about this before, but any time you switch platforms you've gotta build up a following from scratch. i dont think you should factor in audience engagement when youre deciding what site to post on

[FGC_Checkmate]

Scribblehub might be a possibility depending on what you're posting. Although they are very picky with what they read from what I heard (a lot of the writing there is NSFW).