[rudyfink]

What you said reminded me of this Royal Road (https://www.royalroad.com/home) website I came across. It is not physical publishing (at least I don't think so), but it is a large collection of different authors who release books / work incrementally. The work mainly seems to be fiction of different varieties.

[davisp]

Royal Road is a place for a lot of folks to get audiences seeded before they inevitably move on to some combination of Patreon, Amazon Kindle Unlimited, and Audible.

One very notable example of this is Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. He's even just announced that he managed to sell publishing only rights to Ace for large scale distribution which to my knowledge is a first (from authors that started on Royal Road).

https://x.com/mattdinniman/status/1780998536529883622

Also, I'd highly recommend reading Dungeon Crawler Carl if you enjoy anything close to Douglas Adams-esque comedic sci-fi. Its definitely trends a lot more "adult" than Douglas Adams, but that's about as close as I can think of off the top of my head for comparison. And I'd very much recommend the Audible versions narrated by Jeff Hayes for anyone that does audio books. The Sound Booth Theater production is also good but I'd only recommend that if you're doing a re-listen.

[murphyslab]

The Dungeon Crawler Carl series' first 4 or 5 books (it's been a little while) were excellent. Carl's tone reminds me of a detective novel, while the setting is more reminiscent of Ready Player One and The Matrix. The genre is a LitRPG novel (admittedly a genre I'd never known existed until reading DCC), heavily doused with comedic elements. Lots of mature themes and references to sex, drugs, politics, and violence, but with some of the allegorical or illustrative critique (to the point of absurdity) you'd find with Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett when discussing serious topics with parallels to real life, in an imagined scifi/fantasy setting. I'd recommend the series if for those who haven't picked up a book in a while and who would appreciate those elements.

[o11c]

RoyalRoad has at least 3 major problems:

* there's a significant conflict between "this is a place to read stories" and "this is just a place to advertise for Amazon"

* the effective site rules are unwritten and quite arbitrary (one unwritten rule: you are not allowed to say anything positive about real-ish religions, only negative things)

* way too much pedophilia, including in site-promoted stories. Unlike religion, it's clearly not something they put effort into removing.

[Narishma]

Another problem is the ratings. Everything there seems way overrated. You'll see a ton of 5-star or 4-star ratings for things that are barely readable.

[lenkite]

Wasn't the case before, but RR allows banning readers from rating author stories. So, usually authors have become smarter and immediately ban readers whose review history looks critical. You cannot rate a story from which you have been banned.

Of-course readers have also gotten smarter, many now leaving 0.5 stars for all new stories. If they are banned later, you can still adjust your rating. So now many new stories get a surge of 0.5 ratings.

[dageshi]

When you've spent many a year reading machine translated chinese xianxia then indeed many stories on RR are 4/5 star worthy in comparison.

Royalroad is not a place you go to find objectively good stories, it's the place you go to enjoy your particular blend of delicious trash because in the end you'd rather read chapter 1600 of the long running braindead litrpg than you would whatever just won the hugo's.

[api]

Eww that’s not just a problem. The last two tell me something about the community. Hard pass.