Sites like Royal Road

Royal Road is brilliant, and it is also enormous. Whether you are a reader who has run out of stories in your niche or a writer whose new serial sank in a flood of fifty other launches that day, it is sensible to know what else is out there. This is an honest tour of the alternatives, including where our own platform, LitFic, fits and where it does not.

What people love about Royal Road

Credit where it is due: Royal Road earned its position. It has a huge catalogue, a strong community around LitRPG and progression fantasy, rankings that surface rising stories, and a decade of trust. If you write in those genres, it is probably still where your largest potential audience lives. The trade-off is the crowd. Thousands of active serials compete for the same front page, and most authors who earn money there do it off-platform through Patreon rather than through the site itself.

The usual alternatives, honestly

Scribble Hub is the closest cousin: similar serial format, strong on romance, isekai and slice of life, with a lively forum culture. Wattpad has the largest general readership of any fiction platform and skews young adult and romance; discoverability for niche genre fiction can be hit and miss. Tapas is mobile-first and episodic with an ink economy, better known for comics but home to plenty of prose. All three are worth a look depending on your genre. None of them, like Royal Road, pays most of its authors directly for reads; earning usually routes through tips, subscriptions or off-platform patronage.

Where LitFic fits

LitFic is a serialised fiction platform run by the Ever After Group, the same family as a real bricks-and-mortar genre bookshop in the UK. We built it around one idea Royal Road does not offer natively: authors get paid on the platform itself. Writers can mark chapters as premium or early access, priced in LitCoins (one coin is worth a penny sterling), and they keep 50 percent of every unlock. Earnings accrue in pounds, not points, and are withdrawn through Stripe once they pass 10 GBP. No Patreon setup, no redirecting your readers somewhere else to support you.

For readers, that model means no subscription and no paywalled catalogue: free chapters are free forever, and unlocking a premium chapter costs pennies that mostly go to the author. The reader itself has light, sepia and dark themes, font controls, a synced library and history, optional read-aloud audio, and RSS feeds for the whole site and for every individual series.

Two publishing tracks keep quality and openness from fighting each other. The Commons is open to everyone, exactly like posting on Royal Road, and a Commons series that earns a real audience unlocks the ability to charge. LitFic Originals are curated: submit a manuscript, and if we take it on you can charge from day one and get featured placement.

The honest trade-off

LitFic is smaller and younger than Royal Road. If raw audience size today is your only criterion, Royal Road wins. What a smaller platform offers in exchange is visibility (your launch is not one of fifty that day), built-in pay rather than a second job running Patreon, and a team small enough to actually read submissions. Plenty of authors sensibly do both: keep posting where the crowd is, and put a monetised mirror or an exclusive serial where the economics are better.

Try it either way

Readers can browse the catalogue without an account. Writers can start a Commons series in minutes or submit a manuscript to the Originals track. If you want the full picture on earning, read our guide to publishing a web novel and earning money.