Author here, trying to get a handle on where readers are looking for LitRPG and Gamelit. What Amazon categories do you check to find new books? What keywords do you search on? What should I as an author do to make it easier for you to find my books? Note: I write life in space, which has a litRPG and Gamelit feel since I am a gamer from back in the dark ages of mainframe computers with text games on them. So my books don't totally fit the genres, and more skirt the edges. But a lot of my fans do also read LitRPG and Gamelit. For example, my last book was space fighter based, with a lot of similarities to Wing Commander and Egosoft's X3 series. Not a game, but my own universe, but there was leveling up and kill totals, promotions etc. I'm trying to get a handle on where I sit with the genres, and how you as readers find books to read given neither actually have their own categories yet. Most of my books go into Space Opera and Epic Fantasy, and as many appropriate sub-categories as possible. If you're looking in certain places, and my books fit, I want to make sure you can find them. Comments welcome.
Personally, I read based on recommendations; mostly on reddit, a couple of Discord channels, GoodReads and the LitRPG Podcast. In other words, I hardly ever use Amazon as a search engine when it comes to LitRPG; most of the time I'm there to download a book (they're all on KU) that I have already heard enough good things about. I definitely glimpse at Amazon's recommendations whenever I'm browsing a book that I've already have my eyes on, but again I hardly ever check those recommendations unless the title or the author rings a bell.
I've never used Reddit. Can you explain it a bit? Ditto Discord Channels, as I've not even heard of them. Goodreads I avoid except to keep my books listed properly. Link to the Podcast? Especially to where an author gets their books on it. A year later, and I'm still trying to figure out how Yesterday's Spacemage became so well known so fast.
Here you go! =) Reddit is like a huge forum, with subforums about any conceivable topic. Here's the LitRPG subreddit: litrpg Discord is a chat app (think Skype), focused on allowing a lots of people chat at the same time. The LitRPG forums has its own Discord, here: Join the LitRPG Forum Discord Server!
Amazon, especially Kindle Unlimited, has turned me into a horrible pack rat of Samples. This forum hasn't helped me with that, either. Go there to check out, download, or buy one book, and two or three others in the Also Viewed or Also Boughts catch my eye and get a sample downloaded as well. After a year of that, the queue on my Kindle has gotten so large, I wonder if life, work, and my own writing will ever give me enough time to catch up.
Reddit can be a little unfiltered, which is good, in a way. It has a rather short attention span, though, and it lends itself more to people leaving their piece of opinion and moving on. And, yes, join us on the LitRPG discord (I also never look at Amazon recommends and go by recommends of people who I think have similar tastes)
I type in LitRPG and sort by most recent publication, then scroll down until I get past all the pre-releases. I pretty much at least look at every book that is obviously a LitRPG. Make sure that "LitRPG" is in the subtitle. Searching for that as a keyword gives lots of false positives. If the book doesn't literally say, "LitRPG," I'm not going to look at it. LitRPG is hard to pen down. Those some readers will take a hard line that any book that doesn't actually take place inside a game isn't LitRPG, most readers believe that simply utilizing game mechanics qualifies the book for the genre. I feel that way myself. In fact, I prefer portal fantasies that have game mechanics over books that actually take place in a game. That being said, a lot of readers in the genre, myself included, want system messages that say, "You have gained 1000XP. Congratulations! You have are now Level 2." To be honest, if you don't feature that kind of game mechanics, I'd rather skip it. My other reasons to not buy a LitRPG: - You have a line space between paragraphs. (Surprisingly, a good number of readers agree with me on this one and absolutely will not buy a book that is formatted this way.) - You overuse italics for artificial emphasis in lieu of utilizing better word choices. (As far as I can tell, I'm just about the only person on the planet who feels strongly about this issue.) Hope some of this helps.
Mostly Goodread recommendation on other litrpg books I've read + recommendations from people on either reddit or goodread. I trust that site the most because you tend to get honest reviews in there mixed in with the bought/fangirling ones as opposed to amazon or audible. Plus it's coming from people with similar tastes so... yeah! I hardly use the amazon engine or even bother with the reviews there as most tend to give false info on litrpg books... or didn't even know what litrpg is as a genre and bought the book randomly causing them to hate it for what it is with their review boiling down to a rant on genre norms and nothing specific about the book itself. Generally however the best way to get the word out about your work is the facebook page for the land series. I forgot the name of that thing but it's a clique and pretty much corners the market. I used to get most of my updates and recommendation from there before I found out the truth about the person running it.
That's interesting. I have the opposite view. If an author has to put the genre in the subtitle, then the cover and blurb have totally failed to do their job. I know its common now, but "A LitRPG adventure" as a subtitle puts me right off even looking at it. This is very D&D, but not space games. In space, we get promoted to a higher rank, which is a different level. And we dont add HP, we get a MkII shield to replace the Mk I. And better versions of everything else. We dont armor ourselves or our horse, we buy a better ship or are given it. Comes down to mechanics. Rewarded more often with money for missions, and spend that on increasing HP type stuff. In the good sand box games, the more kills you make, the harder things get. Back in the Wing Commander days, the more kills you made per mission, the harder the next one was to beat. So eventually you'd have to shut the game down and restart it to reset the difficulty back to normal. I used to have to do that with X3's as well. Now you hit something different. Adding blank lines between paragraphs is considered page manipulation by Amazon. While their KU calculator which counts pages ignores those lines now, Amazon is still known to nuke an author doing this on the grounds they are trying to manipulate KENPC to get a higher page number in KU. A lot of scammers used to do this, and for a while, anyone doing this had Amazon crawl up their arse with a microscope as being suspect. A lot of authors were then banned for doing other things wrong, but it was something simple like paragraph gaps in all books which attracted Amazon's attention to them. So technically, any book which still has these gaps, is an author I immediately wonder if they are dodgy or not. And as an author, anyone with even a hint of dodgy about them these days is to be avoided like the plague, because association can bring Amazon down on you if they turn out to be black instead of grey. It's not worth the risk. Personally though, even back when this was a thing, and everyone did it, I refused to read a book which was spaced like this. It made dialogue almost impossible to read for one thing, as you did too much page flipping. A few notable authors bounced me out on the first page back in the day, and I've never read them since.
Goodreads is hostile to authors, so I tend to stay away from it. But what I do notice is most of the reviews there, are also on my books on Amazon. And while I have my fans, they are generally fair. You can see that on Crossover, as it has a 3 rating since most people found it too weird. One has to do ones due diligence. Always read the sample before buying, or use KU. That is what the sample is for, to stop you buying something which isn't what you thought it was going to be. I'm not aware of it. And with my track record with cliques, maybe better that way.
It's probably a different experience from the other side. The reviews on goodread can swing either way. I've seen books brutely one stared out of malice and other praised to high heaven thanks to bought reviewers. As a buyer however it's easy to tell the difference and I do find a brutely honest review more informative even if it didn't give a 5 star review. I'd still buy it if it's to my taste and the thing that brought it down was ok with me. Mostly I draw the line on two things. blatant plagiarism, not kind the same theme or idea but word for word copy pasting. And harem/rape books. I have no interest in a 14 year old's wet dream.
The other problem on Goodreads is it's common practice to 1 star a book as a marker for I need to read this soon. A lot of the time, those 1 stars never get changed. Blatant plagiarism is illegal. There is a very high profile court case going at the moment on this theme. The author was more like a publisher using ghostwriters to do the stories, and she is blaming the ghostwriters to get out of her own mess. Theya re fighting back. Anyone doing it is essentially asking to be sued. It's the reverse harem books flooding into sci-fi/fant which I cant stand. It can seriously mess up your also-boughts. Rape should be banned. Actually, I think it is on Amazon. So if you see it there, report it. So is underage sex, which Amazon define as under 18. So is incest, which is why there is so much step-sister step-brother stuff around. I've not seen any 14 year old wet dream books, thankfully. Don't want to either. I've been accused of being a 5 year old, and I do like my characters being nude in the hot tub, and been accused of teenage fantasy before. But I dont write or read erotica. I did try once, and it was boring.
Not only boring but poorly written in case of litrpg. It's always a piece of white bread as interesting as wet paint that just stands there and is very very VERY passive from beginning to end. The girls are the one jumping on him for the D and in most cases a full chapter is dedicated to BJs,,, always because the girl is the one enjoying it. Like I said, 14 year old who's never been with an actual girl's wet dream. Also they're all Double Ds with perfect bodies. throw in a 500 year old lolita vampire girl that looks and acts like a 5 year old to get over the child pornography rules. gross, so gross. Admittedly the lolita thing I notice more in Japanese books, the american ones like their girls booby and a bit older than the character but only in actions not in age. I haven't seen the one star rating as a "to read" marker yet. I've seen it as a drive by, someone just mass down voting the books either out of spite or so by comparison the ones he likes look better? not sure. There is a to read marker on goodread if you're keeping a shelf their, most people who do rate as a marker are die hard fans that would give the book 5 stars months before it's out and review it something like "Yay can't wait! review coming!" dating back five years or something LOL!
Blurbs and recommendations are what sell me. I'll look at amazing covers and be like, "meh" But if someone recommends a book with a crazy hooky blurb like, say..."The Martian except the main character is a VR server admin trapped in the game he was running as the server dies" Then I am hella tots in. (speaking of which, someone please write that. k thnx
Any mention of someone else's book in a blurb puts me right off. Its ok in an ad, but it still puts me off. It's a kind of bragging. And it also reveals where you head was at when you write the book. So when someone compares it to BSG say, I know immediately I dont want to read it. If they use Frak on the first page, I know its fan fiction pretending to be a new book. If you need to compare your book to another one, the blurb needs serious work. imo.
