What 67 Royal Road Authors Taught Me About Writing Tools

I wasn't trying to market anything. I just asked a question.

"Fellow pantsers — how many unfinished stories are in your graveyard?"

I posted it on Royal Road's Writing forum under my AxiomWeaver_Dev account. No product pitch. No link. Just a genuine question from someone building a tool for authors who wanted to understand how they actually work.

67 replies. 939 views. A trending flame icon. And more insight into what LitRPG authors need than months of market research could have given me.

The graveyard is universal

Every author who replied had one. Unfinished stories. Abandoned drafts. Projects that fizzled somewhere between chapter 5 and chapter 50.

One author finished a 10-chapter fan fic, abandoned it, then years later someone asked how it ended — and they cranked out the other 90 chapters in a year. Sometimes all you need is one person who cares.

Another described their first book as "too embarrassing to finish editing after college" but said they wanted to go back someday. The world was still alive in their head. The writing just wasn't good enough yet.

The pattern was clear: stories don't die. They hibernate. Authors carry abandoned worlds around with them for years, waiting for the right moment — or the right tool — to go back.

Discovery writers don't plan. But they do track.

The thread was aimed at pantsers — discovery writers who figure out the story as they write it. I expected chaos. I found systems.

Almost every pantser had built some kind of tracking system, even if they'd never call it that. Timelines in separate documents. Character notes that grew organically. Spreadsheets that started simple and became unmaintainable.

One author described their process: "I tend to make the world in my head, with the characters acting independently. I want to write almost like memories of the characters in the world. I don't need to write something down for the story to exist for me."

That hit hard. For discovery writers, the story already exists. Writing it down is just sharing it with everyone else. The tool's job isn't to plan the story — it's to keep track of what's already been discovered.

The "too many cooks" problem

Multiple authors described hitting a wall when their cast got too large. At some point, every scene becomes a logistics exercise — who's where, who knows what, whose arc needs attention.

One author called it exactly that: the "too many cooks" problem. They'd started a project planned for 7 books, got halfway through the first, and couldn't figure out how to manage the complexity.

This is the problem I'm building AxiomWeaver to solve. Not "help me outline my story" — plenty of tools do that. But "help me keep track of a world that's grown beyond what I can hold in my head." The entity scanner, the event ledger, the character sheets — they exist because authors told me, in this thread and others, that tracking is where their process breaks down.

The architect thread was different

Two weeks later, I posted the mirror question for planners: "Architects and planners — when does your outline stop matching reality?"

Different crowd, different energy. 20 replies, 184 views. Architects are a smaller, more deliberate audience. But the answers were gold.

One author described a "rolling fog of war" approach — full detail on the current chapter, rough shapes for the next few, just landmarks on the horizon. Another said their 50K-word outline always collapsed to 30K by the time the story was written — the plan was scaffolding that got removed.

The most interesting reply came from an author who games out combat using D&D mechanics. They'd planned an intimidating group of undead wizards, but when the dice rolled, the wizards performed terribly — so they became comic relief instead. The simulation made the story better because it produced results the author wouldn't have planned.

What nobody asked for

In 87 combined replies across both threads, not a single author asked for AI writing assistance. Not one person said "I wish a tool would write my prose for me."

They asked for tracking. Organization. The ability to check a character's state at a specific point in the story without digging through notes. A way to manage 30+ characters across 100+ chapters without losing their mind.

They wanted a tool that understands their world — not one that tries to write it for them.

What changed because of these threads

I adjusted AxiomWeaver's roadmap based directly on what authors said:

Scene archive. Multiple pantsers described keeping "killed darlings" around as raw material, not trash. They wanted to archive scenes without deleting them — remove them from word counts and exports, but keep the entity tags and events intact. That became a ticket.

Serialized fiction mode. Several authors publish chapter-by-chapter on Royal Road and Patreon. They track release schedules in spreadsheets and manage chapter buffers mentally. A release calendar, buffer depth tracker, and published-chapter state tracking — all from these conversations.

The free tier. When authors described their tool budgets ($0-60, usually closer to $0), it confirmed that the free tier after trial needs to be genuinely useful, not a lockout. Manuscript editing stays free forever. The subscription gates the narrative engine — the thing no other tool has.

The real value wasn't signups

I got waitlist signups from these threads. Discord joins. The first people who'd eventually test the alpha. But that wasn't the most valuable outcome.

The most valuable thing was hearing authors describe their actual workflow. Not what tools they use — what they actually do. How they think about their worlds. Where the process breaks. What frustrates them.

No survey could have captured what those 87 replies taught me. The tool is better because of every one of them.

Go talk to your audience

If you're building something and you haven't talked to the people who'd use it — go do that. Not with a pitch. Not with a survey. With a genuine question about their work.

The LitRPG community on Royal Road is generous, thoughtful, and surprisingly willing to share their process with a stranger who asks honestly. I showed up as AxiomWeaver_Dev, not hiding what I was building, and they welcomed the conversation.

The community is shaping the tool. If you're a LitRPG or Progression Fantasy author, you can shape it too — join the Discord or request alpha access.