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A plain explainer of how Royal Road's Rising Stars list works, and a self-check that reads only the numbers you type in. It does not connect to Royal Road, it is not the real formula, and it does not predict anything.
Rising Stars is a list Royal Road publishes on its own Rising Stars page. It gathers fictions that are gaining traction and puts them where new readers browse, so a spot on it is one of the strongest sources of fresh readers a growing story can get. The list refreshes often, which is why a fiction can appear, climb, and drop over the course of days.
Because that visibility feeds more followers, which can feed more visibility, authors treat reaching it as a turning point. That is also why so much folklore surrounds it. This page tries to separate what is publicly known from what is guessed.
Royal Road has never published the formula, so the points below are community consensus, not confirmed fact. What authors broadly agree on is that recent activity counts for more than your running totals. A story that is moving now tends to be surfaced over a larger but flat one.
The exact formula is not public. Royal Road has never released the weighting it uses, how often the list is recalculated, or how it buckets fictions by genre. Anyone quoting a precise weight or a follower threshold is guessing. This tool does not invent one either.
So the honest way to read your own trajectory is not to chase a magic number. It is to look at the levers the community agrees matter, check where your own numbers sit on each, and push the weakest one. That is exactly what the self-check below does, using only figures you type in.
Copy the numbers from your own Royal Road dashboard into the fields below. Nothing is fetched from Royal Road, and nothing you type leaves your browser.
This is a rough educational self-check built only from the numbers you typed. It is not Royal Road's real formula, it reads nothing from royalroad.com, and it cannot predict whether you will make the list.
Find these on your fiction's dashboard on Royal Road. Blank fields are read as zero. The average rating is held between 0 and 5.
120 new followers in 7 days is roughly 17 per day.
Recent velocity is the figure the community watches most closely while a fiction is young.
This is around the daily pace the community associates with a climbing fiction. Recent momentum is the lever most authors agree matters most, so hold this while the story is young.
A frequent, steady schedule is the lever the community agrees matters most while a fiction is new. A regular update keeps a story in front of readers day after day.
A strong average over enough ratings to be stable. This is the kind of rating health the community treats as a green light.
A healthy share of your followers have favourited the story, which reads as readers who are invested rather than just watching.
There is no score, rank, or countdown here on purpose. Each row is your own number with a plain read, so you can see which lever to push next. Whether any of it lands you on the list is up to Royal Road.
The copied text and the PNG both carry the note that this is a self-check from your own numbers, not a prediction and not official Royal Road data.
It would be easy to add the levers up and hand back a single number or a countdown to Rising Stars. It would also be dishonest. Royal Road has not published the formula, so any score would be invented, and a false precise answer is worse than a plain one. The four reads above are the honest version, your own numbers reflected back with the context the community agrees on.
The most reliable lever is also the one fully in your hands. A frequent, steady release schedule while your fiction is young keeps readers returning, and returning readers are what recent momentum is made of. Everything here runs in your browser, with nothing sent anywhere and nothing read from Royal Road.
This tool handles one at a time. WriteIDE is the desktop studio that tracks LitRPG stats, items, skills, and quests across a whole novel, and keeps them correct at every scene.