The most relevant information I could find on whatever the heck litRPG books were was on a website called Splendid Street, which seemed to host a good many of them. Listed there were tens of thousands of entries, each given a title, a cover, and some tags. My eyes were drawn to some of the covers, particularly the ones with barely clothed women, though I noticed that such entries were typically either not litRPG stories — they were something called… harem? instead — or didn’t generally have all that many Followers, which I thought might be the best measure of success here. With that in mind, I made a mental note not to do the same thing with my cover, if I really was going to have to write one of these things.
At that moment, more text popped up in my vision. My instinct this time was to reach out in front of me and make sure it wasn’t really there — giant white letters appearing in the air seemed just as likely as them appearing literally in my eyes, at least to me. They weren’t there, though, so it was the whole eye deal I was contending with here.
Market Research unlocked!
+10 Class XP
As I blinked, I managed to get the words to disappear. Their contents were interesting, though; I seemed to be rewarded for doing my job? That is, I seemed to be getting rewarded for doing my job in a means other than a paycheck. Whereas in my old life I’d taken a great comfort in watching my bank balance accumulate, here, it seemed, I might be able to watch my XP accumulate instead.
I scrolled through the story listings some more, this time focusing on the types of tags that were resulting in the most followers. Male lead was a big one, and that was surely easy enough to write; after all, I was a man!
+20 Market Research XP
Ooh, yes, there it was: the serotonin hit. The mini reward that your body gives you for reaching an incremental goal. It was like the System that Daemon had mentioned was geared explicitly towards it, like it had a vested interest in encouraging you along to your assigned goal.
And I, for one, was totally convinced.
I continued on with the current process, scrolling through story synopses and working out what worked best, all the while smiling as the XP notifications — for lack of a better word — hit me. Until, eventually, I got a message that was slightly different.
+20 Market Research XP
Market Research increased to level 2!
+40 Class XP
Class leveled up!
You are now Class: Level 2 LitRPG Author
At level 2, you unlock:
(1) Specialist skill slot
Would you like to assign a specialist skill now? (Y / N)
I blinked; this was an awful lot of words to suddenly appear in front of you at any one time. How did others manage this, I wondered? Surely this massively interfered with everyday life. And what was with all the exclamation marks? They were completely unnecessary.
My eyes on the final line of the message, I selected Y. Don’t ask me how I did it, it just kinda happened. It was like the knowledge of how to interface with this System had been conveniently dropped inside my brain.
Please select skill from list below:
- Market Research (Level 2)
It was hardly a “list”, but I supposed if this was a system then maybe these notifications were displayed in predefined formats. Who was I to question it? I selected the only choice from the list.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Class: Level 2 LitRPG Author
Specialisms: Market Research (Level 2)
Immediately I felt something wash over me, not completely unlike when you meet someone who wears too much cologne. But beyond the vaguely unpleasant sensation, I felt something click in my brain, as though my understanding of my chosen specialism had noticeably increased.
I turned back to the website, eager to put this hypothesis to the test.
Scrolling through the listings now, I noticed something else — the most successful stories, at least by number of followers, all had a very regular posting schedule, and they stuck to it. These people were committed, and I couldn’t imagine had a day job.
Then it occurred to me: in this world, the people writing these stories were just like me. They probably had no idea what LitRPG was before they started writing, but the System had told them that this was their purpose in their new life. They didn’t have another job because this was their job. I almost breathed a sigh of relief; the idea that someone could post a chapter of a story every day and work another job had made me start to wonder if I’d ever done a true hard day’s work in my life.
Alright, cool, so I knew in broad strokes what sort of cover I needed, I knew what themes and tropes needed to be included, and I knew I needed to post regularly. The only thing I still didn’t know was just what in the hells a litRPG actually was.
The blurbs for some of the top stories gave me some idea — it was like if Frodo had been given some numbers for how much the weight of the Ring was holding him down, or if Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber skills had been on some kind of quantifiable scale, or if Carrie Bradshaw had slowly built up an alcohol tolerance by gaining experience points for all those Cosmopolitans she drank. Not that I'd watched Sex & The City, of course.
But it was one thing to know this in broad strokes, and a whole other thing to truly understand just what in the heck this meant. If I was going to truly understand, then I was going to have to do the one thing I really didn’t want to do: I was going to have to read some.
I groaned; while the Market Research specialist part of me knew this was an important step in this process, every other part of me wanted nothing more than to kick back and relax with a beer, and bull[BLEEP] my way through the rest of it. Just like I’d done every day in my previous life.
I gritted my teeth together and forced my attention back to the screen, then scrolled through the long list of stories for one that took my fancy.
Three hours later, I realised that three hours had past. LitRPG was good. I’d never been a huge gamer, only having played the classics — Skyrim, Fall Guys, Call of Duty — but still the story I read opened up a whole new world for me. In fact, I was only distracted from this riotous tale by the number of experience points notifications I’d been racking up — one for each chapter.
+20 Market Research XP
+20 Market Research XP
Market Research increased to level 3!
+20 Market Research XP
+40 Class XP
+20 Market Research XP
+20 Market Research XP
Market Research increased to level 4!
+20 Market Research XP
+35 Market Research XP
+40 Class XP
+20 Market Research XP
+20 Market Research XP
+40 Class XP
+20 Market Research XP
+20 Market Research XP
Market Research increased to level 5!
+20 Market Research XP
+20 Market Research XP
+20 Market Research XP
+40 Class XP
+20 Market Research XP
+20 Market Research XP
+20 Market Research XP
+20 Market Research XP
Market Research increased to level 5!
+20 Market Research XP
+40 Class XP
+20 Market Research XP
+20 Market Research XP
+20 Market Research XP
…
Wow, a lot of notifications all in a row. That was really useful pleasing stuff — definitely not something you’d just glance over — so I made a note to replicate this in most chapters of my upcoming novel. In scratchy handwriting I scribbled on a nearby notepad: notifications should be AT LEAST 5% of book. The ‘at least’ was underlined.
There, I’d done it. I’d read almost an entire story about a loose strand of hair becoming sentient, progressing up in the world of martial arts, and using it to take over the world and all of hair-kind. It was a story like nothing else, and it was a story I could only wish I’d read sooner.
With the boon to my new Market Research skill that reading all those chapters had caused, I felt I understood exactly why it had worked, and why that loose strand of hair had been so compelling: it was the prolonged multi-chapter fight scenes that had a perfect repeating pattern, the lack of anything controversial like discussions of politics or basic ethics and it was the complete certainty of the protagonist that their way was the right way, with not a moment spent dissecting that idea and making sure it was actually true. All of these factors, combined, resulted in the perfect story.
The challenge now, however, was writing one of my own.