Royal Road Web Fiction Rankings Scraper

Scrapes fiction ranking lists from Royal Road — the largest English web-serial platform — and returns structured metadata for each fiction. No account required. Metadata only: never scrapes chapter text.

What does it scrape?

• Ranking lists: best-rated, rising-stars, trending, weekly-popular, latest-updates, complete, active-popular, new, writathon (your choice)
• Per fiction: ID, title, author, tags, overall rating, rating count, followers, favorites, total views, estimated page count, chapter count, publication status, synopsis, and which ranking list it appeared in (with its position)

Who is it for?

• IP scouts and indie publishers tracking which web serials are on the Kindle Unlimited pipeline
• LitRPG / progression-fantasy analysts building ranking feeds and trend dashboards
• Data journalists covering the web-fiction market
• Writers benchmarking their own fiction against top performers

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	100	Maximum number of fiction records to return
rankingLists	array	["best-rated","rising-stars","trending"]	Which ranking lists to scrape

Supported ranking list values: best-rated, rising-stars, trending, weekly-popular, latest-updates, complete, active-popular, new, writathon

Example input

{
    "maxItems": 200,
    "rankingLists": ["best-rated", "rising-stars"]
}

Output

Each record contains:

Field	Type	Example
fiction_id	number	21220
title	string	"Mother of Learning"
author_name	string	"nobody103"
author_profile_url	string	"https://www.royalroad.com/profile/100374"
tags	string[]	["Time Loop", "Adventure", "Fantasy"]
rating	number	4.83
rating_count	number	16859
followers	number	31727
favorites	number	30680
views_total	number	26652840
pages	number	2932
chapter_count	number	109
status	string	"COMPLETED"
description	string	"Zorian is a teenage mage..."
ranking_list	string	"best-rated"
ranking_position	number	1
fiction_url	string	"https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21220/mother-of-learning"

Notes

• Royal Road serves public ranking pages without authentication — no login needed.
• The actor scrapes public metadata only. Chapter text (/fiction/<id>/chapter/...) is never fetched.
• Rate limits are handled automatically with exponential backoff.