A note for the author I contacted
Hi. I’m Ivaylo Anastasov.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance I reached out because I found your story on Royal Road and saw something in it that made me want to talk.
I’m not here to sell you a marketing package, and I’m not pretending to run a giant publishing house with dozens of authors and an acquisitions department.
What I’m trying to build is much more specific.
I want to work with a small number of authors whose stories have already proven that people want to read them, and use what I’ve learned over the last fifteen years about online discovery, distribution, audiences and recommendation systems to help those stories reach much further.
Before I explain what that could mean for your book, it probably makes sense to explain who I am and why I think I can do it.
How I got here
I’ve spent most of my working life trying to understand how things get discovered.
I’m Ivaylo Anastasov, an author and digital distribution specialist.
I’ve been working with SEO, search visibility and online traffic since 2008. I became fascinated very early by a simple problem: why does one piece of content get discovered while another, sometimes equally good, disappears?
Over the years, my work has increasingly focused on one question:
How do large platforms decide what gets discovered?
Search engines, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, and now large language models all use different systems, but they share the same basic problem: deciding which content to surface, to whom, and when.
That’s the area I’ve spent years experimenting with.
In 2011, that interest took me in a direction I never expected. I started an audiobook channel using public-domain recordings produced through LibriVox. What began as a small experiment eventually became the largest YouTube-based audiobook library in the world, with more than 13,000 videos, over 450,000 subscribers, tens of millions of views, and recordings created by thousands of volunteer readers around the world.
I didn’t build it as a publishing business. At the time, I was simply obsessed with making books easier to find.
But running something like that for more than a decade teaches you things. You learn how people discover long-form content. You learn how search traffic behaves over years rather than days. You learn the difference between something that gets a short burst of attention and something that keeps being found again and again. You learn what happens when thousands of pieces of content start reinforcing one another. You learn how titles, descriptions, search engines, recommendations, external traffic, catalog structure and audience behavior interact.
Over time, that same curiosity expanded beyond Google and YouTube. I’ve spent years experimenting with Facebook traffic, search algorithms, recommendation systems and, more recently, the way large language models surface and recommend information and content.
More recently, I started applying that experience to books.
I came to Royal Road as an author, published my own series on Amazon, and began studying how external traffic, advertising, reader behavior, catalog structure, and platform recommendations interact over time.
That experience is what led me to create Statforge Media.
The audience existed long before Statforge Media did. That distinction matters.
Then I became an author myself.
I started publishing Emilia Transmigrated: A Mage’s Journey From Birth on Royal Road, and eventually took the series to Amazon.
That was when two parts of my life that had previously been completely separate suddenly collided.
I had a book.
And I had fifteen years of experience figuring out how to help content get discovered.
So I started experimenting.
The first publishing experiment
I tested this on my own books first.
When I started publishing Emilia Transmigrated on Royal Road, it was not some obvious runaway hit. Even now, it has only a very small number of Royal Road reviews compared with many of the stories sitting at the top of Rising Stars.
But that gave me something useful: a relatively modest book to test everything else around it.
I experimented with positioning, Amazon ads, external traffic, cross-promotion, release timing, series structure, and the way Amazon reacts over time when a book continues to receive traffic from outside the platform.
The result was much better than I expected.
The series grew to three books. Book 3 reached a documented Amazon Store rank of #2,718, and my strongest KDP month passed $5,500 in royalties.
That doesn’t prove that I can make every book successful. It proves something more useful to me: I can take a book that is not starting from an absurdly strong position and still build meaningful commercial momentum around it.
That’s the experience I want to bring to authors whose stories already show much stronger reader validation than mine did.
#2,718 in the Kindle Store - documented on Book 3.
I also want to be completely honest about the limits of that experience.
Emilia is one series. I have years of experience with traffic, discovery and distribution across other formats, but books are still books, readers are unpredictable, and Amazon has its own recommendation systems that nobody controls.
If readers don’t connect with a story, or if the signals around the book simply don’t line up in a way Amazon responds to, nobody can honestly guarantee a result.
That’s exactly why I’m not looking for random manuscripts.
I want to work with authors who have already proven that they can make readers care. Royal Road gives me something incredibly valuable before I ever spend a dollar: followers, favorites, comments, retention, ratings, Patreon support and momentum.
I can bring distribution, advertising experience, infrastructure and money.
I want the author to bring the one thing I can’t manufacture for them: a story that people already want to keep reading.
Why I’m doing this now
That experiment brought back an old kind of enthusiasm.
Back in 2011, I started with a small idea and no real sense of how far it could go. Years later, it had become the largest YouTube-based audiobook library in the world.
I find myself feeling that same kind of excitement again.
This time, I want to see whether I can build something equally meaningful around modern web fiction - the kinds of stories, formats and genres that have enormous communities online even though much of the traditional publishing world still barely understands them.
I’m not pretending I’ve already built that publishing company. I haven’t.
I’m saying I want to build it, and I know what it feels like to start with something small and keep pushing until it becomes much bigger than it had any right to be.
So the question changed for me:
What could I do with all of this behind a really strong book written by someone else?
The kind of deal I would want as an author
I don’t want to own your story.
If I’m asking you to trust me with part of the commercial life of something you may have spent years creating, I think the arrangement should be unusually simple.
You don’t pay me a publishing fee. You don’t pay me for setup, marketing work or the time I spend around the release.
I fund the initial advertising campaign myself, up to $1,000. That investment is gradually recovered from the book’s earnings under the publishing agreement, never billed to you upfront and never turned into a personal debt.
The initial agreement lasts two years. After that, it can be ended with six months’ notice, and the publishing rights covered by it return to you.
You’ll receive monthly sales and royalty reports.
I also use third-party book-discovery services with established mailing lists and catalog audiences. A release can be included in promotional catalogs and newsletter campaigns that together reach more than 80,000 unique subscribers. These are catalog and newsletter placements alongside other books, not a dedicated email blast to 80,000 people.
This part matters more than it looks
FILM, TV, GAME AND MERCHANDISING RIGHTS STAY WITH YOU.
Today, LitRPG, cultivation, progression fantasy and many of the genres growing on Royal Road can still look unusual to people outside web fiction.
That doesn’t mean they’ll stay unusual.
Japan has spent decades turning novels and light novels into manga, anime, games, merchandise and enormous entertainment franchises. China has built a huge industry around web novels, including cultivation and fantasy stories that later become television series, animation, comics, games and licensed properties.
Western web fiction is younger, but I see no reason to assume its most successful stories will always remain just ebooks.
George R. R. Martin has spoken about how modest the early commercial reality around A Game of Thrones was. In its first years, the money involved was on the order of $50,000-$60,000. Decades later, his personal earnings from the novels have been estimated at roughly $80-$90 million, before even getting into television, licensing and merchandising.
Nobody signing the first publishing agreement knows which story will become that story. Most won’t. But if yours does, I don’t think the publisher who helped you release the ebook should automatically own a piece of everything it might become twenty years later.
No film or television rights.
No game rights.
No merchandising rights.
No AI-training rights.
No option on everything you write next.
The publishing agreement should cover the publishing business we actually agree to do together. I don’t want unrelated rights quietly bundled into it.
Your Royal Road and Patreon income remain yours.
And I’m looking beyond the obvious markets
I’m already exploring international publishing for my own books.
At the moment, I’m trying to open conversations around publishing Emilia outside the standard Western Amazon markets, including possibilities in Ukraine, Russia, China and Korea.
I don’t yet know which of those conversations will become actual publishing relationships. That’s part of what I’m building.
But if I establish reliable partners in those markets, I’d be happy to represent authors I work with there as well - under separate agreements, because every market and every local publisher works differently.
Again, the principle is simple: I don’t want rights I’m not actively using.
I don’t want to build a publishing factory.
My time is limited, and I intend to keep it that way.
If Statforge grows, I expect it to remain a small, focused team. The point is not to publish as many books as possible.
The point is to find a small number of books worth pushing as far as I know how.
That’s what I’ve spent most of my working life doing in one form or another: helping content get discovered and distributed.
- Ivaylo Anastasov
Author, digital distribution specialist, founder of Statforge Media LLC
If you want to check the receipts
The proof is here.
I’d rather show the underlying platform screenshots than ask you to trust a polished claim. Click any image to inspect it.
If this sounds interesting
Let’s talk about your book.
If I contacted you, I’ve already spent some time looking at your story. I’m happy to talk through what I saw, what I think I could contribute, what rights would actually be needed, and what a real agreement could look like.
I created Statforge Media LLC because if I’m going to do this with other authors, I want the business side to be real too.
The company itself is new. The experience, infrastructure and obsession behind it are not.
partnerships@statforgemedia.com