An impression is not a read. It's when a work catches someone's eye: in a feed, in a collection, in a prominent spot in the catalog. They saw it. Whether they open it or not is a separate question.

How it works for everyone now

A work is shown more the more popular it is. A new work is unpopular, so it's not shown, so it doesn't become popular. The circle is closed, and it can only be broken from the outside—by advertising, friends, social media. Hence the common complaint: a newcomer without external traffic can't break through.

On Author.Today this is visible directly in numbers: to get into "Popular", you need five hundred hours of reading per day. Where would a new book get that? Nowhere. That's why they openly advise getting three hundred friends through top authors or buying targeted ads.

What is an impression grant

A new work immediately gets a specified number of impressions. Say, a hundred people will see it. Not random ones: those who have in their "want" what the work has in its header, and in their "don't want" nothing from it.

Then comes the main thing, and it's not about kindness. What happens after the grant depends not on how many people came, but on what share of those who saw it got interested.

Shown to a hundred. Twenty opened. Twelve read the first chapter to the end. Eight came for the second. That's conversion. Good—the platform gives more impressions. Bad—the grant is spent, the work continues to live through search, tags, and subscriptions.

Why this is fairer

A small work in a small fandom and a big one in a big fandom are compared not by the number of readers, but by the share of those interested. Twelve out of a hundred is better than two hundred out of ten thousand. Your law of proportions instead of pieces, just applied to the storefront.

Why it's hard to game

To fool the speed top, it's enough to buy the first vote—it's been measured that one fake vote gives a plus twenty-five percent. To fool conversion, you need to fake reading, and reading costs time: the limit is six hundred words per minute. Buying a click is pennies. Buying a plausible read-through of five hundred pages—no.

And the same for you as an author

You publish a work—it will guaranteed catch the eye of a certain number of people who are interested in such things. Not "lucky with the widget", not "should have published on Thursday morning", not "get three hundred friends".

And a second grant—for an event, you set the date yourself: you finished the work, published a new volume, rewrote a third of the text. This cures what Royal Road doesn't cure at all: there, a lost start never returns, zero out of one thousand fifty-eight.


guys, how do you like this??? the ash tree is growing, and we are solving many problems from a new angle