How I Wrote the First Level Up Book

A string of unlikely coincidences is the only reason this book exists.

April 2016. I'd been carrying the idea around for about four years — though, honestly, it was just one of thirty ideas I liked about equally. Then something came over me (I hadn't written anything longer than a three-page sketch in a decade), and I banged out four short chapters, maybe twenty thousand characters, and posted them on a Russian web-fiction platform. Five likes, four comments. Then I quietly dropped it for a year, occasionally thinking it'd be nice to finish that novel — I was hoping it would become a novel — someday.

April 2017. A year later I saw friends in my feed entering a contest on the same platform. I dropped by to like their book, skimmed the rules, and caught the bug. The opening of last year's abandoned book was a ready-made base to storm the charts with.

Riding the momentum, I wrote a fifth chapter and got two comments along the lines of "keep going, too early to judge." Turned out my handful of early readers had vanished over the year. That stung. I wrote a sixth chapter anyway — a few more comments this time. So I thought about promotion: I'm writing and writing, and nobody's reading? I pitched the book to a bunch of book communities. Exactly one picked it up — the big LitRPG readers' group every fan of the genre knows.

May. On the night of April 30, my mother had a stroke. That night, sitting outside the ICU at the emergency hospital, not knowing whether she'd pull through, I felt how close death really is — and I decided that if I could write, I would. I promised myself I'd finish the book, no matter what.

The community promo helped, too: by chapter ten I'd broken into the top of the LitRPG genre (even though for my book, "LitRPG" is really just camouflage). Every new installment landed to a hundred comments and a round of applause. I later learned every successful self-published author goes through exactly this — the likes, the comments, the rising rank, all of it feeding the urge to write more. Right around then the book, now titled Level Up, was accepted into a second contest.

By chapter fifteen I ran out of steam. I had no plot and no idea how it should end. I sank into apathy. Comments demanding the next installment annoyed me like calls from difficult clients. I stopped opening the site at all.

By then the book was leading its contest — and a major publisher wrote to me. They offered to publish without waiting for the contest to finish and asked for a synopsis. I froze and asked for time.

June. I had half a book and zero plot. Where do you pull a synopsis from? I paused the installments and sat down to outline the second half. Half a day of gears grinding in my head — loudly — and I produced something. It had alien races, elves, dinosaurs, different timelines, and space cruisers. If you haven't read Level Up: the story is about an ordinary guy from a provincial Russian town. How I managed to blend in that many incompatible ingredients I still don't know, but every one of them felt essential to what I was sure would be a hit trilogy.

I sent the synopsis. One publisher offered a contract. While I was deciding, a second called — pull out of the contest, publish with us, and down the line we'll get you translated into English. I said, "Sorry, but I've only got half a book, and there are going to be elves, dinosaurs, and spaceships in it." Their answer: "No problem — send what you have, plus the synopsis." So I did. To them, and to a third house that had also reached out.

For two days I wrote nothing. I waited. The first reply: "Read it all, love it, send us the rest!" That became the new fuel — the chance to be published in a series I loved.

I finished the book in a month. Two months, start to finish, for 630,000 characters. I'll say it plainly: I have never written that fast again.

Second half of the year. I finished editing by late August and sent it in. In September it went to print. By November it was on bookstore shelves. That same August I launched my first subscription run for the second book — but that's a story for another post.

April 2018. Level Up: Restart went up for preorder on Amazon. And I was busy finishing the last book of the trilogy — which, yes, has dinosaurs, elves, and time travel in it.

If you want to see what all that turned into, start with Level Up. The boxing spin-off, The Knockout, runs alongside the trilogy, and you can read the opening chapters free first. Curious how everything connects? Books in Order lays out the whole universe.

→ Start the trilogy that started it all: Level Up.