What LitRPG Authors Can (and Can't) Publish as Bonus Content

The pitch for Follower Bonus Content is simple: post free extras, readers follow you to read them, your follow count becomes a real audience instead of a vanity number. The LitRPGTools.com Studio is live, it’s free, and it takes about ten minutes to publish a first post.

The rules are where authors should slow down. Three of them will shape what you can actually post, and one of them, the retailer caution, is the kind of thing that’s very easy to get wrong in the excitement of a new toy. This is the practical version.

What the Studio lets you publish

The Bonus Content Studio, reached from the author dashboard, handles drafts, previews, media uploads, and publishing. Formats supported at launch are text, single image, gallery, page-ordered comic, audio, and mixed media, across content types that include bonus chapters, short stories, deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes posts, interviews, transcripts, essays, and announcements. Comics no longer have to arrive as finished pages: the new Author Studio composer builds them on the site, with panel templates, lettering, layers, and masks, and exports a full-resolution page.

In plain terms, the material LitRPG authors already have lying around: the cut arc, the character sheet you built and never showed anyone, the world-map draft, the system document readers keep asking for, the narrator outtake reel. Downloadable files are supported, so a wallpaper or a printable stat card can be offered as a follower freebie.

Two identity notes. You need a claimed, approved author profile to publish as an author. Narrators and other verified specialists publish through an approved Industry Professional profile, the same one the professional directory uses, which is a genuinely useful piece of joined-up design: the people who make the audiobook can post their own outtakes.

Rule one: SFW, zero tolerance

Every post is safe for work, full stop. No NSFW text, images, audio, files, or links to any of it. The Studio requires an attestation before you can submit, uploads are quarantined until an automated safety screen clears them, and an NSFW upload can end in a permanent ban.

For most LitRPG authors this changes nothing. For anyone whose series runs hot, it means Bonus Content is the place for the map and the deleted fight scene, not the other kind of deleted scene.

Rule two: rights you actually control

You attest that you own or control the rights to everything you upload — text, art, audio, the lot. Automation can flag a rights risk, but the platform is explicit that it cannot prove ownership; the attestation is yours to stand behind. Commissioned cover art with a personal-use license, a narrator’s audio you don’t hold the rights to, fan art you didn’t clear: leave them out.

Rule three: the retailer caution, read twice

This is the one. KDP Select requires an enrolled ebook’s digital content to remain exclusive to Kindle. The platform’s guidance is direct: do not repost enrolled content as Bonus Content. Sample chapters are a supported format, but only where your contract allows it, and for a Select-enrolled title, the safe assumption is that it doesn’t.

ACX audio carries its own exclusivity; use only audio you control, or an Audible promotional excerpt within the license Audible supplied. And note the distinction the platform draws carefully: a retailer or Patreon link pointing readers to the next step is fine, because linking is not redistributing. The rules end with the sentence every author should take to heart: current contract terms control, and none of this is legal advice.

How approval works

Every submission passes an automated SFW and submission-policy screen. If you’re Trust Tier 2, that’s the only review; human preapproval is waived. Lower-trust creators also wait for admin approval. Either way, the automated reviewer can return a post to draft and count repeat flags, but it cannot suspend or ban anyone; that remains a human decision, on the record.

Published versions are immutable. Revise, and you publish a new numbered version rather than silently editing the old one, which is the right way to run a library readers can trust.

Why the free model is the point

Authors sometimes ask why they’d give this away when a Patreon tier could charge for it. The answer is what the follow does. Following is the only entitlement, and the platform forbids any other gate, so every reader who wants your extras has to follow you, and every follow is a person who opted into hearing from you, with Bonus Content notifications they control. Unfollow, and the post relocks. You are not selling a deleted scene; you’re converting interest into a durable audience, at zero cost to the reader and zero payment friction.

A sensible first month:

1. One deleted scene from your most-read book, attached to that title.
2. One piece of art or a world map as a downloadable freebie.
3. One behind-the-scenes post on how the system works — the thing readers argue about in reviews.
4. Then watch what gets read, and post more of that.

The verdict

Bonus Content is a low-effort, high-trust channel with rules that are strict precisely where they need to be. Post what you own, keep it SFW, keep your Select titles exclusive to Kindle, and let the follow button do the work. The Studio is at litrpgtools.com/author/dashboard/bonus-content, and the full rules live in the author guide.