victorreoli Honestly since there are no rules for this, you can go either way. Probably the Webnovel team didn't expect people to be in such a hurry, which will leave them in an impossible situation - either punish the people that went ahead and published early by not including them in round 1, or include them and indirectly punish the people that didn't publish in round 1.
It's a bit of a fickle choice, but since every round has both a popularity vote and an editor's choice, I'm sure if you work hard you'll have a good shot at one or the other :) Personally I thought that this round was all about convincing the editors and readers with your idea through Volume 0 and nothing else. If somebody does feel like writing, they can just store it for now, as the next 3 parts require 20 chapters anyway, so timing yourself is a good thing.
@WEBNOVEL_OFFICIAL , my first question is how will you handle works that are reused and/or fan fiction or taking a ready-made world and using it?
A few of the novels are old novels that were created anew just so the authors could enter the contest. While I see nothing wrong with that if there are under 5 chapters, what about people that may have written up to 20+ chapters? A bit unfair for them to have an equal shot at winning a contest when they're already done with most of the work, no matter the quality :(
Same goes for fan fiction - will it be considered plagiarism if one of the novels in the contest uses another author's world/setting or just copies from here and there and markets itself as fan fiction? I see this as slightly unfair to everyone that goes to the trouble of creating his or her own world and setting, so I'd like to see it addressed in some way in case somebody does do it.
Third question - Are you going to be checking the covers? Some people's covers might be directly borrowed art that does not give credit, was not paid for, etc, so I'd be interested on your stance on that matter. For instance, my cover is basically a simple edit of 2 separate photos that are given out from a website that allows its photographs to be used for anything, free of charge, no requirement for any credit.
Fourth question - How will you combat any writers that might have numerous accounts? I know this isn't typical, but it isn't that hard to realistically hide your IP through onion routing or a VPN, hence it's easy for people to create numerous accounts and spend their red stones on their own novel, thus in effect cheating. Are there safeguards to prevent such an event?
