ForeverFrozen Ya it’s steep. I’m just going to be waiting for 2-3 months of premium novels to pile up before paying for a month then dropping it.
ELITE MEMBERSHIP
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I think that's actually why its $25. Because most would only get a month out of maybe every 2-3. I agree for a monthly system $25 is too much.
And to the person who was defending it through word count of American ebooks well Kindle Unlimited kinda breaks your point. You said that one series was about $182 which is true for spirit stones. Yet that's the price Quidian set for it not market price. There's thousands of Full length novel on KU for $9.99/month which can probably rival half of qudian's Chinese site and all of this one.
I do like a lot of the books here and I will probably get a monthly sub maybe a few times unlike my KU which I have always. So its $120/year for kindle n maybe $75-100 for quidian at best. Not that different until you get the number of people using KU (which I'm too lazy to look up) but I'm sure they are making millions vs the hundred thousands quidian stands too make. It's really their consumer base is a lot smaller which is why they made the price higher to compensate I think.
Can you subscribe to Elite Membership? I can't subscribe to it. There is no subscribe button in my App
How can we pay this much when quality and update still in question?
Nope. I'm using android. When I click on green Get Elite Membership button there is no subscription button. What should I do. I tried it from different Android, still same.
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LittleSleepyFox let’s compare it to an equivalent service from Japan: Shonen Jump. For $2 a month, you get access to the back catalog of manga from most of SJ and it’s popular series. They are also continually adding new series and currently releasing in Japan series. There are limitations, but reasonable in my opinion, of reading 100 chapters a day. I think this is comparable. Otherwise, $25 is just whack. I don’t even pay $25 for Spotify and Netflix combined!
Obviously, Webnovel should use different limits/counts. But I think that their sub service should not exceed $5-7. The manga service has completed series and new/ongoing series. It’s fully translated and professionally edited. Qidian is using fan translators and editors.
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I have problem with cost of this program. I'm not living in USA, Canada or France, so because @WEBNOVEL_OFFICIAL don't change price depend of region it's cost 2 times more than Netflix Premium. I don't think that you have enough content to justifie this price. Think about less wealthy countries. If @WEBNOVEL_OFFICIAL change the pricing to around 20-30PLN I would buy this service. For 115PLN I could buy enough food for 2 weeks . It only cost 75 PLN for one month unlimited access to city transportation network(Warsaw capital city of Poland). So it's simply cost too much money.
Shaaya Thank god! Someone said it! Most if not all the novels i came to webnovel to read were just dropped! Although reading sth new is fine but come on! Most of the time i just check in or try to find sth satisfying for a while only to be disappointed again! Yes! There are dropped or suddenly finish and all the chapters reset!
The price is well pricy. I am sure that many can follow but.. who says that that's the end? From zero to here in a year... I could justify a lower price, comply to it even especially if i could read my fav novels. But. This crossed my bottom line economically.
Plus, i don't get the difference between subscription and membership. I pay for the membership, can subscribe to x number of novels or i pay the subscription of each novel either way or pay membership get free access to all novel subscribed or not? I don't get it.
good try qidian, but the price and delivered quality content don't add up. I don't wanna criticise the translators, since it all started out as fan translations, but there are still many faulty translations, spelling mistakes, irregular updates or even novels on hiatus. Why should I pay 2,5x the price of kindle unlimited or 3x the price of a netflix sub for subpar translated novels full of fillers?
ramses01 Just look at amazon kindle unlimited and copy their pricing. Their subscription would be a much greater investment over elite membership which costs over two times more.
Tanalei I think you forget what kind of book you are reading. It would be insulting to compare a 'book' that puts out many chapters a day, often times full of 'fluff', and put it at the same price ranges as 2-4 hundred or more page books that authors spend time to flesh out and edit before publishing it into one cohesive format, not something like a web novel where the author is unable to easily edit after realizing the made a mistake.
Kagenesti Just the economics of a $25 subscription is idiotic. They lose money from the people who regularly purchase spirit stones and gain nothing from the people who don't because they can't afford it. One of the main reasons for subscription services in business is to get people to THINK that they need something and price it low enough that they will subscribe and forget, not thinking about how the low monthly subscriptions add up to hundreds of dollars a year.
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Might subscribe for once if "Library of Heaven's Path" catch up with Chinese version. Over 500 chapters behind is pretty bad for Top 2 novel in Power Ranking.
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Tanalei One flaw in your otherwise nice, though incomplete, analysis is your definition of "Fulls". Yes, technically 40,000 words is the starting point for a novel. However, in the markets that the books here are competing in, 40,000 is simply unsellably short. Authors in the field of fantasy and science fiction are told to target their books at 80,000 to 120,000 words - towards the longer end if there is substantial complexity and world-building going on. So your analysis is off by a factor of 2-3.
An example might be "Way of Choices" which I read on Gravity Tales and supported the author/translator by buying the Amazon novels as they came out. They published 4 volumes, each in the 100,000 to 140,000 word range, and priced at $3.99/volume (and then stopped - I would buy the rest if they ever published it!) That's about right.
My calculation (based on 10+ SS/chapter which is more the norm for the books I read here) is that the subscription is worthwhile as compared to SS purchase if you read 7 chapters/day (1.5 chapters free, and 5.5/day paid). It's worthwhile as compared to purchasing Amazon books if you read 18 chapters/day. It's never worthwhile when compared to subscribing to Amazon unlimited.
I don't think they need to match Amazon unlimited's price, but I think they should be within a factor of 2 if they want people to continue to subscribe. I'll undoubtedly subscribe for a couple of months once it looks like the software is stable. But it's not going to worthwhile paying that much for just daily chapter updates.
in our currency it's 1.3k PHP, only enough including all meals and snacks, it can last less than a week.
Just tossing my opinion here
The sub price is too much, it should be around 10-15 $ or Euro.
Otherwise you be scaring away readers or keep den on free.