Wolfick I mean, it's both, SS are super expensive.
So is the monthly membership for unlimited reading, bigger companies with more content charge less than half the rate and they actually have some quality control on their content unlike webnovel who allow any dipshit translator work for them regardless of quality, look at swallowed star being butchered by the new translator all because qidian is quantity over quality when it comes to translators.
in typical amazon novels, you pay for quality. but that 100k words book you're paying for takes at least two years. in wn, you pay for time. for example fmhm, 200k words within the same time frame two years, or even lesser. well ye, that's the translation, not the original lol. chinese to english. count how many chinese characters do you need to know to translate it. raws don't help. same with radicals, it helps a bit but not a lot.
and if you talk about originality stuff cause cn novels are fvckin' cliche. ye, right. cliche stuff are pretty fun to read in my opinion. for extremely original and complex ones... meh. this year, the only amazon book i have read that was actually interesting was Dorothy Must Die which is $6.99 as ebook. lowkey promoting
Monthly membership cost is independent. Just because Company X charges $10/month, it doesn't mean anyone who charges more is overpriced. Competitive pricing is only in regards to competition. Kindle Unlimited is something like $70/year for unlimited books in the program, from what I've heard, but that doesn't mean everyone else shouldn't charge more than that. Webnovel can choose if they wish to compete with that price, but they are both offering different products (yes both are books, but different styles) so there is no need to compete.
Translators, and more often editor flaws are a genuine concern though, I can't agree with you more on that part. There certainly needs to be a stronger supervision on the quality of those, especially older chapters where any comments you make on errors will simply never be seen or noticed.
I completely believe the price of SS is reasonable for a novel like swallowed Star, but lack of translation/editing quality truly brings it down.
I would also like to bring up another point no here is mentioning - is that 90% of the original authors' books here are free, and I have read a lot of them, some are brilliant, while others are well ... not.
And one thing I have to mention is that so many of the novels here are original, while one can complain about the grammar and spelling mistakes, the plot itself is brilliant. There are so many hidden gems on WN that you could spend weeks reading and not paying one SS.
Look, not to brag or toot my own horn, my novel is already sitting at over 118k words, and I think by the time I have finished I will be at 2 maybe 3 million words. Firstly if I went the self-publishing route, it would take me a year or two to finish before I could publish on Amazon. Secondly, I would end up having to cut 80% of my scenes.
As with regards to translators - that is also a mixed bag, but no matter how much a translator messes up - it is still better than MTL the novel, believe me, I have read dozens of MTL novels, and besides the immense headache you get, your own English goes south for about a week thereafter, and you do get incredible translators like EndlessFantasy Translation, who I have to take my hat off too, their translations are one of the best I have ever come across.
What I do find unfair is how WN promotes so many books on the homepage, that are either horrible or haven't been updated in months, and half the time it is the same book over and over again.
No one is forcing anyone to buy SS, you can always cut back on your premium novels, and spend some time looking for those hidden gems. An example, Indigo Emperor by holachica, the novel is only 7 chapters, but the writing is superb.
A blog started by Book_Keeper https://virtualbookshelf.home.blog has started a good ranking system and reviews some of the original novels here - check it out if you are looking for something to read.
At the end of the day, no one is forced to pay for SS. WN has given their customers multiple options to gain access to premium chapters. And users of WN are given the unique opportunity to find budding authors, some who I do believe will go on to become published authors one day, and in the future, as a WN client, you were there when they just started out.
PS: Just my opinion but I do think that the monthly subscription is a bit too expensive. I think it would sell better, and eliminate many of the complaints, if they dropped the price to $10 to $15.
'What expensive is your reading habit.'
All argument have their own point and stayed logical. But the phrase above is what sum it all for me. Hobbies tend to be expensive as you get addicted.
If i like it, i pay for it. If i don't, then i won't.
If i can afford, then i'll purchase. If i can't, then well, i can't, so no reading then.
Really simple, if you ask me. shrugs
i have no problem paying tho when i first found this site chapters where 3-7 Spirit Stones now they seems to be 7-20 Spirit Stones per chapter
The fact that Advent of the Archmage has around 500-600 locked chapters with an average SS cost per chapter at around 10-13SS (some cost as high as 18SS), translates to anywhere around 5000-6000SS to unlock the whole book (we can lower the daily rewards from that) at the current rate you can buy 3250SS for 50 USD meaning a total cost to read AoA is somewhere around 75+ USD. I think this is a case of SS being wayyyyy to expensive for the good of the site. Personally I spent around 20usd unlocking 100-150 chapters until I realized that this is *** stupid and that I'm getting ripped off thus decided to go to other websites to read the book for free. (As a reader I'm not interested about how these sites got the story for free.) All I'm saying is that because webnovel isnt the biggest player in the market and people aren't stupid (like me) if the prices are as high as 100 usd to read a fantasy novel, people are not going to read anything on webnovel.
veinglory But then you got to remember, those books normally at that price are professionally done. Have gone through extensive professional editing as well.
I don't think any of us can sit here and say the majority of stories on this site are getting professional editing done to them. Also in many cases we can't even say the same for the translations. If any we might be able to say 1% of them are close to professionally done.
So from the stand point of those 2 things, its still not fair to be charging that much for them. When the work being done isn't even professional. Because as stated before in this thread. Webnovel doesn't care about quality, they want quantity.
I can get everything on amazon ebook section for $10/month.
WN premium novel authors are all amateur writers, their income is relative to the amount of words they put in their chapters. I dont think there is any editing either being done (might not even be allowed by qidian, idk) on published chapters.
The translated novels are pretty much all copy/paste. Almost all of them suffer from extreme repetitiveness, which i assume is directly related to the wordcount based income.
Asking money for these novels is a joke. Saying that it's not expensive is an even bigger joke. If you ask money for works of fiction than it should be an amount relative to the quality of it.
I've had work professionally published (Wiley, Cleis etc), and I feel confident in saying that many of the books on WN are of a professional standard. That is why those authors have to consider their options carefully. If they submit to a traditional press their work will be edited; if they self-publish they may earn more than enough to pay for editing. Or not. It's all about weighing your options. It is certainly not all crap authors who should be grateful to grovel for pennies.
Can anyone advise other sites or content sources that I could use to read these types of material. This one has a confusing pricing and charging model (just search for "Webnovel .com Scam", and find all the many posts... I don't see that when I search for "Audible.com scam" or "amazon.com books scam" and I'd rather buy books using $ than words using SS, what ever that is. The fact that this thread even exists demonstrates the confusion and why the unhappiness is justified.
Can anyone advise other sites or content sources that I could use to read these types of material. This one has a confusing pricing and charging model (just search for "Webnovel .com Scam", and find all the many posts... I don't see that when I search for "Audible.com scam" or "amazon.com books scam" and I'd rather buy books using $ than words using SS, what ever that is. The fact that this thread even exists demonstrates the confusion and why the unhappiness is justified.
Can anyone advise other sites or content sources that I could use to read these types of material. This one has a confusing pricing and charging model (just search for "Webnovel .com Scam", and find all the many posts... I don't see that when I search for "Audible.com scam" or "amazon.com books scam" and I'd rather buy books using $ than words using SS, what ever that is. The fact that this thread even exists demonstrates the confusion and why the unhappiness is justified.
Drouzy tbh, this thread is no longer valid. WN has changed its system
Overlord_Venus By changing the name of the in-app currency from SS to coins?
@yaoyueyi necro
