Why do you have to pay for original stories? Do the creators even get anything from it?
Pay for original storys with SS?
Actually yes. There's a contract between the authors of original story and Webnovel if their novels are going premium. For every ss we used to unlock the chapters, it will became an earning for the author and also webnovel, but I don't know how they split it. I guess the authors got the bigger pie.
- Edited
Mikaluna
Mookashea
Here's how it work.
1) Readers use PAID SS (free or bonus SS don't count) to unlock chapters and send gifts.
For example, you gift a novel 50 spirit stones bought with US$ 0.99 (let's round it up to $1).
2) A portion of that money is paid to Google (if you use google play to buy SS) or Paypal, or whatever. I'm not sure of the exact amount.
Let's be conservative and say it's 5% of the transaction, or $0.05
3) Webnovel's operating costs are deducted (staff, server, electricity, parties, etc). Again, only Webnovel knows how these are calculated.
Again, let's pretend it's 5% of the transaction, or $0.05
4) The remaining amount is $0.9
5) This amount is split 50/50 between the author and Webnovel.
6) So, in this example, for every $1 you gift to the novel, $0.45 goes to the author's account. Bear in mind that the transaction fee and operating cost are hypothetical, but I believe in reality they are higher than 10%.
7) But wait, there's more!
The $0.45 is put in a sort-of temporary author's account, the access to which only Webnovel has. Authors don't know how much they had in this account.
ONLY when the account has more than $200, does the author receive a check (for $200, of course, the rest is kept in the account until the accumulated amount exceeds $200)
Let's calculate how many spirit stone readers need to gift the novel before the author receives the magical $200 check.
You need $200 in the author's account. And we're still assuming the 10% overhead cost.
After some basic math, I have the answer: roughly $444 in SS needs to be gifted. ($44.4 is deducted as transaction fee and operating cost, leaving about $400 to be split evenly between WN and the author)
So, how many spirit stones is that?
For simplicity's sake, I'll round the SS cost to 50SS for 1$. Again, bonus SS don't count, so don't argue with me about this part. Whether you buy 50SS for $0.99 or 2,500 for $49.99, the cost is the same. 50SS for $1.
So the final answer is $444 x 50 = 22,200 Paid spirit stones.
In conclusion, assuming overhead cost is 10%, for every 22,200 paid spirit stones that readers collectively spend (to unlock chapters or send gifts), author receives a $200 check.
There you go. Comments and thoughts are appreciated.
ImBloo OMG. The calculation make it seems easy and understandable. Thank for sharing it. Although we still dont know the truth at webnovel.com inside calculation.
[unknown]
Really? That means authors receive about 35% the value of the spent SS or less? Lol.
Whatever inside calculations there are, the transaction fees for Google and Apple store are public, so you can probably search for it. Also the 50/50 split is also well-known.
Authors made less than 50% of the amount that readers pay.
ImBloo yup. 5% os less than 50% and 49% is also less than 50%.
Now I feel its kinda hard for the non big author....
Moral of the story
Just use patreon
But wait there's more. Patreons gets censored so for your writing needs
We shall call it patre-on
3694
Honestly I don't know how the subscription fee is split.
Maybe WN takes 50% or more off the top, then split the remaining amount between authors of the novels that the user reads. They might track each subscribed user's activities to see how to split. But that's just my conjecture.
GegeSadewa
Yup. It's hard.
