Webnovel.Forum

yaoyueyi Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

As a contracted author of three novels, I cannot emphasize the wording better for the struggles of writers and for the demand of mass releases. Even after explaining IRL problems, I receive constant demands of mass release.

I appreciate the enthusiasm of readers. But even as a native-English speaker and writer, it takes me 2-5 hours to write a chapter, and realistically, I don’t have that much time in a day, excluding sleep, school, and my day time job.

I even write a lot before actual publication but with writers block in the way—I easily run out of the stockpile.

Another issue is that I would make one mistake (ONE—a comma placement for example), and someone points it out. I like to emphasize that the story is not always about the grammar, but the content itself. It also hinders my confidence as a writer, afraid that I will be called out. This also applies to non-native English speakers. Yes, if it’s constant then don’t be afraid to suggest an editor (respectfully) but other than that, pointing out one simple mistake is just arrogance at this point. ~ sorry ~

I suddenly found the urge to write and then I posted on webnovel. No editing. No checks whatsoever. Its just one of the many novels you are free to ignore. But if you read it I hope you like it.

I got my first review today. The person just said "bad bad bad bad".

How does one delete a review? The only option I have is to report it.

Beautiful

poapasi I'm not sure about you, but for me I have an option to delete any reviews that are posted on my own works.

It appears as a trashcan icon next to the like button and the comment button.

yaoyueyi First let me start by thanking all you authors out there who manage to keep me captivated ,my humble respect. Moving on, thank you for ironing out your side of life. Really appreciate it. Am not going to be a hypocrite and say that am not one of those people who demand almost the impossible from authors because that would be plain lying. I love reading wonderful captivating work of art and I see that putting pressure on my dear authors is not doing me and you any good. Am new to web novel so I've managed to see some minor problems that have managed to irritate me like typos and such but after reading this I know that it's somehow our fault as readers.
We put so much pressure on authors to release more chapters that they can't even properly edit their work and when they release unedited work we start pointing out the mistakes like it's all there fault.
We should be thanking and helping out our authors the best way we could if we want excellent work. How many stories have been dropped by readers due to poor work and such?
Have we ever wondered how a beautiful story simply goes out of context the further it's released? How it captures you in the beginning and then just goes "blur" the further it goes?
I think if we were to answer these questions we would understand the pressure authors are in to produce award worthy work...( Too many words )

I live in America. In my opinion some of your books are better than a lot of books we call " Best Sellers" here. Ya'll are very talented. Yes I ask for mass releases. Especially when it start getting real good and the chapter is over. But it also gives me something to look forward to the next day. And yes I love spoilers. But you're good at what you. People are people and you can't please us all. Do what you do best.

For the record I rather read on here than read my Kindle. I'm on here everyday but I haven't been on Kindle for almost a month. But please understand I still don't like that Privileged stuff

TheCaffinated those Writers working for chinese webnovel companies are expected to have that level of performance. Er Gen can tell you horror stories about expectations of paid writers for webnovels.

Clowniac You’re absolutely right, authors don’t owe readers anything regardless of whether they’re reading for free or not. Likewise, readers don’t owe authors anything: they don’t have to like your books, they don’t have to vote for them, they don’t have to review or comment on them, they don’t have to save them in their libraries or even freaking read them.

Honestly, if basic, and I mean basic, standards of writing were to be adhered to; most novels on WN would fail the test and that’s being modest. In fact, when it comes to grammatical accuracy, the translations fare better than the originals (feel free to disagree). Most readers shut down their brains and read with their hearts in order to appreciate the efforts of the authors. Like someone rightly said, readers choose the plot over grammatical accuracy. That said, even the plot is so messed up sometimes that readers have to, mentally, edit it as well as the grammatical errors ( which is freaking frustrating) for the order of events to make sense.

Tip to readers:
When choosing a book to read, 1) check how far gone it is - if it’s less than a hundred chapters, then it may take a while for the story to pick up (especially so with translations which are usually a 1000+ chapters) in which case you may want to hold on; 2) check the frequency of updates by checking the last date it was updated and the intervals between each update; 3) check the creator’s comments to see if the author is one who communicates breaks in updating regularly then you may choose to read at your own risk; 4) NEVER fall the ‘comments and suggestions are welcome’ ploy cause most authors say that but end up whining and ranting when you actually comment and suggest honestly (except, of course, if you’re painting black white).

Tips for authors (if I may, o magnificent ones):
1) don’t be in a hurry to publish your book if you’ve not completed up to 75% of the raw/draft/first edited text, cause once you publish, readers will keep demanding for updates to feed their suspense (I dare say that it’s only on WN that this is considered a bad thing).

2) Don’t open the floodgate of suggestions if you can’t handle honest views and opinions.

3) Minimise subplots involving supporting characters as these leave too many loose ends to resolve, especially when there’s no clear connection to the main plot. (I suspect this to the main cause of ‘writer’s block’ here).

4) Be sincere in your communications on updates; prepare the readers’ minds (whether to expect daily, weekly or monthly updates) so they know what they’re getting themselves into.

5) Now this is the most important one - STOP whining! Its unnecessary and annoying. Frankly, I’d rather be ghosted than to read an author’s lamentations about how difficult it is to do what he/she claims to love doing.

That’s all folks!

PS:

If you think I was rude, read your post again.

Clowniac You’re absolutely right, authors don’t owe readers anything regardless of whether they’re reading for free or not. Likewise, readers don’t owe authors anything: they don’t have to like your books, they don’t have to vote for them, they don’t have to review or comment on them, they don’t have to save them in their libraries or even freaking read them.

Honestly, if basic, and I mean basic, standards of writing were to be adhered to; most novels on WN would fail the test and that’s being modest. In fact, when it comes to grammatical accuracy, the translations fare better than the originals (feel free to disagree). Most readers shut down their brains and read with their hearts in order to appreciate the efforts of the authors. Like someone rightly said, readers choose the plot over grammatical accuracy. That said, even the plot is so messed up sometimes that readers have to, mentally, edit it as well as the grammatical errors ( which is freaking frustrating) for the order of events to make sense.

Tip to readers:
When choosing a book to read, 1) check how far gone it is - if it’s less than a hundred chapters, then it may take a while for the story to pick up (especially so with translations which are usually a 1000+ chapters) in which case you may want to hold on; 2) check the frequency of updates by checking the last date it was updated and the intervals between each update; 3) check the creator’s comments to see if the author is one who communicates breaks in updating regularly then you may choose to read at your own risk; 4) NEVER fall the ‘comments and suggestions are welcome’ ploy cause most authors say that but end up whining and ranting when you actually comment and suggest honestly (except, of course, if you’re painting black white).

Tips for authors (if I may, o magnificent ones):
1) don’t be in a hurry to publish your book if you’ve not completed up to 75% of the raw/draft/first edited text, cause once you publish, readers will keep demanding for updates to feed their suspense (I dare say that it’s only on WN that this is considered a bad thing).

2) Don’t open the floodgate of suggestions if you can’t handle honest views and opinions.

3) Minimise subplots involving supporting characters as these leave too many loose ends to resolve, especially when there’s no clear connection to the main plot. (I suspect this to the main cause of ‘writer’s block’ here).

4) Be sincere in your communications on updates; prepare the readers’ minds (whether to expect daily, weekly or monthly updates) so they know what they’re getting themselves into.

5) Now this is the most important one - STOP whining! Its unnecessary and annoying. Frankly, I’d rather be ghosted than to read an author’s lamentations about how difficult it is to do what he/she claims to love doing.

That’s all folks!

PS:

If you think I was rude, read your post again.

Clowniac Rapeculture is sure is real, like blaming female worker when mass exfect had a bug, or saying that females achieve everything by sleeping around. And it’s always rape threat. Webnovel should report those to the police quite frankly.

Reinesse

For what it's worth, I've had it happen for long spans of time like this as well, but it's been a long time since the last one. Once I genuinely stopped caring if anyone was going to like what I am writing, I stopped hitting those kinds of snags. I really do think a lot of it is performance anxiety, and not an absence of ideas or creativity.

Clowniac I feel like only a child would complain about writing speed. In higher education you get 6 month to research and write 100 pages long thesis and 3 months for 50 page short version. I personally clocked up to 200 including images and transcriots etc. but I had to work at it 10+ hours a day. If you wanna meaningfull text produced faster than a page a day then you get a textbot or a chatbot that generates rubbish.

Bloody hell, 2 hours to write a 2,500 word chapter? Who said so? I spend 3-4 hours a day writing 2,000 words!

It's kind of funny because I usually receive several types of responses. I do have one or two readers asking for mass releases, but when you spend 3-4 hours a day writing just one chapter, that's not realistic. Really. Even so, I do my best to the point I overworked and fell sick a couple of weeks ago, complete with a fever, just so I can stockpile enough chapters.

And what did I get in return? After falling sick from overworking myself (I don't just write, I actually have a real job and I have to study for graduate school in real life, and I essentially sacrificed sleep and lots of stuff just to write), one reader came in and told me in a one-star review that my story is garbage. Now, I understand that my story is trash and I'm probably the most awful writer on the site, but do you not find it frustrating that when you've overworked yourself to the point of falling ill, some guy (or girl) comes in and calls your story garbage? After all the time and effort you put into it? I'm not asking for praise, and I guess readers should be encouraged to be brutally honest and call people's stories trash if they think it's terrible, but it's no less depressing. I feel like I should have spent the time better and taken care of my health if I knew everything would go to waste.

The other type of response, which I receive more often, is rather than asking me for mass release or chapters, these readers actually demand that I stop releasing any chapters whatsoever. They want me to delete my story and leave the site because my writing is so poor that it apparently lowers the quality of the website. Yeah, that is how bad I am, and sometimes I think I should just take their advice and quit writing because I clearly don't have the talent for it. I don't know why I bother...

yaoyueyi

yaoyueyi I completely agree.

Well I'm a reader and writer. I spend weeks if not months just figuring out what I want to write and how to write it and how to make it work. I pushed myself for the best quality I can possibly produce, but I'm shy. I read constantly and enjoy seeing new ideas and concepts come to light, and i get frustrated seeing something amazing being put down because one isn't loving some section of the story.

I write as a hobby I have a life, I have school, i have expenses, I don't have the time to sit down and write 2000-3000 ch every day for free and still maintain the quality. I have no idea if I'm good or not. Ever since the new option. To publish I became elevated with the thought of sharing some fun writing peices. But then again I'm a bit protective of my literature so I had to decide what am I willing to publish.

The aspect of constructive feedback in lines with writers. Is to help mature their style, build and improve on their craft. There will be toxic people and everything I understand. But if people are willing to say your doing a good job its because your are. If people are willing to stick to your story. This is one proof that your a good writer.

I'll be publishing here soon after I amass a good bit of content to publish through a period of time.

Guess this msg is aimed towards readers and writers. Haha. If you guys are writing and receiving toxic responses introduce me to your story I'll love to read it. But I'm only one person XD I may read a lot but I cannot be everywhere at once. And everything is subjective so being negative with no sensible clarification and reasoning. For me is meaningless. You don't like the writing, because of the mistakes ok, story is not unique ok, story has too many fillers, ok. These give an idea but lack a bit more info to how to improve. Too many fillers, can mean the development of plot. I suck at spelling and not so amazing at grammar, so I recheck myself dozens of times, that doesn't mean I will write a perfect literary composition. I'm a writer not a professionally trained editor, with a degree in lit, that can meet all the criteria of a perfect sentence.

And lastly it's not unique. Fine but what is unique. Everything has some influential aspect tied to it. If my literature if influenced by something so be it the question I want to know is did you like it. Was it interesting. Did you hate it what didn't you like about it. Help me help you. I can keep going. But I'll end it here.

Soon to be publish on webnovel.

Me uwu

Clowniac then i guess i already experienced it. no one was reading it so i dropped them.

yaoyueyi I'm not an author but I totally understand and agree with you! All the best in your writing!

yaoyueyi Let me present a Counterpoint:

Readers generally do not give a flying fck about the amount of chapters, they care about whats in them and about the authors communication.

I honestly cannot even recall the amount of comments i have read that go along the lines of:"Holy crap this is filler" or "Holy crap this chapter is short".

This leads us to another common theme: Lacking Quality. I get it. You get it. The community gets it. You are writing light novels here, not fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings or something.

But if a majority of a chapter is either reiteration of earlier chapters, reactions to these earlier chapters or stat-summaries and other word-count-padding BS people will call you out on it (rightly so) and the chapter will feel shorter, simply because you did not advance the story in any meaningful way.

This is more a problem with Translations than Originals, but still applies to some extent.

Positive Example(imho): Lord of the Mysteries. Every chapter is not too long and not too short and there is at least one thing happening relevant to the main-story-arc. Many authors could learn from that.

Negative Example(imho): Kingdoms Bloodline. Holy crap these chapters are long, but not in a good way. At some point i realised that its not even worldbuilding or character-development, just wordpadding and I dropped it after 100-200 chapters, cant even recall tbh. Sometimes 10 chapters go by with nothing relevant happening besides people talking. Some call it a slow burn, i call it long-winded.

Nobody expects you to put out perfect work like some sort of author-machine.

But to some extent, you set those expectations yourself. How many new novels have promised daily or even twice-daily updates, only to crash and burn as the weight of their own expectations caught up with them?

If you do not think you can keep that kind of schedule up communicate that to the community in a sincere way, there are authors notes and comments for a reason.
Many authors use these features to update their readers on illness/rl-stuff happening and generally its received positively and with understanding. We all know you guys are only human too.

Positive Example: Out of Space: Author just got sick, told everyone, everyone was cool about it, with no updates promised. Everyone celebrated new chapters because it meant the author was getting better.

Going silent with no warning or explanation is not well received, and with good reason. Many stories have been abandoned that way (permanent HIATUS is abandoning imo) while leaving the community built around them high and dry. Of course this has let us become scared of it happening to our favourite stories and we lash out if we feel played.

In the end i think, its a systemic issue, not a community one. Webnovel, and by extension Qidian has built this whole Powerstone-System and the little display at the top of each novel informing us of amount of chapters/day for a reason. They want you to keep writing, at all times. If you don't, your PS-Ranking suffers, you lose visibility and money from SS-Payouts. It is kind of toxic in my opinion, as it puts pressure on authors to deliver, even if its substandard.

But oh well. All of that is just kinda my opinion on the whole thing. As a reader i am biased anyway.