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.