Reduction of spirit stones on webnovel
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Rianolinon
I think you point the real problem:
Rianolinon FREE SS does not give anyone $$$
The promotion of the company wouldn't be done on the back of translators and authors . If the company decides to distribute free ss, this isn't the responsibility of content providers.
ps: "on the back of", I don't know if this idiom exists in English...
Exinaus I'm sorry. I'm a bit sensitive to phrases like "why don't try it yourself?". I think that's the lamest defensive excuse that can be made, ever. I fell the need to stand against anyone who uses it. That's maybe my bad trait, but I'm not that eager to correct it, because I think I'm not wrong on it.
As Tomoyuki rightfully pointed out while I couldn't be bothered to find this before.
:3 Do you know how this kind of behaviour is called? It's hypocrisy.
Cantiara Ah, posted before saw this. It's not about being smarter here. I just have so much fun trashing jerks like him xD
Like, in real-world they would either spit at you or try to make things violent and what's the fun in beating someone up? It's better to destroy them with just words.
MotivatedSloth You sell story. The whole idea behind selling the books is about selling a medium that is used to tell the story. The only difrence lays in form.
Yes, you are right. But this difference cannot be ignored and can be quite substantial. You know, if you need to move from point A to point B, you can just walk, or take a bus, or a taxi. Prices are different.
Webnovel and website - bus.
Hard book - taxi.
Pirating - walking.
Ofc i can fuss a little that for a bus service I were charged like I used a taxi.
MotivatedSloth If I make my story suddenly filled with fillers, without any plot progression, drop the quality or anything, my income will drop as well because people will simply stop reading it.
I actually agree with you, it's just some small details that bother me. You can make a filler chapter here or there (or let's just assume every 20 chapters or less, or more, the number is not important and depends only on author guts of how often he dares to pull it off), or insert a few filler paragraphs every chapter. Few readers will grumble, but they will not leave. But if you decide to put all of it in a hard book, and a good editor will throw it out, you might find yourself lacking content for a book. I saw those things happen. For example, "TheGam3". I read web novel edition, and then bought hard copy ... so much stuff was rewritten and thrown away.
A lot like this. Hundreds of examples that i read myself (not just heard somewhere). I just can't see webnovel like anormal book. So many examples tells me that it's not possible.
ludo2776 A novel on this site is not an elaborate draft. If you were to compare the ages of the authors on this site compared to college graduates with an english degree in writing, you'd think so. However, most authors on webnovel are under 30. The ones in the top 50 are literally in their college years or just out.
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Exinaus By your analogy, pirating is not walking.
Pirating is you hijacking the fare machine of a Metrotransit bus or light rail and taking the fares from other people while the train and bus drivers who are doing all the work of ferrying people to their destinations aren't getting any money in return for their labor. While you do, all because you hijacked the fare machine.
That's what piracy is. I know it's probably hard for you to understand, because you're a surgeon, but you probably should read up in intellectual property, copyright and DCMA before coming in here and pretending to know what you're talking about.
No one is denying that the quality of webnovels are low and some of them are outright atrocious. Guess what? You don't have to pay for them. You get to read like dozens of free chapters, and if you decide that they are bad, then don't pay to unlock the premium chapters! If you think they are worth it, then pay for them. Why are you demanding that writers write for free or should have their already low wages reduced further? It's not like you're purchasing an entire book from a bookstore - one of the advantages of Webnovel is that you already have access to a decent sample of the book you're reading before you decide whether it's worth purchasing the remaining chapters. You can't say you haven't been warned, or that you never expected them to be bad when you've already read a hundred free chapters prior to the locked ones.
And also, the amount of money you spend on a webnovel (what, $6 for 30 chapters?) is worlds apart from spending thousands on a single surgery, so I don't know why you insist on comparing writing to other jobs. Like, really? We already earn much less than you do, so why are you always mocking us, as if to say we should not be paid for writing?
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Tomoyuki And also, the amount of money you spend on a webnovel (what, $6 for 30 chapters?)
500 SS = $10.
While a single chapter (at least in novels that i'm reading) costs 14-18 SS. So it's $10 for ~31 chapters.
And how many chapters does your novel have? How many are you planning it to have?
From what i saw (for a properly finished, not dropped novels) it's at least 1200-1400. Minus first 100, or 150 which is free. It's ~$400 for a story.
Just like you said before, hard book costs $15-20.
Do you want to tell me that your story will be like 20-25 real books? Or correct me if i'm wrong with the math.
And let's mention some of huge books with 2000+ chapters, anyone wants to calculate costs?
Right. Seems rather reasonable?
I will give here a few words here as a reader and writer.
as a reader it's normal for wn to make changes it's not the first time that this happens (I can tell 2 similar things) and after 'sh*t storm' it will be normal and we will be hoping for the old days to come back but they won't. And most important I been dropping a lot of novels for a long time when they become premium did I miss them, yes but I go further and slowly forgetting what was there
as a writer, I'm publishing here for a long time (for me) DAYLI(most of the time it was for FREE but still I been uploading it and I don't remember when I had free day without writing/publishing something here and I don't keep with time which I write but still I'm uploading 2 chapters or I'm trying to do this) and I been contracted a not long time ago and from writing from 1-2h a day (still bad but I'm trying to improve this) go to around 4h or more depend of a day and now seeing that I'm exhausted from doing it but I still writing (with almost no response from my readers comments from last month I can count on one hand) and when someone tells me that its easy job should try to write 2k-3k words a day for 3 months (for free - and deal with critic which sometimes show up) and not be exhausted then congratulation its job for U
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I don't understand the link between the age or schoolary degree of writers and the draft-like quality of what they product.
I know what it is to write a novel (not in English, it's not my language, not in this format neither) but my English is enough to judge the quality I could reach in what amount of time if I did it in my mother language. When I write 400 words, my first writing is low quality, I spend around half an hour to an hour. Then, I read it, and write it again, increasing the quality, adding lacking details, working on sentences syntax, checking the exact definition of words, choosing the most appropriate, deleting unnecessary parts, doing some research etc, for 400 words (this amount is convenient because it's more or less one page on word, as i set it), I will spend around 2 hours. A chapter of my novel is between 10,000 and 20,000 words, so i need some days on each parts of the work. The quality after that part is not inferior compared to what you find on webnovel (here is what I call a draft). When the chapter is finished, I give it to some friends who read it critically and I adjust again a large amount of my previous work. At this moment, I need around half an hour to an hour on those 400 words. I'm not a genius in literacy so many people write way faster than I do. But if I count the time I spend for 2000 words (close to the length off a chapter here), it's approximately 15 hours. I'm slow but not bad, even so, this is what i call an elaborate draft, far from the quality expected in a published book, after professionals look at it and another round of hard work. If the quality isn't draft to elaborate draft after spending just 4 hours on 2000 words, how do you people work so fast or avoid so many steps of creating a good quality work?
All in all, the prices on this site are a bit expensive regarding the general quality.
Time to go to sleep, I think people don't talk about the original subject of this thread, me the first.
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MotivatedSloth Do you know how this kind of behaviour is called? It's hypocrisy.
No, it's not. Hypocrisy, in basic terms, is when you mask bad intentions in a righteous cause.
So, what cause did i masked and where? I saw Tomoyuki declaring that writing is a hard job. It's a job, but it's not hard, in my opinion.
Since he spoke about writing in a vacuum, i brought some of the jobs as a scale.
I never masked anything, that's not hypocrisy. I might be mistaken, from your point of view, but I didn't mask anything under anything.
Yeah, i admit that i was harsh replying to childish statements like:
MotivatedSloth Only when you do so, you will have the right to speak to me
MotivatedSloth Are you sane or are you soo immersed in your previous age
But that's my mistake. I always forget, when you speak with idiots you don't go to their level of thoughts. They just crush you with experience in those filed.
I'm still harsh? Yeah, but what did MotivatedSloth expect starting our conversation from those lines?
Who does he think he is, that he's allowed to start a conversation with those phrases?
That's literally quotes from the first message that he wrote to me.
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Tomoyuki I said the whole story from the first chapter until the last usually takes 1200-1400 chapters.
If we look just for prices, whole story here will cost to a reader ~$400, which is equivalent of 20-25 (in price) books.
Are you suggesting that one web novel is equal to 20-25 books? because according to prices here - it is.
And then i asked: is anyone wants to do the math to huge web novels here, with 2000+ chapters. How many books does that story equal to? And are these prices seems fair to you?
Exinaus Yeah, an average novel is 30 chapters thereabouts. So you divide a story that's 1,000 chapters by that and you get roughly 33 volumes. That's how the Japanese light novels work - they separate the hundreds of chapters into 20 plus volumes and sell them as full length novels. Paying $400 for 33 volumes, which is approximately $12 per volume seems fair - considering your estimate of 12 to 14 spirit stones per chapter, that's about 3,000,000 words - an equivalent of 50 60,000 word length novels. But you are paying for quantity over quality, and speed over polish, so obviously these webnovels will suck. But still a fair price nonetheless.
Exinaus I did not speak in a vacuum, I was literally replying to Threetimess. Not sure why you're so bent on lying about that. The guy claims that we don't take hours to write, as if we can make chapters appear immediately with a snap of our fingers. Perhaps if you pull your head out of your ass and read the entire thread to get some context, you would have realized that.
Tomoyuki And how high is high? I see a lot of people complaining that the prices are high, but they honestly aren't expensive when compared to traditional books. You're basically paying 2 cents for every 200 words, or 20 cents per chapter, which translates to $6 per 30 chapters (probably the equivalent of a volume). That's "unaffordable" and too high?
I in general agree with your arguments, and have no problem with webnovels reduction in free SS, but honestly you are way off base in your cost comparisons. I buy a lot of books (over 4000 hard copy books, 500 ebooks); the comparable market for webnovel is Kindle self-published books, where in the science fiction area I expect to pay about $1 per 30,000 words (most sf self-published books are in the 90,000 to 150,000 word range for $3 to $5). That's about a third of the cost you state above.
If you want more direct evidence, I read Way of Choices when it was on GravityTales, and supported it by buying the Kindle volumes as they came out. That was about 80 chapters per volume, at $4 per volume. That's about $1 for 40,000 words. That seems right to me.
I have no problem paying webnovel $20 to $40 per month, as I do, for the "new chapters" that come out daily or X chapters a week. I regard this in part as supporting the authors or translators in their work, and want to encourage them to continue to produce it since I like it. But there is no way that I will pay the webnovel prices for "archive chapters" of completed novels, or pay for chapters 200 through 1000 of a 1200 chapter in-progress novel to catch up. I think webnovel realizes that and will try again to offer better options for this bulk reading. But right now, the price for this bulk reading is "honestly" at least 2-3 times the price that it should be.
Quite disappointing changes. Lost the excitement of reading and unlocking more chapters.