Cantiara It's all good, no worries mate. Yes, Sloth did compare the two but @Heavens_Edge was just giving an example of what you could do with x amount of money.
I think it is time to move on from the webnovel forever.
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MotivatedSloth
Before you accuse someone for spewing lies you should make correct comparisons and with equal statistical value.
First of all, you forget to include the 1000ss for access to premium chapters which kicks up the price, following your calculation, from €13,12 to €34,12.
I read reincarnation of the strongest sword god which costs around 9-10ss which is more than you ‘average’ chapter costs of 7.5ss. Thus the correct price I should pay is 3 x 30 x 9.5 / 1000 x €21 + €21 = ~ €39,- PER MONTH
Furthermore, if you think you are being smart by comparing physical books to webnovels then there are also kindle editions of light novels (digital versions) for only €6,- with the same amount of words.
Thus, using you analogy, I can:
- pay webnovel €1 for ~4400 words
- buy a kindle lighnovel €1 for ~10.600 words
Even IF someone buys gold/ss for ‘50% off’, which is a misleading marketing trick and is even illegal in the EU, nevertheless, webnovel still charges more per word than a kindle light novel. Furthermore, as you said it, the quality of webnovels are (much) lower.
EDIT:
And one more thing people can not buy ~1850SS then must pay 2000ss which equivalents €42,- PER MONTH... and yes, after you spent €504,- for one year for a single webnovel, then the 13th month is for free. Congratulations!
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my eyes get blurry whenever there is calculations in these people post. 
I'm not going into numbers, and I used to think the same way about WN being so expensive compared to buying digital books on Kindle. But then I stumbled upon a comment by @CrispyCritter back in August, which made me realize that comparing a web novel and a kindle editions of light novels, as well as physical books, is like comparing an apple and a pear. It's not only for you, but also for Sloth, or anyone else that is trying to compare these two types of entertainment. They're not the same, no use in setting the two side by side.
CrispyCritter When I pay money to webnovel, I personally am not paying for a finished product, like I get on Kindle; I am paying for a product to be finished. I see something I like and I want to see it continue, both for me and for others. So I reward both the author/translator and the mechanism (webnovel) that allows me to find such work by buying SS, and if I really like it, by buying Privilege.
So, there are people that are willing to pay for this type of entertainment, just like me, as there are people who aren't because they don't think it's worth it. And that's fine, it just means that this type of entertainment is not for them, and they probably need to find a different kind of entertainment that suits them best.
Heavens_Edge pay webnovel €1 for ~4400 words
If you are quoting my words, use it properly.
1ss gives 200 words.
100ss gives 20 000 words
You can get 100 ss for either 1$ or 2$ (I can buy 50 and get 50 bonus ones, that's what I'm refferign to, there ain;t any 50% off)
That means you can read 5000/10 000 words/1$
Two:
Heavens_Edge 1000ss for access to premium chapters
There ain't such thing as far as I know? If you mean privledge, then you should realise that its ADDITIONAL service. You don't need to use it. In the very essence of it, authors/translators can upload MORE chapters than they were suposed to for an additional price to unlock them, it's not like you need to ever buy it.
Heavens_Edge ‘average’ chapter costs
That's why instead of using average chapter lengs, it just went back to using cost/words
All in all, if you want to speak about something, do your research first. But all in all,
Cantiara showed great reasoning
Cantiara CrispyCritter When I pay money to webnovel, I personally am not paying for a finished product, like I get on Kindle; I am paying for a product to be finished. I see something I like and I want to see it continue, both for me and for others. So I reward both the author/translator and the mechanism (webnovel) that allows me to find such work by buying SS, and if I really like it, by buying Privilege.
IAmLowProfile I’ve seen more data here than in my statistics class
MotivatedSloth What kind of half-baked comeback is this? First you pick three pieces of text and pull them out of context then you dare to say I need to check my stuff.
First point, I was not quoting you I was using your analogy. €1 for 4400 is based on my calculation including privilege chapters. Then you come with the counter “that doesn’t count, this is an ADDITIONAL SERVICE”. No, you are wrong, it does count. This is comparable to when a book goes on sale after it is no longer regarded as new.
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Heavens_Edge You got it wrong too. $1 is worth 10k words at webnovel. I'm not saying he is right though, because he always goes with the low range numbers. But that is the price for words. (and $1 is worth less than 1 euro). If you want to compare, compare completed books too. On kindle etc you buy completed volumes or books, therefore compare to completed volumes or books of the same quality and fame. The book he mentioned has a manga, anime and lightnovel... it's not some contracted stuff, that a newbie author came up with. They are able to charge more for such things, because the author made a name for himself.
If you compare to TKA for example, that is a completed book. It's popular, and has other medias surrounding it (manga and so on). TKA first volume is free, but let's assume its not. 90 chapters, that is how much it has. TKA I checked and 10 coins is an average (it could even be 11, as usually it was 12, 11 per chapter). if I take the same numbers as you guys did, then one could read this book in 30 days. With coins alone, that would equal to 900 coins, which is around $10 (with the bonus of course). If I were to subtract the fast passes, you'd pay nothing. Literally, nothing. 30 days means 90 fast passes.
Of course, that is under the condition, someone would actually spend 30 days reading 90 chapters... which is bs. In reality, the price would be around the same, as it is for the first volume of that other novel. Sure you get a copy with kindle. You can read it offline, and pretty much anywhere in the world. While others can argue that you get over 2x the amount of words for TKA. My problem is not the well known and popular novels, because webnovel has the right to charge that amount for them, no problems there. The problem is original stories, where they have poor editing, while the price stays the same.
On what basis should TKA cost the same, as some no name novel with mistakes? Price wise, it's not that different, it's the quality wise that differs (Besides, I said that at the beginning, it's basically the same. Only you get copies of the books with kindle, and you can even subscribe to get a lot more books cheaper).
@Cantiara Completed novels can be compared, so long they compare apples to apples. Completed novels here, would get rid of privilege, and under that pretence, they can be compared. (A completed volume of a book at amazon, and a completed volume at webnovel). That is comparable, so long they promote the same quality and fame. If you compare a well known book like I don't know Game of Thrones, to some new contracted work at webnovel, you don't have a comparison. A well know author against some guy or gal the webnovel community barely heard about... not a correct comparison. I never had a problem with people paying either. I mean what people do with their money, is not my concern. The equilibrium so far is only thanks to those bonus coins... for now. But yea, the best method is to wait and see.
DarkRay You are also not considering privileged chapters.
The point I am trying to make is that nobody is willing to pay €42,- per month for a single webnovel. You guys know, just as well as I, that these privilege chapter are out there, for free. The loyal paying webnovel customers are not going to stick around loyally waiting or loyally paying. They will move on and this app will lose, again, a big chunk of its customers. Just like when that happened when 50 privilege chapters for ~€50,- were a thing. After webnovel noticed this after two months they reverted to 20 privilege chapters for €21,-
I like this app, think it is sad and I do not want this to happen. One of the reasons I am here is for the community, to discuss the story in the comments in the latest released chapter.
However when people start to defend this with invalid arguments I can not shut my mouth.
And mark my words, webnovel will revert/adjust these changes again within two months just like their last stupid decision but that will be too late, most of us loyal customers will have moved on by then.
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If you want to speak about privilege, you need to learn what it is in the first place.
Take an imaginative scenario.
An author gets 100 chapters free and goes premium. His release schedule is 2 chapters/day and he diligently sticks to it. But he realises that not only is his book pirated, the amount of loyal readers he has isn't enough for him to make even this 200$ per month (if you earned less in said month, you need to wait for the payment till the time when your combined income will cross this mark, in short - WN is not making transfers for less than 200$ which is rational considering various transfer fees that banks slap on top of it).
So he decided to work REALLY hard for some time and creates a privilege for 10/20 chapters.
That means he will STILL release 2 chapters a day without a hiccup (at least, that's the idea) but if someone can't wait to read next part of the story, they can UNLOCK THE PRIVILEGE to buy the stockpiled chapters. Meaning, you can pay additionally to read in advance.
What's more, if authors want to be kind to his readers, he can slap a discount to the chapters locked behind privilege. For example my idea for setting up the correct privilege:
The author writes 1k long chapters, always costing 6 coins.
He writes 2 chapters a day, so that means his monthly output of published chapters is worth 30x2x6 = 360ss/coins
So he sets the price for 10 chapters at 80 coins and adds 25% discount to the chapters, or 160 coins for 20 chapters privilege and 50% discount for the chapters.
That means that the amount paid by the user isn't changing at all, but the author can ensure that at least this 10-20 chapters have less chance to be pirated.
For the free user, he will still be able to unlock all the chapters with free passes, but if he wants to read the advanced ones, he would need to fork out some money and support the author (because both the privilege and privileged chapters can only be bought with coins or so I heard.)
Of course, most of the authors want to actually make money out of the privilege, so they can, for example, make the price of 10 chapters from the previous example to be 200 coins without any discount, and 20 chapters privilege would cost 500 coins, with 10% discount to encourage people to buy this more expensive package.
But you need to remember, that privilege isn't compulsory to read the book! If a book is FINISHED but still has privileged chapters, just ask the staff to remove it, I saw the situations when it happened. It's a translator/author's fault for not changing the status of the novel to the finished.
But all in all, if there is priviledge or not, you don't need to bother yourself with it. Without the priviledge, you wouldn't be able to read those chaptes in advance at all, with priviledge you can BUY access to those chapters in advance. That's all there is to it.
PS; Just noticed your last post. It's not WN setting up the prices for the privilege. It's all in the hands of author/translator.
For example, I can (and will soon) set up privilege for my chapters.... to 1 coin. Because that will probably lock the pirates from botting my story on their site, while readers won't be influenced by it at all.
zettemagat honestly am so sick of the app. Too much rigor signing in and buying coins for almost every chapter for a book of over 2000 chapter. Am jetting out mehn!
Please everyone calm down ! For the one who are not willing to pay up just get out ! For the other one please go to the left and bend over.
Threetimess go to the left and bend over.
Zero_Profile Agreed. Someone is throwing around a lot of numbers and assuming a lot of things and writing long ass screeds, but at the end of the day the math is simple.
As an example: consider Ghost Emperor Wild Wife, which is complete at 2262 chapters. Assuming premium kicks in only after the first 100 chapters, that comes out to 2162 chapters that must be unlocked. Assuming 3 passes per day, and that you read the book over the course of a year, that's 1067 chapters to be paid for, each of which seems to be consistently 4 coins. At the current best rate of 2500 coins for $50, that works out to ... the lovely price of $85.
And what does that $85 get us? Do we get a pdf copy of the novel we can read at anytime, at our leisure? Do we get excellent editing, quality control, and consistent releases? No. We get none of that. Instead, we have to spread out our reading time over the course of a year, in order to keep the price from being even more ridiculous, and we get novels full of poor writing and bad plotting compounded by translations with inconsistent quality and highly variable timing. On top of that, the year timeline is ASSUMING that the translator and author are even capable of consistently putting out 3+ chapters a day, which is a laughable assumption. In fact you may have to wait for several years (at which point the cost of the novel goes down, but so does your interest in it).
IMHO, under no circumstances is any novel on this website worth $85. And the example novel I picked is one with comparatively cheap chapters. Consider a novel like Lord Xue Ying where the chapters are 12 coins and the price skyrockets.
To me there are two possible conclusions: Qidian is either greedy and/or has an unreasonable business model. I wonder if the prices couldn't be made more reasonable if it implemented quality control by dropping unreliable and unskilled translators, and maintained a smaller roster of high quality novels instead of going for quantity over quality, which means it has to pay a lot of people.
ChuYang
People are likely to read your "free" novel on "pirate" sites simply so as not to increase traffic to the WN site. After all, their aggressive way of earning money has caused many people to go to pirate sites, causing an emptying in the community. I'm sure most of the community doesn't like WN because they don't give a shit about their customers (readers).
While they are making money from the works, they will only increase their value, after all, there are people who come happily to defend their profit.
MotivatedSloth
Sheep
MotivatedSloth you should feel shamefull not the other way
MotivatedSloth pff benefiting . Lol they earn more money per day than you Will in your life
MotivatedSloth ah, so you are an author. Then you probably know what you are talking about and have my utmost respect (no sarcasm).
Do you think webnovel takes a bigger margin than they should?
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Heavens_Edge Can't really judge, I'm still in my first month of premium, so I will get any real information about it at 5th january only, but even with that, we do not get a detailed data, only the total income (from what other authors showed me), meaning that I won't have any grounds to judge it properly.
(I won't have any info regarding how many of my chapters were bought with bonus coins/fast pass compared to how many were bought with paid coins)
PS: My book is still far for being profitable enough, so I aim for minimum guarantee system for now, but I'm already working on another novel that will be able to compete in terms of quality instead of attracting attention with smut and cover