Heavens_Edge

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.

      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 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?

                  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

                      So. 😳 A lot of math was tossed around. I still don't get it.

                      😆 But this conversation thread has been interesting. Nothing like some passion for that spicy new year.

                      Anyway. I'm going back to watching Life of Brian. and his friend Biggess Diccuss... 😉

                      To all the writers and readers. We all have valid points.

                      I commend and applaud my fellow writers. The effort and time being put into various works are beyond words, even if some works are below our readers' expectation of a good work (though writers, like myself, could put more effort into the writing quality).

                      I also appreciate and thank the readers for being there, loyally. You are truly amazing. I truly understand your frustration. But, don't let your anger cloud your mind. Whether you are paid readers or not, we need you. I hope your love for your prefered works and authors, will make you to continue rendering your support.

                      Let's keep writing and reading, as true Daoists that we are.

                      Happy new year in advance. I hope we all have cause to celebrate in this coming year.

                        Cantiara. I def feel like if I indulged myself like I want to I would be paying over a hundred for 1 novel. Where it really gets expensive is ready multiple novels at once.

                        BTW I figured out how to farm however the books still end up locked which is total bs in my opinion. Especially since they prices to convert has increase. So now im starting novel after novel until they lock just to get accumulate points to convert to finish the first novels I've started. Smh its as draining/pointless as it sounds and my last attempt to hang on to this app.

                            MotivatedSloth What made you decide to go premium? I just got a contract from them 2 days back, so I am not sure what do to. There had been lots other people saying its a selling your soul contract, I am new in this novel business so I am not sure.

                                lunate
                                First thing first, did you get the contract offer through the inkstone or the email?

                                This is something I'm actually angry about, they are testing this feature without informing people about it (I mean, they should make some announcment for the authors, instead of just informing about it on the inkstone.)
                                So, if you got your contract offer on inkstone, then sorry to break it down to you, but it's not real. It's just something they are testing out right now.

                                And about going premium - Being able to put a food on my table through my writing is one of my longest dreams. Even if my book quality isn't sufficient to make it big with it, I'm trying to make up to it by simply writing a lot, and I'm actually working on my new novel that would be far better and more serious than my current one.

                                While I get why a lot of people are negative towards the contract because of various reasons that I can't really state here, I believe it's an equal trade off. You lose something and you gain something. All in all, no matter what people say, it's an easy way to actually try earning money through your writing so if you don't mind some clauses, I think you should go for it.

                                And don't forget, most of those "bad" parts in the contract are there just to secure WN intrest. I never heard of anything from those most drastic parts being actually implemented in real life.

                                    Yea i got it through inkstone

                                      So it's a fake? there is even a preview contract there.

                                        Keilz

                                        Yes, if you read multiple novels all at once it definitely could get pretty expensive. I am currently following 3 novels, 2 translated, one original, and all privileged. I'm spending quite a lot of money on them. I used to follow more novels, but that was several months ago when I had a lot of time to kill because I was sick, hospitalized, and after that had to stay a few months at home to recover. Now that I'm back at work full time, I naturally had to reduce the number of novels to read here because I simply don't have as much free time as before anymore, which is a fortunate thing. Okay, maybe I can squeeze some time for 1-2 novels more because after all, a chapter read is just around five minutes (well, and then there's this additional 10-15 minutes for me, personally, to put my thoughts in a comment. If you know me from the novels that I'm following, you would see that I often leave chapter comments, and I'm the type that can and would write an essay in them, but this habit has also been reduced because of the time constraint). So, yeah, if I were to go on a full indulgence mode, I could probably squeeze 1-2 more novels into my active reading list. But I don't want to. I don't think it's worth it. Besides, there are still quite a lot of (physical) books on my bookshelves that are still waiting to be read.

                                        Self-indulgence isn't a bad thing per se, but it's also important to have self-control. IMHO, 3 free fast passes a day are enough to indulge yourself, especially if you don't want to spend your own money and make a purchase. There are other alternatives to entertainment than just WN, without having to resort to supporting piracy. Read real books. If you don't want to spend money on them, go to your local library and check out a book. Invite your friends/family/neighbors/colleagues to play board games. Go have a long walk in the park (it's healthy!) or explore your city. Play free online games. Really, a lot of things to do for entertainment than just reading a novel on WN.

                                        I understand the frustration with these changes, but you're in control of your own life. Your fun and happiness should not depend on whether or not you get free coins from WN.

                                        Anyway, I keep saying 'You', but the stuff I just wrote is not directly addressed to you, per se. It's for all the people that are still bitter about these WN changes. People, come on, there are more to life than just this site/app. Go out, socialize, have fun with your loved ones! Seriously, just spend half an hour outside and you'll forget WN in no time.

                                        Oh, and BTW, you actually don't have to read the novel in order to farm points. I learned about this from @Yuki_Qing. You can just set your page to turning mode instead of scrolling and click through the pages without having to read the content until you get an ad. Just think of it as a game, and you'll farm a lot of points in no time.

                                        Peace out ✌️

                                        EDIT: The advice to go out was meant for those who aren't confined to bed/home due to sickness. But even if you can't leave home, there are still a lot of things to do than just read a novel here. Read real books, play puzzles, write a blog, watch TV, news (it's good to stay updated with current affairs), watch stuff on YouTube, cook, learn to cook, etc, etc, etc.

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