Subscription Based?
Pexaan I personally prefer the coin system. I don't need another goddamn subscription and just want to pay for what I read upfront!
yaoyueyi Their previous sub model was more expensive than amazon prime. The current membership model severely limits how much you can read per month.
There needs to be a middle ground between price and access from their two attempts or people will just continue to pay for other services while coasting on webnovel's free offerings.
My suggestion is 10 a month. Let me read whatever I want as long as I have it active with no perm unlocking. Only authors that I read that month gets a share. Fair price, constant money, can actually get caught up on a series without burning more money, good author/translator gets rewarded for their efforts.
Daoist658025 What they tried wasn't that much different from what you describe. It didn't work.
It's the difference between paying for "new chapters" (freshly released daily or X per week) and "archived chapters" (chapters in completed novels or, say, the first 1000 chapters of a 1200 chapter work in progress.) The "new chapters" are what people are willing to pay WebNovel's prices for, and what Webnovel is targeted towards supporting. But what happened with the subscription model is that readers like me read thousands of chapters a month of "archived chapters", along with their normal hundred or two "new chapters". So the "new chapters" were a small percentage of the total chapters being paid for, and the income of the "new chapter" authors/translators took a large hit.
WebNovel needs to find some different mechanism to more realistically price "archived chapters", while preserving the income from the "new chapters".
CrispyCritter This is exactly the problem I have with webnovel right now. The system as-is makes me really hesitant to open up new books to read since it costs so much to get through the archive! Once I’m caught up, it feels worth it to pay for the new chapters, but being being unable to read through the archive (or, more likely, skim through most of it) makes me hesitate starting any new books.
There’s an idea I’ve had floating in my head for a while, but it’s just another way to solve that problem. If there was something like an elite subscription for the archives, then you pay using the current system for the 200 most recent chapters, I’d happily buy it. Even if it was $50/month for this “catch-up subscription”, I’d be glad to do it since it’d be a fixed cost and something I could budget for.
Rewindx I think that releasing compilations of their most popular work would be a good idea, I mean they already do it in China.
Take an arc or certian number of chapters, polish the translation if necessary, and put them on paperback with a reduced price eBook.
People who don't want to spend money on digital goods will have something more palatable to them, those with e-readers will have a means to catch up while spending less, and it will require the barest amount of effort from Webnovel themselves while potentially making more money.