Hello, it has become apparent that Webnovel is driven by short term profits instead of long term. Because of this, they don't pick novels that others would consider good and instead pick cliche, copy and paste novels instead.

My personal example is the Plague Doctor, it wasn't picked despite 100+ reviews and a rating of 4.9.

My suggestion is to list every dropped novel with a base score of at least 3 and every week, people will vote for what novel to come back.

What does WN get out of this, though? They get a happy customer base, that's it and they should be happy getting that.

    TrueGodOfExp

    Funny thing about the trial reads they're based on HOW MUCH PEOPLE ACTUALLY SPENT ON THE BOOK. Rather than an easily abused review and rating system that anyone with half a brain cell knows is BROKEN and no one with a clue relies on either.

        The review system might not be effective but it is true, that mostly cliche copypasta novels are the ones being TL’d. The ones that are passingly different (for example Trafford’s Trading Club, Sword of the Daybreaker) are the ones being dropped. Dropped with little warning or even admitting they are dropped.

        Transparency is a very important thing for businesses. It is necessary for growing your brand. Companies stand to gain much by communicating brand transparency. Without transparency, the consumers would be disinclined to choose your company as the choice to get products. Products in this case is novel translations. Brand being Webnovel as a whole. Consumers don't trust Webnovel as a company producing translations because of their choices.

        Webnovel does not communicate with their consumers, Webnovel does not interact with their consumers, Webnovel does not show that they are a company that cares about their consumers. That's probably why they cause lots of people to go to aggregators rather than read on their own site.
        If Webnovel were to be able to promote itself as a "Good" site with "quality" products and show that they care about their community, there would be more consumers actively using this site rather than shitty aggregator sites.

        However, Webnovel does not care about the long-term goals, hell, their actions prove that short-term goals like a few months from now is their priority rather than making this the next qidian site that will last for decades. If Webnovel were to become the next Qidian then it's consumer base would be huuuge. After all there is a massive english consumer base available across the world for them and since they are the only "legal" company that can translate popular qidian novels then it should be safe to assume that this company will become huge.
        Unfortunately, Webnovel is being run by blind people who only have short-term profits in their eyes. For a site that relies on popularity of novels and their consumer base to survive, choosing unpopular novels, clones of other novels and bad novels in general to be translated over popular ones is a poor decision showing how much the company does not care about becoming big.

        Just giving a message saying that they dropped a novel is a way to gain consumer trust, that's literally just telling them yeah sorry we can't do this anymore. That effectively cuts off hope for a dropped novel, because if there is no hope then there is no despair and anger. If they just told their consumers that they can't continue after 1 day of stopping then that would cause less outrage then to wait fking months and be yeah no. can't do it.

        VoiD_dEmOn The selected novels are being picked all the time. The ones that earned the most. Not the ones that got the most free-readers voting for them, commenting or reviewing. No need to be salty that the novel you wanted wasn't picked. Next time, throw some money at it, cuz its the only way to realistically help.

            I actually question why webnovel doesn't implement a better ad system, currently ( i think) the ads are only used for bonus reward of exp which is ridiculous. Like, they could've made it another fast pass. This gives free readers a reason to watch their ads and maybe even click on them. I know ad revenue is literally garbage but it's still better than nothing considering how there is quite the reader-base for webnovel.

            On a side note, the watch an ad to unlock a chapter has basically been removed. It should've been kept for small chapters that cost 3 to 6 coins. People would be more than willing to watch the ad rather than spend their fast passes on something so small. And for longer chapters, they would be willing to watch ads to get that fast pass.

            Before you tell me that no one will watch their ads, I'm telling you, as a reader I actually used the get more SS by watching ads function. Like I would spam that thing to get SS but the only problem was there were NO ADS to watch.
            Remember, ads can generate money being pay for view, it doesn't have to be clicks it can be from views alone. It just requires webnovel to give a reason for people to watch ads.

            I'm just ranting sorry.

            Everybody knows that the webnovel management are totally noob in long-term plan. See the new choice for weekly choose? Garbage game designer with 2.7 rating. If they don't allow the continuation in amyway, I will make sure that I will make Taiwanese translate it. Chinese DMCA? You cannot DMCA the country you don't recognise.

              Daoist_Zheng Hello! My name is Tofu and I'm responsible for this novel.

              Let me explain a little bit how novel selection works at Webnovel;

              Webnovel will essentially pay translators to continue novels that are more popular, such as those that were selected during Trial Reading. However, novels that was not selected during Trial Reading will therefore not get paid for. Therefore, whenever you see DROPPED novels being put on Voting Pool, it means WEBNOVEL is not paying for it. This is PURELY because the Translator wants to continue the book out of their own interest. Please don't give the book bad reviews just because translators for other dropped books are not willing to continue their books.

                  Tofu does wn pay the original authors of the stories which are being translated and is there proof of that?

                  The reason I ask is because I never see any indication of it on the Chinese websites where a lot of these novels hail from.

                  You would think the author mentions something about it in either his authors notes on there or page...

                  As a result, considering most of these novels are readily available to read online as most of them are only making some money through donations by fans, I worry that these are being translated and then earned of without permission.

                  Which is a major wall that keeps me from applying for a membership on webnovel as I have seen nothing to show me its on the up and up...

                  Perhaps you as a translator have access to the connections and resources to show that this is all being done in agreement with the author for atleast a book you are responsible for translating and that they are being paid for it?

                  • Tofu replied to this.

                      Hatake_Shirou Hello

                      - does wn pay the original authors of the stories which are being translated and is there proof of that?

                      Webnovel has a contractual obligation to pay the original authors of the translated stories a certain percentage of the share. I, unfortunately, do not have anything I can show you as a lot of these are under a Non-Disclosure Agreement, however, feel free to message the author about it and hopefully they can give you an answer. Authors also tend to ask us as translators to change different names and such, that's usually how we know that these authors do care about the translated stories, otherwise, why would they bother?

                      -As a result, considering most of these novels are readily available to read online as most of them are only making some money through donations by fans, I worry that these are being translated and then earned of without permission.

                      These are mainly translated by fan translators and you are correct in that they do not give any part of the translation or the ad revenue for that matter, to the original authors. All novels translated and published on Webnovel are generally speaking sharing a profit with the original authors.

                      - Which is a major wall that keeps me from applying for a membership on webnovel as I have seen nothing to show me its on the up and up...

                      If your biggest concern is that the original authors are not getting a profit of the revenue, then as long as you are willing to support their books on Webnovel, then they are definitely receiving a part of this revenue.

                        WebNovel's parent company owns the distribution rights to hundreds of thousands Chinese webnovels (look at Qidian.com). They are the main Chinese webnovel publisher. The original Chinese authors are getting whatever payment was specified by their original contract with Qidian. In the case where that was a flat fee, that may indeed be nothing.

                        There's lots of discussions of whether the contracts of Qidian or WebNovel are fair to authors. But there is almost no reputable discussion (eg, from authors) about either publisher pirating works. WebNovel at least thinks it has the explicit legal right to publish all the novels on their site and the authors and translators are getting whatever their contracts say. It's one of very few non-pirate sites around.

                        Tofu So, are you a translator?

                        If so, would it be possible to translate at least 3 chapters of Plague Doctor/Week or hell, even 2 a week? A lot of people like that novel, but apparently it didn't make enough money.

                        • Tofu replied to this.

                            Tofu So trial read is essentially for the translators to see if it's worth the effort to translate a certain novel? Or do you mean now that translator won't get paid atall?

                                Mute

                                As explained elsewhere qidian holds the rights to HUNDREDS of books. There's no way their translators can work on them all at the same time. Books get dropped due to low income freeing up the translator to work on more profitable ones.

                                Think of Trial Read as the users being polled on exactly which is more profitable to work on. The translators still get paid even if a book isn't picked but by the same token if a book isn't picked those sixty chapters is as far as the translation goes since translating beyond those sixty chapters is no longer for their job and becomes a passion project like TrueGodofExp is asking... of course qidian rather frowns on people translating their ips on their own since that is also how they make money so a cease and desist order is in the future of any 'generous' soul actually heeding the above users stupid request.

                                  Just false hope only novel u spend could coins get selected

                                    Although it's a passion project, it still fks up with the way trial read novels are inserted into the voting pool, it should've been added into the voting pool along with the next trial read novel "Astral Pet Store" instead of replacing astral pet store in the voting pool.

                                    I wrote reasons why this was bad as a review on the book, I'm fine with removing it but the problem is that it messes up the future trial novels. Suppose there's trial books that people want to read. There is 4 each month and trial novels don't stay for more than a month. So out of 16 possible trial novels, only 4 is chosen each month before they are all replaced with other books.

                                    Not to mention some trial novel books are rotated out after only 15 days, of course you might say that they just aren't popular but how are they going to compare with the trial novels that were released for more than 15 days. After all the coins from trial novels that don't get picked take a month to come back, and membership users probably don't have enough coins to vote for more than 2 trial novels.

                                    Not every book is popular, I get that. If you currently look at the trial novels, almost every trial novel has about 100 to 200 fans and like 3 with less than 50 fans. And then you look at "Astral Pet Store" with over 700 fans. This literally shows that everyone has spent most of their coins on Astral Pet Store and they don't have enough for other trial novels. So now out of the 15 books remaining, 8 might get replaced with new novels next week. And since they are all relatively equal with the number of fans supporting the novels, someone's highly anticipated novel is going to get dropped.

                                    Therefore, if one of those slots is replaced by a passion project, the readers are obviously not going to passionate about it.

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