First of all Congratulations to all fellow Winners.
Although I won, I have mixed feeling about the results.
I am surprised to see Karna The True Elementalist win for WPC #154 but not Sol Invictus The Saga of the Avenger Princess for WPC #153. Even though, both are currently being featured on WebNovel's Originals as "Encouraging Original" & "Potential Originals" for Male Lead and Female Lead Categories respectively.
Similarly, my entry Supreme Sect which got featured on 4th day after I started publishing it (also has most collections and views amongst all my novels) and Abhimanyu The Scion of Soma & Indra, which in my humble opinion has a better plot than Karna The True Elementalist, did not win!
So from what I have observed, to win the contests at WebNovel here is what you need:
- Best option is the Fantasy Romance Genre for the Female Lead
- Second Best option is the R-18 content
- Third is the LGBT Route
- Fourth is the usual orthodox trope of Cultivation / Super power clichΓ© followed by Manga/Manhua/Manhwa
- Fifth is the Humor Route
- Go Global. I used Indian Mythology Theme as setting for Abhimanyu while Global Setting for Karna. The market is for Global Audience. I thought targeting a particular community will give more marketability but not all regions are supported equally by WebNovel. For example, there are Content Editors for Indonesian Language and there are contests in some languages; Content Editors for Hindi are not available, although you will see 'Hindi' as a language option while creating Novels.
- Do not try to experiment and go with the "Book of Authors" provided by WebNovel
- Also focus on 1 or at most 2 novels at a time. I entered 4 contests with 7 entries and it did create lag for some chapters
- Most important, name your characters with Caution
Jack Frost is a supposed God from Nordic Mythology, however, Disney made the name famous. Elsa too is a famous deity but movies like Frozen made that name famous. I named the characters as such and they were mistaken for characters from works of movies, when they actually are from Mythology! So your work might be considered Fan-fiction because of those.