Zero_Things I agree with you wholeheartedly. What is the point in signing a contract with webnovel if they aren't doing anything to promote your novel because the site is flooded with botters? Only the top authors currently will get their work noticed. in comparison, the newbies will just stay at the bottom.

I disagree with the because part. Webnovel didn't decide to 'not promote novels' because botters exist. It's definetely not the reason, because they actually promote botted novels, regardless.

I believe their inaction on promoting is because they believe it's easier to let the authors battle royale themselves, so the best will rise. And by the best, I mean, the ones able to gather more readers.

And we do it. Win-win promotion was exactly that, a competition of popularity and auto promotion effort and only the top authors with good fanbase and people working tirelessly to auto promote their books would have a reward. WN only officially acnowledged it was a problem and poorly planned when they noticed it was bleeding their pockets (and they took longer than I expected).

About botters... I think most of you know it, but even the New York Times Best Sellers List, the most influential list in the World, is 'botted'.

Many in the publishing industry know that there are companies selling their services to buy an author's books (the author pays them to buy his own books in bulk, if you are wondering) to make it in the ranks. And many of the books that made their way into the NYT Best Sellers list were put there by this tactic. But they will eventually become best sellers by exposition or fall in the ranks like Lucifer fell from heaven, so... why do bother, really?

The only stupid thing is to worry about rankings. They are rigged by nature. A book can be fabricated to check all the marketable points a book has to have, just like many Beauty Pageant Contestants are criticized for doing. The Miss can do plastic surgeries, lipo sucction, etc. It doesn't mean she's naturally the prettiest, the most deserving, but she covers all points in the jury's avaliation sheet. Or she can sleep with D. Trump and win the contest.
In both cases, she worked hard to win the crown LOL.
The organizers can think Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman) was the prettiest in the beauty contest she took part in, but she didn't make any effort to show she wanted to be the winner.

I believe it's the same here. They really want authors that do the hard work for them.

As you said, the only way a new book can be seen is rising in the ranks. So, an uncontracted novelist on WN must find their own readers until it's contracted. I definitely agree with everyone who said a contracted author shouldn't pay out of his pocket or have any concerns about publicity. Because mainly, I'm not splitting my costs with auto advertising with them, but I'm splitting the profits.

A last thing:

Once a novel is contracted, remember, it's officially not yours anymore. So, Webnovel decides whether, how, and when they will advertise it. I was reminded of it a few times by WN.

      SrtaA As I said. Webnovel literally gives zero sh*t to botters. Many authors were exposed for botting but webnovel didn't do anything.

      And now with win win, they're forcing authors to do their own promotions for privilege. Boosting on social media, taking efforts to market a book everywhere, but all this for what? To get 20 dollar worth of privilege readers for a banner which doesn't even last for 24 hours? It's insane!

      If I count in privilege swap, most authors are spending more money on buying coins than what they're earning from win win features. Very few can truly benefit from it unless they have a large readerbase.

          Tea_Tae But that's also part of the problem. Priv swaps and people using alt accounts to boost themself is what has stopped the features from working.

          They had to reduce the time span of features due to the increased amount of people reaching those milestones.

          I feel like they could fix win-win by changing the numbers of readers to total coins earned.

          Lowest Like this:

          10,000 coins - Minor feature.
          25,000 coins - weekly feature.
          50,000 coins - banner.
          100,000+ coins - Get all the privileges as the top win win prize.

          It would fix the webnovel echo system as it would count on how much support readers give your novel rather than fake numbers by people spending 1 coin to unlock your first tier of priv.

          But that's just my suggestion.

              @Tea_Tae totally agree. It's insane. Also, it worsened the 'dummy chapters' issue. I usually laughed because some authors got to the extreme shamelessness of telling their readers 'I'm putting this dummy chapter here because WN is bad and won't pay me" completely tweaking the truth.

              Zero_Things They really should do something as you suggested. But if there's one thing I learned here, they never do what we suggest.

              I usually think their promotions are rushly planned (as the original winwin was), because you can see the ensuing problems and cheat opportunities from miles away, but they seem to think it's perfect and ready to go. Then when s**t hits the fan, they cut things for everyone, because a few cheated.

              What they did to Inkstone to prevent cheating, for instance, that's something that will cause more problems in the long term. They changed a fundamental tool but only put a note on Discord about it, that will be buried after some other posts. So new users will have to learn the hard way.

              But I digress...

              Anyway, good luck everyone, botted or not. You'll need more than bots and good writing to thrive... Persistence, relisience, and some painkillers, I mean.

                  SrtaA lol I'm guilty of being one of those writers. But I've stopped that now and just update at my own pace. The whole win-win and swaps were exhausting and I gave up on it. If webnovel doesn't promote my books then I can just move elsewhere. Besides, we're here for our readers and if webnovel can't see the quality of a writer's work then it's their loss. Very soon, they'll lose good writers to the botters and the app will lose its touch.

                  In the end, if webnovel only cares about cash and let good books become victims of botters then they're gonna face a crisis in the future.

                    Tea_Tae Only for priv. that doesn't really mean anything. but they could do it in a tier system were only other authors would know about it.

                    So tier 1 is 10000 coins and then so on. But they wouldn't do that because they hate to take suggestions from writers. They only care about what the readers want.

                        Zero_Things it still exposes part of the income details. And creates a new hassle because it won't stop privilege swapping (in fact it'll increase more). The whole format of win win should have been based on numbers of words instead. Coz that would have tested authors for pure talent.

                          Tea_Tae
                          Anyway, the new app and site layouts killed all 'extra' advertisements such as banners, etc. As for me, when the opening banner pops up I never see what it's about because I'm too busy looking to the countdown so I can close it.
                          Everything became bland and similar in the layout, so nothing really catches my attention.
                          In the app, the spots that catch my attention are 'Limited Free' (usually a novel I'm not interested in), When there's nothing to read (because it's ugly as hell), and Potential Starlet (interesting reads sometimes). So, I don't know if the opening banner is really useful, to begin with.

                              Zero_Things Yeah, I suggested this in a feedback survey. I doubt they'll do it, though, because all those authors currently writing 1500 words per day and paying for coins to buy each other's priv with alt accounts will stop. Which means they'll be out of money

                                  Zero_Things Yeah, I suggested this to them in a feedback survey. I doubt they'll do it, though, because all those authors currently writing 1500 words per day and paying for coins to buy each other's priv with alt accounts will stop. Which means they'll be out of money

                                      SrtaA According to authors who've gotten it, it's INCREDIBLY profitable.

                                      I think we, as authors, look at these things very differently than pure readers do. We're analyzing for our own business. They're just shopping.

                                          AimeeLynn It's still showing part of their income. It'll be highly unethical and even illegal to do that. Authors will not agree to this.

                                            AimeeLynn depends. If the content of a book is not appealing, even a thousand banners cant save it. Some authors will enjoy a temporary steep but fall low in trends again because their subs take a massive hit. Readers have become more choosy in their taste. Plus, the constant win win banners is beginning to tire them. Seeing the same books getting featured is boring to them (and the nothing to read feature is just plain laughable)

                                            Personally, a 5 dollar facebook boost from my page got me more readers than a win win banner. It's cost effective and targeted towards my audience. Then again, a lot of people with good and appealing content did get good results. Others... Not so much.

                                                a month later

                                                ok

                                                after i had seen this all.

                                                Let me write my thoughts about it

                                                what Zero_Things said would works crazily better instead.

                                                why?

                                                Coz it will show the true novel's value.

                                                Exposing income as what Tea_Tae said? Well... you can always hide that income but only shows the rank. Its not like that everyone cares about writer's earning after all. Besides, they can estimate it, but it wont be 100% accurate which is basically a good thing as well. And then, use the rank as the indicator of the feature reward. Let's say,

                                                rank 1 will have a youtube ads feature.
                                                rank 2-8 will have lib feature
                                                9-15 will have banner feature, and so on

                                                Thus, if I were their developer. I will go with that path of win win instead (Ranked by the total coins spent in the privilege)

                                                on another note, I'm not really agreed with the new win win, there are some mad lad who will actually abuse that winwin by putting it 1 coins 99% 50 chapters right away.

                                                losing earning? Well... As i told in above. "mad lad ." it means that they won't think like what you guys would think normally. And I have meet that kind of person a lot of times in my life anywhere (not only in writing). That's why I'm not agree with the new win win rule.

                                                Edit: Apologizes for the wrong tagging

                                                      hartpeler lol. What new win win? It's the same old thing.

                                                      The old win win only increased botting and swaps. Authors indulging in it were e merelh exchanging coins. Their earnings barely increased except for a few of the top authors who benefited.

                                                      The new win win could have given everyone an equal chance. So what if 1 coin is 50 chapters? That's good. Readers will have to spend and instead of swaps, authors will actually earn. Authors will publish more chapters and get more cheers from readers, ultimately reaching the target. Even with someone who has 10 to 20 privilege readers, they can easily get 200 cheers if they update more frequently. That's how it should be.

                                                      Problem with ranking is the powerplay at hand. There will always be a selected few books which will get high rankings in terms of privilege so only they will get the feature while others lose out. So in the end, same books will get features over and over again. It won't be win win anymore

                                                          Write a Reply...
                                                          Web Novel Novel Ask