ssound5rs, a really dumb guy (I'm told he smells of elderberries, too) who actually looks at industry trends and historical data: Well, it looks like the online fiction industry, both in China and America, offer somewhere around a 70% royalty, including the mother branch of this very same company, so I'm going to ballpark it at that.
UnknownDaoist and Ideal, Master Prognosticators and Men of Taste: LOL U CAN'T KNOW THAT WHAT ARE YOU DOING LOOKING AT A CRYSTAL BALL LOL WEBNOVEL'S GONNA HOG IT ALL AND EVERYBODY WILL GET NOTHING BECAUSE WE HAVE A HATE-ON FOR QIDIAN AND YOU CAN'T MAKE US SAY OTHERWISE.
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A platform that does not offer competitive value is a platform doomed to be usurped by those that will. Period. This goes for all kinds of industries. "Value", of course, is not merely royalty payouts though.
Traditional print publishing rarely offers royalty rates above 10%, for the record (and 5% was extremely common for a very long time). This is how they've worked for the better part of a century now, and for the mainstream, it still works, if just on sheer inertia. The publishers assumed that online publishing would be a mere fad and that they would always hold the leverage. They were wrong, and now Amazon is laughing all the way to the bank even as they have to hand off 35%-70% of the money every time an independently published ebook is sold (note: 70% is only the rate if you're in KDP Select and give Amazon exclusivity, many folks settle for 35% in order to not have to lock themselves into exclusivity, and they still make good money from it).
Everybody who says "we don't know what the contracts say" is right in that regard. We don't. I also have zero inclination to believe that webnovel is going to just give crap away out of the goodness of their heart. They're a business and need to make money. But so is Amazon. So are many others. Companies that act Chaotic Evil and screw their suppliers to the point of not wanting to do business at all don't have a supply for very long. There's a happy medium of screwing us just enough that we can tolerate it. I'm not going to get a harem picked from a stable of A&F door boys or a television series out of this. That's okay (well, I mean it is, despite how nice the abs on those door boys are and how sad I am without them, but I'll just have to cry myself to sleep at night and deal with it like an adult).
I'll be the first to admit that China Literature's international presence has been... less than superlative. They've had a pretty rocky start in the translation community. They're also still starting out and learning how things here in the West are a good bit different. But since they're only getting a non-exclusive grant in the license and since I can always take my ball and go home, I'm willing to let them stumble a bit to get it right (could they just "screw me" and continue distributing back in China? Yeah, I guess, if they're Stupid Evil and ignore their existing enormous slush pile back at home just to specifically curate me there. I don't see that it matters since I don't know a lick of Chinese and would never operate in that market myself anyway). Nobody else is paying me so much as a red cent for this crap, after all. And if they don't figure it out, well... someone will. And they'll be the Amazon of the space and we'll flock there. But right now it is what it is, and I'm willing to take the risk.
Sorry that this went a bit long. I don't know what vintage of urine certain people received in their cheerios to care this much about a program they're not participating in, but it's getting rather old and annoying to get told what to do by them, so I had to vent a little. If there's a superior platform out there that does this sort of thing and does it "right", you guys should be out there promoting that instead of wasting your time donning a sandwich board proclaiming QIDIAN IS SATAN as you impotently scream on the street corner here. The people who are likely to get contracts here have enough reading comprehension to know their risks, let them make the call when the time comes.
It could all be a big mistake. But that's not really your call, because you're not producing anything except piss and vinegar when the market here is stories people want to read. If you do manage to use that time machine to acquire a knowledge of how they're going to really put the screws in, though, I'd appreciate it if you took a moment to get me some lottery numbers while you're at it.
