Webnovel.Forum

Hi I am an author, and my novel is "God of Abominations". I am wondering how to get a contract on it, and if there is a way to negotiate the terms for when to receive the money if I were to get a contract. How would I get that contract, and how popular must the novel be to get a contract or does that not matter? My novel currently has 15 chapters and 77,924 words. It has 20 collections and 4.1k views (but the views are multiplied by 10 by Webnovel for some reason (and I have completely confirmed this beyond any semblance of doubt), so it's actually about 410 views), so I was wondering if this meets the requirements to get a contract? If not, how much more would I need to get a contract?

Wow.
That's a lot of words for 15 chapters.
All works enter into a queue system for contracting process automatically. The waiting time until a contract is offered to you is around 2 months.
After that you can ask the editors in discord about the status of your novel.
Payment terms are covered in the contract already.

yeetitetatious General requirement is 12k words and the collection to views ratio should not exceed 300 or 350.
Just divide your views by your collections.
Also, growth also matters. with 15 chapters, your views are a bit low. I would suggest you to start promoting your novel off the platform. At least reach 10k views for 15 chapter[so 2:3} Or even exceed it.

yeetitetatious Also, like what Lu Shui said... too much work for just 15 chapters, if your chapters are bigger just divide them in parts. That's what I do.
https://www.webnovel.com/book/the-god-of-jesters_23577019206689905

yeetitetatious Also, just checked your rnovel. Your release rate is super slow. So that might be the reason for why its so behind in viewer ship.
Do at least 2 chapters a week.

GoGo How do I promote it off-platform? I don't have social media and I don't have any friends either. On top of that, I don't even know how to put information on the internet anyway.

yeetitetatious Make a Facebook ID and visit the fan page of Webnovel and promote there.

Though the better idea would be to promote your work on the Discord server of Inkstone and Webnovel.
Even try Scribblehub's discord if you wish. But dont' be pushy and post your novel links out of nowhere.

First ask the members where to promote and where you can put your links in.
And then talk to them about your novel but don't give out any links or name.

And only if they show interest do you DM(Direct Message) your novel to them or show tell them the name.

yeetitetatious Also, its 1500-2000 words not 5000. So keep watch at that.

GoGo Thx, I'll do that then. I do have discord and Facebook already, so that helps lol. I'm just not active on them lol.

yeetitetatious You can ignore Facebook. But don't do it for the discord.
As you know, in this day and age. Promotion of a product is more important than the product itself.

GoGo What's the discord for inkstone? Is there a link somewhere?

yeetitetatious https://discord.gg/9XfhsEz

yeetitetatious how i can check my real novel views?

Abdullah_Hamada An odd question, but in on mobile app click the middle button on the bottom of the page and you can see the details about your novels from there.
On the desktop, it simply shows up on the main page of a novel.

https://www.webnovel.com/book/the-god-of-jesters_23577019206689905

Take my novel for example, 22.2k views at the moment.

@GoGo has solid advice. Try really, really hard to stay above 1,000 words and below 2,000 words. Readers on this site have incredibly low attention spans.

GoGo's advice on update frequency is also accurate. Readers (and Webnovel) want frequent, predictable updates. I believe Webnovel will ask you to post at least 1,000 words per day if you get a contract with them (and will really want you to post at least 1,500 per day), so you'll need to get used to publishing much more quickly if you want to get a contract.

Of course, publishing much shorter chapters will make that easier to do.

On that same note, you also need to use shorter paragraphs. You shouldn't be going above 70 or so words for your longest paragraphs, and should cut them even shorter whenever you use complex sentences. 350-word paragraphs will simply lose the attention of most readers here.

Whenever you have a change in narration topic, at the very least, you need a new paragraph. In your first chapter, you have a long paragraph which starts by describing the MC's mental state, then his physical features, then his clothes, then the city guard, then the master of the city, under the umbrella of giving context for the MC's clothes.

Even without editing the actual content of that paragraph, it would read much, much better if you cut it up into small chunks like this:

He was a young boy at the age of fourteen, and he was extremely thin because of his lack of activity after his sister died.

He had been depressed and sad to the point that it affected him physically, further deteriorating his body. On top of already being extremely small for his age, he would now have a malnourished body and was extremely thin.

However, he could be said to be handsome if he was not so thin.

He had beautiful blue eyes and jet black hair cut short. The robes which he put on were a silvery blue in color, and although they were not of high quality, they were not of low quality either. On the front of them was a small patch with a small silver sparrow silhouette on it. Below the sparrow was a single bronze star representing his rank.

A single bronze star was the lowest rank above commoners, and it was not at all powerful in the city.

The city was called the city of silver sparrow, famous for its silver sparrow guard, which were all extremely powerful with three silver stars each. They were the city's last line of defense and had always been the trump card of the city of silver sparrow. The silver sparrow guard was made up of five members and all of them had strength only below the city master, who was the strongest person in the city.

The city master was the only one in the city to be ranked at one gold star. In total, there were three bronze stars, three silver stars, and three gold stars. Those at the three star gold ranked warrior level were known to be invincible and they were not someone that anyone could kill.

You're also redundant with a lot of your description, like telling us three times in less than 80 words in the above section that the boy was thin, or by just repeating basic details and actions very closely together:

As he walked out of his room, the boy heard his mother's voice. "Su Tao, I made breakfast. Come eat," The boy's name was Su Tao, and he went up to the table and ate.

Or like this bit from the next chapter:

As he got into the water, he winced in pain since it was still extremely hot, and even though it wouldn't burn him, it would still cause him a tiny bit of pain, and on top of the pain from his aching muscles, it was very painful.
But the pain went away very quickly and soon relaxed his muscles.

As his muscles relaxed in the hot water, the pain lowered to a tolerable point so that he could train again.

Your first chapter is just describing the MC being a depressed kid with a mother who loves him, as well as describing the setting. 5K words is way too much for this. Readers want to see some kind of action or forward momentum in the first chapter.

An opening is your chance to promise the reader what kind of story they're about to read, and having a depressed MC who does nothing is probably the single worst kind of opening you can make.

Keep in mind that, by the standards of this site, a reader would have read two to four chapters of another story by the time they finish your first chapter, and during that time, there is no plot progression and the MC shows neither any power nor any virtue that will make a reader cheer for him.

My suggestion is to remove the current first two chapters and make a new first chapter with the following plot:

1. Su Tao shows up to the training ground. People talk behind his back about him as he sets up to train. Someone has pity for him because he has become depressed and weak after his sister's death. Someone else mocks him for his weakness. A third person chastises the second person, saying that Su Tao is showing mental strength by forcing himself to train even though he's depressed and weak.

2. Su Tao ignores the people talking about him, only focusing on training. The pain he feels is much greater than before, because his body has deteriorated, but he forces himself to push through the pain and train harder than he ever has before. He imagines that he is striking the face of the young master who killed his sister, and this makes him punch harder and faster until he is at the point of exhaustion. He falls to the ground.

3. Su Chao comes over and mocks Su Tao to his face for being so weak that a training dummy could defeat him. However, Su Tao ignores him, gets back up, and keeps training.

4. Su Chao attacks Su Tao, and your chapter continues as normal, ending with Su Tao being struck by lightning as your chapter currently describes.

All of that should take no more than 2,000 words. You shouldn't give all the details of the city right away, but give details over many chapters as the details become relevant. Readers care about characters much more than they care about the city and the guards.

I also highly recommend you use the free version of the ProWritingAid software to help edit your chapters. PWA is much better than Grammarly.

Also, please don't tell your reader the story isn't good in your synopsis! You want to convince them it is worth their time, not tell them they have to sit through a bad story for a while until it gets good. Just start with the good part.

Here's a better version of your synopsis:

Destiny is unpredictable.

No mortal can tell how, where, and when any event might occur.

This is especially true for poor Su Tao, a young, talentless boy in a city of bullies and thugs.

When the city's young master humiliates and murders his sister, Su Tao loses all hope.

He has forgotten the words his sister once lived by: "Never give up hope. So long as you hold on, there's always time for a miracle."

That miracle has come...

...and now Su Tao is the strongest abomination this world has ever seen.

I'm an editor, so feel free to ask any more writing questions you might have, and I'll try to answer them!

EldritchBlade Thanks for the advice! I am going to go back in and rewrite the first chapter, and I was actually planning to cut up the paragraphs as well already, I just hadn't gotten to it yet. I don't use Grammarly and IDK what PWA is, but I'll check it out. As for the repeating information thing, that is just something I tend to do without thinking, and I will work on not doing that as much. As for the synopsis, I will change it and get rid of the thing about the story developing later like you said, and I will shorten up the chapters.
I was originally planning to rewrite the earlier chapters later on once I got more writing experience anyway, so this advice really helps me to do that.
As for writing questions, I will probably ask a few later on for how to shorten the chapters and how to do dialogue. Because, if you ended up reading the first couple chapters, you probably noticed that there are only a couple lines of dialogue in the entire thing, and that is because I'm not good at having characters interact. So, if you have any advice for that, I would love to have it as it would really help me.

EldritchBlade also, I forgot to mention, but the reason that my word/chapter count is so high is because the later chapters all have twice the amount of words compared to the first few chapters. The first chapter actually doesn't have 5,000 words. It has 3,406 words, which is much closer to the range that you talked about.