Webnovel.Forum

The contract is awful. You get paid next to nothing, you lose the rights to your story, they work you like a horse, you have no idea what WN will do with your story, and you have no way to know if they are even paying you the correct amount.

There are so many better options for earning money from your story, like self publishing for example or getting a patreon setup with advanced chapters.

Selkie Myth is a good example of an author who's managed to make thousands of dollars a month for 9 chapters a month on Patreon (currently, they make $22,140 a month). And that's excluding the money they make off of Kindle.

Just look at most semi successful authors on Royal Road. Most of them are able to make a good amount of money - somewhere between $10k and $5k a month - and they get to still keep the rights to their own story.

With the WN contract, you get paid $400 a month, plus 50% of earnings will go to you. But you have to write 1500 words a day and give up the rights to your story. This is absolutely nothing compared to what other web novel authors make.

And just so we're on the same page, the usual contract WN offers (this is based on what I remember) gives WN ownership of your story. You are no longer allowed to use any of its properties or materials outside of WN. And you have to meet WN's quotas. And if the contract is broken, they still keep the rights to your story.

Mithun_ReddyGaru I was replying to another thread about the contract when I found this: https://writerbeware.blog/2023/01/20/bad-contract-alert-webnovel/

I suggest you thoroughly read through the contract and do some research about it before signing. But I would likely never sign a WN contract.

Stardust_46 There are lots of ways authors can earn money for their work.

There is the classic way which is to write a full book, send it to multiple publishers, and hope one of them likes it. A New York Times best-selling author went into the Royal Road forms and was giving some advice about this.

There is the web novel way which is to keep your writing free, but post advanced chapters for somewhere around $5 on Patreon (I'd say look at the price other people set for their advanced chapters). And if you want, you could self-publish on Amazon (I recommend Amazon) or Barnes & Noble. You will have to stub your story, though, if you self-publish (meaning take down most of the chapters that are published in the book; you can still post chapters, just not the chapters inside of a published book). Hopefully if you self publish, you would have built up a following that you could use to boost book sales and get your book noticed on Kindle and sites like Good Reads.

What sucks is WN is not writer-friendly. There is no easy way to direct readers to a donation page like Patreon. There is no easy way to tell readers that your story is stubbed. And you can not link your self-published books here on WN. There are better sites where you can do these things, like Royal Road.

Ghostwriting and editing are also options.

The bottom line is that you need to put in a lot of work if you want to make money doing this, and you need to research this stuff. You gotta think of writing as a business and need to figure out the best strategies to sell your products.