they stopped giving fast passes on PC some 3 months ago to combat piracy... they also made changes so you cant google translate. if you want free fast passes you need to download app and use it.
btw that combating piracy failed spectacularly. now pirate sites even have advanced chapters of some novels and pissed off crowd of PC users... gj webnovel
i think this is anti piracy measures that webnovel introduced around 2 months ago.
so if you want to google translate novels, best solution is to go to pirate sites (lol). they cracked the measure and some even have advanced chapters...
although no official announcement, fast passes were cancelled on PC cause of adblockers and to combat "piracy". if you want fast passes you need to download app and someone mentioned you can get around 4 fast passes.
fun fact: piracy was blocked for around a month and some novels on pirated sites even have advanced chapters now.
WinterTimeCrime
you have put many of my thoughts into your reply. webnovel sees authors as money printing machines that are disposable as soon as they are not making money any more. i find their exclusive contract pretty exploitative from what i read. for signing away your copyright and getting 50% of part of the profit your novel generates on this site, they are not investing much for their share of the profit, nor are they trying to promote authors outside the website.
personally if i was the author i would try to reach as wide audience as it was possible and grow as a brand. there are many ways to capitalize on your copyright if you make great book that has many fans.
Sara_Wilcox well webnovel has different strategy compared to more traditional publishers. it chases quantity over quality with low input costs. so it wants more authors and more novels regardless of quality. cause they already have server infrastructure, publishing new novel requires them 0$ cost. also compared to more traditional publishing, webnovel overcharges per word (i have read comparisons and IIRC it is somewhere around 2-3 times more expensive than books in other stores).
enabling physical books printing would require them to take the risk and invest thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars to adjust format to physical book, hire editors and then make printing run. usually you will need to pay 3-8$ per printed book with shipping depending on number of books printed, length, quality and complexity of the book. also they will need to rent warehouse to store your books before shipping and selling them. also they would need to price the book competitively, so printed book could end up cheaper than paying spirit stones on webnovel. and now repeat this process for x number of authors. not every author will sell, but they will have enormous costs and reduce profit of their original site. if they want to print books, they will select very few high ranked works where they can minimize their risk.
i have not read your works, nor do i know good they are, but my recommendation would be to branch out to many different sites and publish there to gain wider audience. make discord as main feedback channel for comments and open patreon with advanced chapter there.
idk how much you are currently earning with webnovel, but i have seen people earning from few thousands to 25k+$ monthly on just royalroad. if you were successful with attracting wider audience then you can start to consider making ebook for amazon (or few other sites) and physical copies.
also you will keep all copyright this way and you can do what you want with your work.
well i would keep copyright on all my works cause otherwise you are beholden to whims of the copyright holder (aka webnovel). you have many alternatives from where you can publish digitally and keep option of having copyright to publish physical copies. if you really want to keep working with webnovel you can get non exclusive contract. i have not read terms of it, but i saw they offered it to people on other platforms.
karmic_daoist usually there are no consequences. if original author/copyright holder notices you, he will send you cease&desist or DMCA takedown. if you comply there will be no further actions. if you dont comply then it can further escalate and you can be brought to court for copyright infringement. but considering those proceedings are very expensive, usually it is not worth it, so they will bring DMCA takedown to your server provider of which 90% will comply and remove content/ban you.
also webnovel is doing lots of plagiarizing from non qidian novels where they change part of the novel and it becomes "new" novel. when comparing it side by side you see same story, but one has story flow and logic (no matter how flawed it is), while other is missing half explanations and has numerous inconsistencies. is it legal? i really couldnt tell cause of numerous reasons. it is definitely in gray zone and i would say immoral.
RR has better quality novels (at least those more successful). Webnovel prefers quantity over quality. RR userbase has more experienced readers, so they are more critical (nobody wants to read same copy/paste xianxia/system novels for the n-th time (n ->∞ )). Webnovel has too many fanboys (bots?) that give 5 star rating to frankly terrible novels.
For earning i have seen RR authors earn from couple hundred dollars to 20k+ monthly without any contract. You can check their patreon pages (easily accessible from novels page) and most of the data is publicly available. Also some authors publish their books on amazon after some time and they have access to paypal donations.
Webnovel has more predatory contract where you give all your copyright to them and you more or less become their employee that needs to type certain number of characters weekly. They give you minimum guaranteed income and take 50% of your profit. I didnt see any publicly available info about authors earnings, but could be considerable considering number of fanboys and price per chapter.
[unknown] it is actually bad long term decision.. it will drive away lots of free user who make new novels actually discoverable. and users that left will in turn promote either other sites or pirate sites to their friends. it is good short term decision cause they will free server resources and will manage to convert part of the free users to app.
@"Neko_5445" royalroad is great site where all novels are free and you can donate on authors paypal or get patreon subscription for advanced access. wuxiaworld is mostly free, but you need to pay for advanced chapters and completed novels. on amazon you can buy books, or if you have kindle unlimited you can get access to 1-2 million books for 10$ monthly (can be much cheaper with some special discounts and amazon prime) and you have prime reading (cut down version of kindle unlimited). also smashwords has lots of free and cheap novels.
there are lots of more websites where you can read original english novels other than this site unless you want to read specific contracted novel. then only choice is to pay the price here or go to pirated site and hope they have it there.
[unknown] i am reading novels on few different sites. royalroad, wuxiaworld, amazon, smashwords and i buy and donate depending on the novel. all those sites have better translated, edited or written novels. if not for 1 novel that i actually read on this site i would have been long gone. and also that novel is also wordpadded and frankly not worth 15-20$ that i would need to spend monthly without fastpasses.
also i discuss "low quality novels" cause you compared price of amazon novels with price of novels on webnovel and somehow concluded that webnovel is actually better site cause of hundreds and thousands of chapters here. except few novels that actually have good story with good translation, editing and fluent english, rest are frankly terrible. ffs most new translated novels in last year and half were sh*tty plagiarized westernized rewrites of faloo novels(or other non qidian novels).
PancakesWitch download shaddy phone app instead of perfectly secure browser on pc.
on average amazon has better quality novels. lots of novels on webnovel are just wordpadded so 100k on webnovel is equivalent of actual story progress of 20k words in normal book. that is cause qidian is encouraging quantity over quality. also lots of novels here are not edited with half readable english vs fully edited fluent english on amazon.
idk why would you want that terrible contract... if your story is any good, put it on royal road and get patreon/paypal accounts. you will keep your copyright and probably earn much more than what you would earn on webnovel. some good authors earn $20k+ monthly that way. and they can still publish on amazon and similar sites.
if not for 1 original novel that i read on this site i would have left a long time ago... ffs most new novels are total sh_t rewrites of some sh_tty faloo (or other non qidian) novels. original (non chinese) novels are usually written in half illegible english with tones of tropes that 10 year old fanboys are voting to the top. translations of chinese novels are sometimes half edited mtl.