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[Title]
Devourer of Destiny
[Pen Name]
Lower Tier Dragon
[The link of your work]
https://www.webnovel.com/book/10348607406014105/Devourer-of-Destiny
[Three keywords about the cover]
Long-haired silhouette (male-dressed), in front of a blood-red full moon, in a dark landscape
[Inform us]
@Edgaaaar

ssound5rs That's what I get for not having read the fine print since before 2015. I stand corrected. :)

Even if they were offering tradpub money, though, the real point I'm aiming for is that Ideal and UnknownDaoist are alarmists operating from a position of bad faith with their only argument being "I have a hateboner for QI and you can't change my mind about that". You can't reason people out of a position they haven't reasoned themselves into in the first place. In their worldview, QI is a Stupid Chaotic Evil corporation that kicks puppies and strangles infants for the lulz, so it's obvious it's going to steal everything and give nothing.

Back here in the real world, we can appreciate that companies who act that way to their suppliers don't get supplied for very long and that the value of rights in digital publishing already has years of precedent behind it, something that gives authors leverage when it does come time to come to the table to negotiate. QI want this platform to succeed, and among groups like authors, part of that requires having success stories. Obviously, contracts will be the exception rather than the rule, but there will be enough of them and QI will pay well enough for people to want to chase that carrot. :)

BaiSiwa SHAMELESS

Short answer: As many or as few as what will convey the story you wish to tell in the way you wish to tell it.

Anecdotal stuff: In my case, Devourer of Destiny is plotted out as though it is made for network television. Each chapter break is a commercial break "breather space". You can expect a full "episode" of Devourer to be around 7 chapters, more or less (I just wrapped up what I consider the second episode with 8 chapters, the one prior to it being 6).

Because of this structure, it works best for me to keep chapters around 2000 words (to date largest: 2416; smallest: 1718). This gives me enough room to comfortably make something happen each chapter; I'm not the type to drag out every minor tussle with a minion or mid-boss type character for three chapters. The most important thing for me when I hit Publish is that I can look back over the text and go "yeah, something happened that moved the plot forward". I'm releasing 1-2 chapters a day, so I want people who read it as it is released to not feel completely blue balled, to be perfectly crass about it.

So, I'd say however many words makes something happen and makes you, the author, satisfied with it (yes, some people will complain, we have a big userbase here, there's always going to be someone able to find something subjectively "wrong" with your work, don't write for them). But I'm biased. :)

NineNeatherBird Okay, now that I have survived my cable going out here, let's take a look here.

Something to keep in mind: of the 84 Originals in the Popular list, at the time of this writing yours is at #33. Not too shabby, especially given we don't have an extensive toolkit for exposure beyond the "Latest Updates" page and people finding you under other categories/tags.

Tagging

Which brings me to the first thing (and this one goes for everybody): if you haven't already tagged up your novel from your main page, do so. It doesn't show the list of tags to other people on the page, but they'll still find your novel when searching tags. Especially make sure that if any of the top 12 "Suggested Tags" applies that you've tagged it. Each tag is another page you show up on that people can find you when looking, but make sure it's actually true for your novel.

Synopsis

Next up: Your synopsis has the flowery lines of poetic prose thing going on, and it actually makes it read in a stilted manner. Your synopsis exists to tell people why they should read your novel, and if it is difficult to read/understand, their first takeaway is that your novel is going to be difficult to read/understand. My suggestion is as before: view it as an elevator pitch (30 seconds to sell me on your novel spiel) first and foremost.

As something to keep in mind for an advanced technique for "selling" your novel, the first 150 characters of your synopsis are the ones people see when scrolling down the categories/tags; they should clearly say something interesting enough for the browsing reader to want to click through and see more. The three things people see when browsing the lists are your cover, your title, and your synopsis: make sure all three are on point to maximize your potential.

As a general note to other people reading, there are two primary misfires I see in folks setting up their synopsis. The first is the "let's get poetic" thing. The second is the "let's ask a whole bunch of questions at the start" thing. The first I've gone over before, it's just confusing. The second is a problem because you are outright inviting your reader to say "no" and move on to the next novel in the list. I get why people do the question thing: it makes the novel look mysterious. But you have to have your reader intrigued before you can mystify them. Ask the questions later in the synopsis, not front-loaded.

Bold Strategies

Now, for you in particular there is an additional hurdle you have thrown up for yourself: you have a novel with multiple simultaneous optional viewpoints. Your synopsis includes instructions on how to figure out how to read your novel. This introduces a level of difficulty that requires investment from the reader; I'm pretty sure you're going to get some "bounces" (people who get to your front page and turn around and go elsewhere) because of this. There's no recommendation I can offer for this, just a note that it is going to impact the size of your reader pool.

Which brings me to another general advice point: we all do things that will cut down on our pool of potential readers. Using my Devourer of Destiny as an example, I have an unapologetically wicked protagonist. This is going to turn off some folks. I do invite folks to stick around and see if the handling of the characters interests them anyway, but I cannot force people to want to read about a straight-up murderer. I am okay with that. The takeaway here is that you have various artistic choices to make with your novel, and only you can decide what's important enough to stick to your guns for. Everybody should have something about their novel that will turn off some amount of readers; to have it otherwise is to be writing trite marketing pablum, not a novel. Take a look at your own novels and understand these things and their importance to you, the writer. Make your own decisions and make sure you're okay with the invisible costs.

The Beginning

Okay, back to things we can work on, I'm next looking at the first part of your first chapter here. I know you said you may cut the chapter entirely; that's up to you, of course. Whatever you do with your first chapter, understand that the first "screen" or so of text should capture the reader to keep scrolling down and reading more.

Your first paragraph is an omniscient third person infodump. This rarely works out as a first thing because you've immediately broken the rules and started telling us things instead of showing them. It's clinical and dry. Other visual media like film and television get away with introducing this with a narrator because they have something going on in the background that looks interesting. You only have your text, and so you shouldn't do that.

Your second paragraph makes for a better first paragraph. It immediately has stuff happening. This is good. The main problem with it is that your verb tense shifts halfway through, starting in the present and then going past tense. Just stick with past tense from the outset; the tense shifting thing is unconsciously snapping the process of immersion right in half, so you want to nip that in the bud.

It is extremely important that you run through the first few paragraphs for issues like the tense thing, because you are establishing an expectation for the level of the novel's quality here. You should obviously be running everything through some sort of checker in the end, but the start is where typos/grammar/syntax will turn people off, the most extreme folks running to review "this is a crime against the English language" and such.

Whether you cut the chapter entirely or not is up to you. Just make sure to address these concerns for whatever your start is.

Parting Stuff
You're in a pretty good position on the chart, all considered, but can do a bit more to improve it. If you get some extra time, look at the folks around you and see what they're doing better/worse and try to learn from it if you can.

Of course, there are some things you just can't change outside of just the deliberate artistic choice thing. Some folks came into the opening of Inkstone with chapter stockpiles. A few are works and authors from other sites with existing fanbases that are transplanting over here. Both of these are huge advantages in getting eyeballs on the chapters (which is what determines popularity). There's currently nothing we can do for it other than continue to steadily produce and hope it all equalizes as all the numbers rise together and as the site adds things to support us.

That's that for now, sorry if adding in the general advice for everybody makes it confusing but I figure that's the cost for taking up page space that other people have to read. Now I have stuff to catch up on since my cable's back. ;)

NineNeatherBird I'll be taking a looksee later tonight/tomorrow, as I'm currently putting together my releases for the day right now.

The initial general commentary I can supply is that the system is still in its infancy and they've promised to give us some more options for visibility once they've got it better locked in, so I'd say the most important thing to do right now is to stick with whatever promises you've made with your story (that applies to quality and format as well as schedule) and see what tools we end up with. Nearing the top of the chart we're dealing with stuff that has been transplanted from other sites and have lots of chapters + existing fanbases, so it isn't really fair to gauge your current progress against those. It'll all even out with time and adjustments to the system.

Katharina_Stemmer Since you asked for feedback, I took a moment to take a glance at things and, while I'm hardly a mega-expert, here's some help I can offer:

Your Reviews
You have two different kinds of reviews going on there, and you seem to understand that. Firstly, the troll/spam ones that offer zero actionable/stylistic feedback should be reported as abuse, straight up. Don't even feel bad for reporting those people, they're dragging you down. I had a fellow colorfully spamming in caps that he wanted, ahem, a plethora of large mammaries. That was a clear "you're just trolling me here" that got removed even before I myself got to reporting it, so they do cut that stuff.

As for the other, you have the review that disturbs you. You have your options here, and the first thing is to determine for yourself whether there's anything you can or care to do about it, or if it just is what it is. You've tried to engage and that's excellent, but strive to accept descriptive bad reviews either as challenges to be accepted or as badges of honor for sticking with writing your own story instead of someone else's. That's what it comes down to.

In the case of that fellow, you sort of hovered around the primary issue of how that review came to be and it's one that you can't readily fix now because it's a timing thing: your story was published before you had ample time for it to air out, so to speak. Next time you might want to rethink the stylistic choice of taking three chapters before you introduce your primary protagonist, but if you're going to do that, don't hit the publish button until they show up. Even in doing so, it is your job as author to make the start compelling enough to continue those three chapters (once they exist) before meeting the person they're supposed to invest in. First impressions are important, and if your first and currently only chapter up gives the reader little to get interested in, they're going to chuck it into the bin and go for the next story on their list.

Which brings me to the next bit.

Your Synopsis
The problem: your synopsis is not terribly helpful. It suffers from emulating the prose of translated work synopses that themselves require the translator to actually write something helpful after. You sacrificed functionality for pseudo-poetic form and in doing so you gave me nothing to distinguish your novel from any other "the system became a world of its own" novel.

What you can do: Fix this. Write a paragraph, or two if one won't do. I don't expect you to make me deeply care about your work in that paragraph or so, but at least allow me to distinguish it from others. Give me names of things to remember, at a bare minimum. The synopsis is your elevator pitch, the 30 seconds where you capture my time and sell me on your story, so make it count. Names give people a platform for association and association builds memory, and people who remember your novel are more likely to come back to it even having not added it to their library on the first go round.

The Prose
Congratulations, you have submitted yourself to a platform where people are going to rip into your grammar and spelling of things and sneer at you for every tiny mistake. You have guts! But do not despair, writing is a profession that generally gets better as you do more of it, and tools exist to help.

This isn't a deep dive, it's a first impression thing, much as the rest of what I'm covering here is because what you seem to have is a first impression problem. You really, seriously, need to consider running your stuff through a word processor grammar check before you publish.

Right off the bat, your second would-be word, "noone", is not proper usage except as colloquial dialogue. Third person can and should have a "voice", but it should avoid colloquialisms, particularly those that step outside grammar. Or it can just be a typo, in which case, fix it. Every mistake particularly in your first visible page-on-the-screen is going to be a gigantic neon billboard saying "this doesn't have a lot of effort put into it, does it?", even though that's not your intention or the truth (we all put a lot into this stuff).

Another area where a word processor's scan might help you is in your suffering of that very same affliction I find myself extremely prone to: too many commas and going too deeply parenthetical. Technical and essay writing tend to lull us into thinking this is okay; narrative writing requires us to break this habit. Straight up excessive commas should be trimmed and a grammar checker generally will flag these. If your commas are showing up because your thoughts are becoming parenthetical nesting dolls, you need to reconsider the presentation of that particular (set of) thought(s) or idea(s). Grammar checkers are less good at digging these out sometimes, because it's acceptable practice in non-narrative prose.

There's more, but it really comes down to again using a word processor or other app and checking spelling and grammar. It adds time to the workflow, yes, but it's time well spent, particularly on your very first chapter. Have my reassurance that even with the flaws that are present, you are eminently more readable than a great number of new works here I looked at. This all comes down to not just doing well, but doing better.

Parting Words
This is pretty lengthy already, so I'll wrap it up. You need to report those useless crap reviews and then take the negative-but-constructive review and turn weakness into strength however you can manage to. You need to improve on things to make us care coming into your story, and the best way to make us care is to show you care, by providing a succinct and descriptive synopsis and clearing up the bugs in your text. Doing this stuff won't catapult you to a webnovel rock star but it will up your stars and build you up to be a better writer. After you've worked on that, then a conversation could then be had on taking it to the next level from there. Ultimately, if you really want to climb the chart, you need to get people caring enough to spend their limited Power Stones on your novel, for example. For now, though, let's stick with getting those stars higher.

Happy writing. :)

Is there a way? Sure. Authors can do whatever we want in our process before hitting that "Publish" button and putting our stuff up for reading on the site.

Is doing so going to catch on? Maybe, but probably not. Visibility on a platform like this is a matter of competition. A large part of staying on top of that competition is releasing chapters early and often. If you have a creative pipeline of proofreaders, story consultants, beta readers, etc., you are injecting additional time into the whole process, time that the chapter could have been up and read and your novel could have risen in the rankings. Additionally, having all of those folks on board has other costs, particularly with folks doing strong editorial work that -- depending on the quality of the author's raw work -- can take a decent chunk of time for them. Especially when you're starting out and getting nothing but satisfaction and practice from doing this, you're not going to have very much to give besides virtual headpats.

Now, if you do all that stuff you'll probably (that really depends on how good the people you have working on it are, BTW; you can't just magically pick anybody to edit and suddenly you're JRR Tolkien) have an edge in chapter quality, but that advantage can be eroded if your whole machine gets clogged and you can't maintain the same pace as others who have some minor writing issues but are putting out constant content. Where a single author just has their own breaks to plan around, an editorial team+author multiplies the number of people you have to be mindful of the availability of, and so more easily can fall to pieces if not carefully managed (there are teams that do this very well in the translated stuff, but they also tend to be teams that are getting compensated well for it).

Keep in mind in China where the translated tales hail from that the authors there generally don't have the kinds of heavily wrought editorial machines we apply to some of the very top tier translations here either. You just have the author, sucking down on cigarettes and/or caffeinated beverages, wailing out up to four chapters a day, trying to hit a daily word/chapter count to keep themselves eligible for their contracts. The guys rising to the top there don't have a committee improving the work, they just naturally put out something people want to read and maybe it'll get an editing pass on the way to print if they do well enough for that.

Since that system works well enough over there, don't expect the culture from the site runners here to be terribly different, nor should it be. I've seen some suggestions else-thread about enforcing a standard of quality and I wonder if the people suggesting these actually use any online platforms (where nobody does that kind of thing for free) or if they just think there's an editing/proofing sweatshop that'd be able to even sift the very bad from the passably good and better without incurring such a cost that the site would have to entirely paywalled to afford it. Guess what, folks? The readers are the ones who are doing that here, by design.

It does make my eyes bleed to look at something new and from the first sentence it has bad capitalization/spelling and random spaces (or lack thereof) before and after punctuation marks, if they're even used, among other travesties I've encountered. The way a platform like this is designed to handle that sort of thing, though, is for the readers to rate that stuff poorly and then to more highly rate the stuff that isn't eye-gougingly terrible. One place where that currently makes no difference, though, is on the front page "Latest Updates" section, where we're all equal. I really don't know what they can do there, though, because they have to strike a balance between giving brand new works decent initial exposure so the whole process of rating it can begin and do its thing while also promoting the stuff that people do think is good. Not having a comprehensive, well thought-out solution of my own, I can only note it's going to be a problem as we get more and more of this stuff in the total pipeline, and wish them luck in figuring it all out.

Whew, that was sure a good chunk to say in one go, but I'm also sort of addressing stuff in other threads all at once too. We do need to find our way as a new-fledged writing community here, but I'm not thinking it'll be terribly mutated past what China gets in this regard. :)

Yeah, I began publishing today and while my second chapter is now publicly visible, the first still gives a 404 (despite being there in the ToC and having shown on the public latest list within two hours of its submission as though it were approved). Not exactly the first impression I'd like to give readers, but all I can do for it is leave an Author's Note at the end of the second chapter and hope it all works soon as I keep submitting new chapters. I think many of us can understand growing pains with a new system, I just hope it isn't painful for too very long.