Webnovel.Forum

yaoyueyi Oh for fucks sake. Goddamn WN fuckers.

Well, whatever.

Free Hongkong, Taiwan #1, Tibet is not a part of China.

Tomoyuki Wait, people seriously thought that train-episode was filler? What the actual fuck. That was the most heroic shit i ever read and it was obvious it was definitely not filler.

People can be stupid that way, but the tricky thing about filler is that it is often only obvious in retrospective what is important to the story and what is not.

A good way to handle Infodumps or Statscreens is to not count them towards your total word count. Realm of Myths and Legends does this. The stats and System-Messages never factor in, but thats kind of the exception i suppose.

Fact of the matter is its contextual and the hardcore readers have enough experience to call bs out if they see it.

I_Only_Sleep Yeah ima gonna wait for a reply from the author then. For this kind of talk its kind of a big deal, if you want to vent about your own experiences or if you claim to speak for quite a group of people.

yaoyueyi
1) Ok, so which is it then? Your perspective as an author or "from your dear authors" as you have titled this post? This seems very weird.
2) If you title your post "from your dear authors" i assume you write for at least several of them and not only yourself? Once again, this is very weird.
3) Keeping up with a schedule is not the main point of your post, but i already laid out why it can lead to problems together with your main-problem. I am not going to repeat myself, but once again: You are arguing from your own experience, yet your post is titled "from your dear authors".

Either you are making your points from your own point of view or you do not. Which is it now? If you do not represent a bunch of authors just remove the "s" and we are in the clear.

yaoyueyi Let me present a Counterpoint:

Readers generally do not give a flying fck about the amount of chapters, they care about whats in them and about the authors communication.

I honestly cannot even recall the amount of comments i have read that go along the lines of:"Holy crap this is filler" or "Holy crap this chapter is short".

This leads us to another common theme: Lacking Quality. I get it. You get it. The community gets it. You are writing light novels here, not fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings or something.

But if a majority of a chapter is either reiteration of earlier chapters, reactions to these earlier chapters or stat-summaries and other word-count-padding BS people will call you out on it (rightly so) and the chapter will feel shorter, simply because you did not advance the story in any meaningful way.

This is more a problem with Translations than Originals, but still applies to some extent.

Positive Example(imho): Lord of the Mysteries. Every chapter is not too long and not too short and there is at least one thing happening relevant to the main-story-arc. Many authors could learn from that.

Negative Example(imho): Kingdoms Bloodline. Holy crap these chapters are long, but not in a good way. At some point i realised that its not even worldbuilding or character-development, just wordpadding and I dropped it after 100-200 chapters, cant even recall tbh. Sometimes 10 chapters go by with nothing relevant happening besides people talking. Some call it a slow burn, i call it long-winded.

Nobody expects you to put out perfect work like some sort of author-machine.

But to some extent, you set those expectations yourself. How many new novels have promised daily or even twice-daily updates, only to crash and burn as the weight of their own expectations caught up with them?

If you do not think you can keep that kind of schedule up communicate that to the community in a sincere way, there are authors notes and comments for a reason.
Many authors use these features to update their readers on illness/rl-stuff happening and generally its received positively and with understanding. We all know you guys are only human too.

Positive Example: Out of Space: Author just got sick, told everyone, everyone was cool about it, with no updates promised. Everyone celebrated new chapters because it meant the author was getting better.

Going silent with no warning or explanation is not well received, and with good reason. Many stories have been abandoned that way (permanent HIATUS is abandoning imo) while leaving the community built around them high and dry. Of course this has let us become scared of it happening to our favourite stories and we lash out if we feel played.

In the end i think, its a systemic issue, not a community one. Webnovel, and by extension Qidian has built this whole Powerstone-System and the little display at the top of each novel informing us of amount of chapters/day for a reason. They want you to keep writing, at all times. If you don't, your PS-Ranking suffers, you lose visibility and money from SS-Payouts. It is kind of toxic in my opinion, as it puts pressure on authors to deliver, even if its substandard.

But oh well. All of that is just kinda my opinion on the whole thing. As a reader i am biased anyway.