TawnyWrites No worries! Anything for someone who aspires to write. I wish you the best of luck. Just keep in mind that there are people that cheer you on. Sometimes just imagining the pride of my parents and friends when they read a dedication keeps me at it. ;)
tomeck
- Sep 25, 2019
- Joined Jun 24, 2018
Whenever I feel like something I wrote is bad I usually just google "hilariously bad books" or something similar and settle back to enjoy a chuckle or two at the expense of fellow authors. It helps you see books from the eyes of readers and points out some mistakes you might have made yourself before you publish.
Best case: your book isn't actually bad and you're just having insecurity. Even best-selling authors suffer from that and many have admitted that they were afraid they'd never reach the level of professionalism they wanted, even when selling like hot cakes worldwide. You might be one of them!
Worst case: your book may actually be bad. But even if it is, there will still be people that will enjoy reading it and you'll get plenty of feedback (good, bad and fucking horrific) in the comments and product reviews. You'll learn what you did wrong, which things to avoid and move on. If you feel it really was substandard you can always rewrite it. Amazon for example afaik allows submitting a corrected version.
One thing to note is that nobody is born the perfect writer. Most really good authors got that way by writing almost constantly. An obsession almost as much as a hobby or profession. Just keep at it, try to keep an eye on your habits and keep a group of people that is willing to proofread your stuff and/or give you feedback to catch the really obvious errors and you'll be fine.
Sure thing, the ones I read on Amazon in no particular order:
The Station Core - A novel about a person kidnapped to serve as intelligent control system for a defense network in alien star systems (apparently humans are very good at being violent with a purpose, who knew?) gets side-tracked by an attack on the ship transporting him and lands on a planet with primitives where he needs to protect his core, repair the damage caused by the crash landing and eventually build an economy capable of building a starship to get off that rock.
The Slime Dungeon Chronicles - a four book series dealing with a guy being reborn and building a dungeon, centered mostly around (le gasp) slimes. The series deals mostly with the interaction of dungeon and people, featuring some nice intrigue and perspectives of both the dungeon core and the adventurers visiting it.
Ancient Dreams - a 4 book series about a Dryad building a plant based dungeon under a mountain on the border between a kingdom of elves and a slaver empire looking to subjugate, sell and/or possibly defile all the hot elves.
It's a pretty good series, but it's mostly concerned with the human interactions and - be warned - some heavy lesbian leanings between the dryad and various battered elves she rescues more or less by accident.
Really liked the series despite the fact that the protagonist is mostly portrayed as very overpowered (sue me, I like it when the bad guys get beaten down hard :P).Divine Dungeon - 3 books (4th coming out I think) about a Dungeon Core building a dungeon with a divine twist. It has some plot holes, but I enjoyed my time with it anyways.
Loki's Daughter the Opal Dungeon - first book in what I dearly hope will become a series. A soul is given a chance to become a dungeon and is snagged by Loki and friends to help him escape from his imprisonment (and possibly start the god smackdown early). Has a great twist in the book that I really enjoyed.
The Wizard (Dungeon Core 1) is a series of a wizard getting murdered due to a mistake and somehow escaping into becoming a dungeon under the spot that was once his wizard tower. Haven't read that one yet, but it's got three books in it and it looks promising.
Dark Dungeon 1: Dungeon Spawned is a pretty good dungeon book series with a definitive leaning towards the more saucy side, think harem. Not too wild about the smut, but I didn't let that dissuade me with Ancient Dreams when the book turned out to have a decent story and it didn't stop me here either.
Corrupt Dungeon: straight out smut with a dungeon core setting, literally about a sexual predator getting access to dungeon functions and various mind control mechanics to become a bigger (no pun intended) menace. Read the first book, wasn't really into it because it's really almost entirely set around the sex, including aphrodisiac plants, slimes that dissolve clothes and accost women and "zombie" plant people that do what slimes do but without the slime.
Fine if you're in the mood for it, but I didn't really care for it. No kink shaming, though. :PAs to RoyalRoad:
Not gonna go too into it here cuz it's free stuff and therefore you can just dive in and read it if you like.
The Misplaced Dungeon - MC is a woman who's soul was copied by a lazy goddess to function as a controlling entity for a dungeon on her world. They wanted the dungeons to function as a cheap way to terraform the planet which has all sorts of issues because of said laziness, but OP went rogue and decided that instead of becoming a dungeon in the middle of nowhere she'd rather be a dungeon in the ocean.
Hilarity ensues.City Dungeon - MC was a fan of Simcity and got struck by lightning, reincarnating as a dungeon. He decided he didn't wanna be a murderhole dungeon and set out to become a city dungeon, working with and protecting people to prosper together instead of harvesting from the corpses.
The Dungeon of Evolution - MC was a badass mage who died from sort of mega disease and got chosen to make a new dungeon by some deity or other. Pretty slow start to it, but it's now reaching areas where it starts to get interesting (read: he's actually getting visitors!).
The Realm Beneath - MC is actually a real dungeon, not some person reincarnated. Acts accordingly insofar as he's not torn about not murdering his visitors like most reincarnated MCs are. It's a fun read, but pretty short just like Dungeon of Evolution because they're both still updating.
The Caring Dungeon - MC is a guy trapped in a dungeon core who wants to make a splendid forest dungeon. Not much to say about it, haven't read more than a chapter yet (damn games, why you gotta get released so closely together?!). Find out for yourself!
Dungeon Heart - old dwarven master artisan dies in a mountain and finds himself becoming a Dungeon Core. Sets out to make a dungeon that's an artistic masterpiece, surprising virtually everybody. Still updating, meaty chapters, up to like 50 chapters now and one completed volume so a decent amount to read.
Aaaand that's it for now. I'm positive I've read more, but I can't find em on kindle (it doesn't show kindle unlimited books you read in your history very well) and the other ones on RoyalRoad are dead or discontinued. This list should keep you going for a while anyways.
I don't know of any such story on this website, but I know that dungeon core webnovels are almost a staple on RoyalRoad.com, if you're okay with visiting another site. It also has a lot of "reborn/transported to another world" or "reborn as a monster" novels that are also quite enjoyable.
Other than that there's also KindleUnlimited - the service itself costs money each month, but it enables you to read as many KindleUnlimited books as you'd like and among them are a good dozen full books/series of dungeon core books.
If you're interested in that I'd be happy to give you a few recommendations about it.Noticed the same thing. When I first hit the premium chapters of the two stories I read I bought enough stones to get up to date and attempted to stay current, but one of them is in the habit of uploading batches of over 10 chapters at once pretty regularly.
After doing the math I was paying enough money to buy 10 full books on Amazon in two weeks just trying to keep up with the authors voracious uploading schedule.
While I applaud the author and/or translator for this diligent work ethic, it does mean that I simply can't afford to actually read the chapters when they get out. As I also play games (especially with friends, which means buying premium releases as they come out or not playing with them at all), I had to decide between reading my daily chapters or being able to afford Fallout 76 or other titles to play with my friends.
Consequently, I stopped buying spirit stones and decided to bite my tongue and just wait for the free chapters to catch up to where I was in the novels... That was several weeks ago. One of the novels I read is now at 100 premium chapters still locked.
If they stopped unlocking chapters then I'd rather find out now so I can delete this website entirely. No offense, but I can't afford spending a hundred bucks a month for the spirit stones I'd need to keep up with my reading habits here and if all stories I could read just cut off somewhere in the middle then I might as well not torture myself by reading any more of them. :/
- Edited
I really think a much better way to do this would be similar to the Amazon Kindle Unlimited system.
I. e.:
Non-paying readers that read a story will only see the released chapters that are currently free to read (if a novel has 121 released chapters and 10 of them are premium, they'd see only 111 chapters released. They'd only see 1 unread when the 112th chapter became free to read and not if chapter 212 which is also premium was released, etc.).
This would solve the whole "I don't even know if I can read one more chapter because it keeps showing premium as unread even though I have no access" thing.
Instead, it would show a little message reading "There are currently 10 premium chapters available to Webnovel Premium users. Become a member today and gain access to these chapters and hundreds more! Click >>here<< to find out more.
The link would lead to a small infomercial site explaining how premium works, how much it costs and what exactly you gain access to, including a list of novels currently offering premium chapters.People can subscribe to the service and pay a small monthly sum. Say 5 bucks to start with, if you wanted to gauge interest. That money (minus whatever cut the website gets, which is necessary to pay for the service) would land in a pool and all premium stories would draw from that pool in a percentage determined by their popularity as measured by the donation of power stones or whatever other currency the site wants to distribute. So if there are 10 premium fictions and the top one gets 40 % of the donations, then it'd also receive 40 % of whatever remained in the pool.
A small initial sum could be guaranteed, so even if a novel received only minor contributions they'd still get something, but a big chunk of their pay should depend on their popularity to encourage good translations, quick work and generally not being a dick.
To make sure authors don't start a lot of really goofy stories and submit them all as premium to make a bunch of dosh from the guaranteed minimum payment, a certain limit should be set before you can become premium.
This limit could (or should?) be a mix of story age/length (so you can't submit a story of 2 chapters and 200 words to get immediate cash), popularity (measured via the "voting" currency so you need to generate at least SOME genuine interest to become eligible) and dependability (a certain number of uploads a week / general scarcity of missing upload dates to encourage people to actually do the work the website and therefore subscribers pay them for).
Those limits shouldn't be draconic and really hard to get to - they'd be more of a doorstopper to stop clowns from trying to abuse the site and reap undue benefits rather than a weeding process. Especially the uploads per week / post date one would need to be lenient because a number of texts here depend on the original authors and can't really help it if the author is taking a week off (maybe there should be a system to "drop out" of the payments if a known hiatus has happened?).The resources a subscriber has access to should be limited, but not harshly limited. Meaning that you wouldn't want to give them only 1 vote because the subscriber might like 4 of the 10 hypotethical stories above and would then be forced to short-change 3 of them because he just doesn't have a way to split his "vote" or currency.
Free readers should also get a vastly smaller amount of said currency so that authors that draw in a lot of traffic also benefit even if for some reason they should not get a lot of premium user/subscriber interest (whales are good, but dolphins/regular fish are fine, too :P).
The currency/vote agency should be something other than spirit stones. Spirit stones should function like bits do in Twitch.tv - as a way for a user to show support and give the translator a little bit of a helping hand. A small tip of the hat or some coffee money, if you will.
Heck, you could even implement a top 3 spirit stone donator thing and some fancy icons or highlights for subscribers/top donators.
I think this would address all the issues, would reward premium authors/translators fairly, would have an avenue for the website itself to monetize and a way for devoted fans to show some extra support without short-changing people that don't have the money.
Numbers would ,of course, remain to be determined, additional benefits such as ad-free viewing or a discussion board with the authors/translators or access to fan art, etc. tt. could be added and all that good stuff.
There's no reason the numbers couldn't be adjusted if it turns out the subscription was too small, the minimum payment too generous or site upkeep more expensive, and so on.Would that be acceptable?