Yeah, that's the thing there is shit ton of stories over the years of authors being fucked in china by the big novel publishers, and there are many novels whose translations I followed, only for them to get info like "novel got stopped because it got in trouble with censors" or some shit, so I was wondering what is the case... but then, some of the top novels on RR and SH right now also publish on webnovel, so is that still the case? It seems that over time more and more webnovels authors do also post on webnovel.com (Sanguine paradise for example)
One of the difficulties of the site, is that you are competing on it against shit ton of chinese novels translated to english as well, which does seem to increase the difficulty.
Also, their numbers are sus. Their most popular novels.. have 2/4x the number of views most popular novels on RR have, taking into consideration the comic thing, it seems pretty unlikely, if not impossible. The comment/rating ratio to chapters, seems to agree with my hypothesis of inflating numbers
Finally, let's go through some points of their ToS (
https://www.webnovel.com/terms_of_service )
Important things:
1. "you and Webnovel agree that every dispute arising in connection with these Terms will be resolved by binding arbitration" and " Any arbitration between you and Webnovel will be resolved by binding arbitration administered by the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (”
HKIAC”) under the Administrative Arbitration Rules of the Hong Kong" I'm not a lawyer , etc. but as far as I understand, this makes it impractical for pretty much anyone but the top top 1% of authors to fight them taking away your money if they would. Which they quite likely would. Small note here- it seems that in general the amount of cases about IP won by foreigners in chinese courts has increased in recent years, so that might be going for you.. but then there are cases where foreigno companies are just taken over and it takes courts 20 years to return them.. after they are not worth anything anymore.
2. According to their ToS, it seems (once again I'm not a lawyer) that they no longer take ownership of everything you have, just a licence to do what they want to do with your novel
"
Limited License Grant to Webnovel. By posting or publishing User Content, you grant Webnovel a worldwide and non-exclusive right and license (with the right to sublicense to Webnovel affiliates solely in connection with their provision of the Services) to host, store, transfer, display, perform, reproduce, transmit, broadcast, modify (which is made solely for the purpose of formatting for display), and distribute your User Content, in whole or in part, in any media formats only through our Services.
6.3Limited License Grant to Other Users. By posting or sharing User Content with other users of the Service, you grant those users a non-exclusive license to access and use that User Content as permitted by these Terms and the functionality of the Service."
All in all, I'm torn, from one side I do have a lot of bad impressions of their company from their old ways, from the other, it is a site that's about as popular as royalroad (though important thing to note- they also have comics, which as far as I understand are their main source of traffic (basing on top novels vs top comics about 75% to 25% split)
Actually, it seems that
@Kuropon is also releasing on webnovel, maybe you would like to share your experiences here with us? :P