Please be assured that everything I write isn't against you as a person, but the entire thread just feels like a screaming child throwing a tantrum. You fear about traditional publishing, but you don't even have a finished manuscript. You worry about money and your audience, but you aren't willing to put in the time and effort to build one. Instead, it's "all the others" or "the circumstances" and that's it. I won't say anything against you as person because I think most writers had these thoughts at some point, but there is something I want to point out.
If you want to sell something, you have to put in the work first.
Right now it feels like those twitch streamers who buy a shitt camera, stream for 2 weeks without any concept or plan, never advertise or grow their audience, and stop because only 4 people found their random stream. It wasn't as easy as you thought it would be? Yeah, no shit.
Writing in itself is either a hobby or your job. If you want it to be a hobby, then it is normal to not get a monetary return. If you want to play the guitar, you buy one and you play. But people won't pay you for it. You play in your room because you like it and maybe to a few friends later, after you became good enough. But no, the time used was already paid through your own enjoyment. The same for writing: Write for your own enjoyment, because you want to. That in itself is already your payment.
Or you want to write to make some money. Then it is your job. Either your main one or one on the side. And then treat it like a job, do your daily work, train yourself to get better, do shitty stuff to keep your head over water, and improve yourself and your product.
In all honesty: You have written 10 chapters with 15k words. Your story is so damn short, the majority of readers won't even start reading it out of fear, it'll be dropped right away. Depending on the site, most readers won't even start without 50k or even 100k words and a constant release schedule. Leaving out your first day as new book here (which is mostly dominated by the name and cover, both of which are a bit more off the mainstream), you had maybe 4-5 hours on the frontpage with your story. Given that a lot of people only look through the top spots or use lists, your time where people would see your story and think about it, was probably more in the range of 1-2 hours combined.
Did you advertise your story? Went to writing groups or the discord? Marketed your story through either ads, your own blog, helpful postings in writer forums, appearances in podcasts or conventions, or whatever? Or did you just throw our your story and hope for the best? Did you spent time reading writing theory, marketing stuff, did you inform yourself about publishing?
Either it is a hobby for you that might make you some money at some point or it is something you want to make money from. But right now, it feels a bit like those teenagers who pick up the guitar, played for 4 weeks but didn't practice that much, covered a view songs and are now angry, because no one books them.
And now to stop my "counter rant", something more positive.
Then I just look into your story and you have a great rating but also people who actually comment and show interest. Man, you have 15k words and a review already. There are stories with 100 chapters who would kill for that activity. It already shows that there are some things that are working and stand out, so build up on that. Not having the standard tags hurts, you'll get less viewers and readers early on. But writing something that doesn't feel like the "mediocre everyday crap" often also gives you a more passionate readerbase and the potential for higher reader-growth later on.
But for that, you'll have to put in the work. You want your story to be special, then make it a special one.
It's early enough to cry when everything failed. But thinking about everything failure without putting in the hours is just "giving up"...
My advice is pretty simple, just go out there and fail. Fail over and over again until you want to cry. Then use the knowledge you gained from those failures as the foundation to your success.
I think this is one of the most important points.
A lot of online-readers start with really long stories for the typical webnovel-format. It's just that easier to build up a specific audience and sell it. But it's the complete opposite from traditional publishing who start of with a polished mostly self-contained first volume. For those who want to go into more traditional publishing, story structure and polishing is a lot more important than for webnovels, who often are selling "ideas" instead of the writing itself.
Imho writers who want to break into traditional publishing should go for short stories. Not only will they train story structure and polishing a lot faster through the higher output of different stories/setups-payoffs, but there are also a ton of contests especially for short stories which can earn one a lot of feedback and/or even a published story in a magazine or anthology...
