WARNING for WRITERS: Ignore W*BN*VEL Invite E-Mails

[LordJoyde]

This makes me happy I was there to stop my little sister from falling for this predatory crap.

 

[SerikoLee]

That became normal when I reached rising author , good novel messaged me twice when I made the seraph series

 

[HugodeSantaCatarina]

I also post on their webnovel site.
I also received an official contract option in the dashboard.

At first, I was happy as well, but then I learned that you have to hand over the copyright of your novel.
Not to mention you have to atl least write 40k to 60k words every month depending on the package you choose.

Only in the first 3 months, they will give you a fixed 100-150 dollars + the amount readers spend.
After that, you are on your own.

After the 3 months period, the income depends on your readers, who unlock your episodes.
And only readers who actually use purchased power stones count as earning and not the free stones/coins.

On top of that, the webnovel takes about 50% of total income.

The writing quota should always be filled.
The writers affect their writing style and quality just by trying to keep up with quota, resulting in a bland novel that readers usually drop.

Also, they assign you an editor from a webnovel.

The editor also intervenes with your story and you have to change it according to him.
Like forcing you to include Harem or cliche pervert moments, etc even if you don't want to.

Also if you are novel does get popular and you don't heed the editor's demands, they actually snatch your novel and assign a new writer to continue your novel. You can't do anything about it.

The competition is tough, only if your novel manages to reach the top, will you get a lot of benefits.
There are like thousands of contracted authors but only the top 100 make decent earnings.

Not to mention the reader base of webnovels are the most toxic people.
My fellow friend that I met on webnovel's discord quit writing after her readers spammed 'harem' all in the comments and with 1-star reviews. Despite she was just a casual writer. The webnovel site moderators didn't help her coz she didn't make a contract.

Webnovel also doesn't allow writers to have bold, italic, table, etc features for their casual writer.
Only once you are contracted with them will they let you use those features.
This is surprising because I have never seen any other sites do this.

But generally female lead, romance genres is much more popular on their platform.
Despite all this there are some decent readers, as well, hence why I still upload their.

that sounds absolutely horrible. and it only confirms my suspicions and doubts when it comes to webnovel. it reminds me of a modern more corporate, dystopian, and predatory wave of pulp fiction. not the movie. the pulp novels of the sci-fi age. they'd put half naked women on the covers and publishers paid more for stories that had half naked women in the story. and also the more recent dollar store romances with the hot cowboy guys on the cover and stories.

internet fiction is good. its a genuine and diverse genre of creative and talented writers who've established themselves online. writers like CM Kosemen, Daniel Arenson, Rupi Kaur, and your very own Hugo de Santa Caterina and these people, these corporations are trying to dumb it all down. i want ya'll to not only see this as warning, but also as a prompt to value your writing and your legacy more. i see your fiction on your signatures here in this thread, and they're all fantastic works of literature. value that more! dont sell out. at least, dont sell out to people who don't value your work like you do.

That became normal when I reached rising author , good novel messaged me twice when I made the seraph series

did you take it?

 

[Paul_Tromba]

About a few years ago, I received a response to a call for submissions for some publishing company. They were interested in my book. A lot can happen in a year, and it took exactly the same amount time to realize that the composition and quality of my prose in that book wasn't exactly 'bestseller material'. Initially I was excited, but then I watered myself down like I always do. Even then, my self-loathing and general lack confidence in my work was what probably saved me from being scammed. I had long forgotten the name of that publisher and when I went to look for their email in my Gmail, I couldn't seem to find them. I think they might have deleted their initial message when i told them off. All I know for sure is is that I did some research into their business practice, I found testimonies from their authors about how they actually make their money. They charge processing, agent, and publishing fees up the ass, charging thousands from people who are desperate to be published after a thousand and one setbacks and rejections, a similar place to where I was a year ago and in the exact same position. I remember reading about a woman who was asked to pay upwards to 9k just to have the book out. I decline and provided the reasons as to why not even i would be stupid enough to fall for their bullshit, and so they probably deleted their initial email after getting called out.

I never thought this would happen again. I was at first excited when Webnovel invited me to be become one of their official writing partners, but then I did some digging. One of the the people here, SadTuna, was also invited by one of their scam artist editors but fortunately did the right thing and consult a forum of writers if the move would be right for them. Luckily, for them and all of us, they didn't go with it. And neither should you. Here's why. Webnovel offers both exclusive and non-exclusive contracts, and though I had yet to see a contract myself in the e-mail sent to me, I have read that authors who work with Webnovel have the same modus operandi with some rather predatory third-party web novel distribution companies, specifically EMP Entertainment. TL;DR-

-they can terminate your grant of right (which dictates who owns the intellectual property i.e, your book series) EMP can terminate that at any time but you can't. You leave when they say so.
-within this term of agreement which you cant get out of unless they say so, they can essentially copy paste your work anywhere else but you cant.
-they also have a perpetual claim to your work- when your contract ends, you must offer to sell your work to the company
-after you've signed with them and they've rightfully fuck you over, you're not allowed to tell anyone about it.

Read into more detail about it here.

I can understand the temptation to give in to something that promises recognition, money, notoriety, and a wider viewership- but at the end of the day, we all just want to be read and appreciated as writers. we as writers should really be thinking less about reads and likes, because a preoccupation with these analytics is how these scuzzball companies lure us in to these bad deals in the first place. We should all be more occupied on having fun while writing and improving the quality of our work. It doesn't matter if people think you're shit now, you can always improve. And sometimes, even if you've improved as much as you think you can, you often find yourself ignored, unsupported, unknown, and obscure. Don't think about that. Caramuru, the most important work in the Brazilian literatury canon, was written by Santa Rita Durao- who nearly burned it along with all his other works because of the harsh criticism by his contemporaries . Only Caramuru survived, and only a few decades after his death was both Caramuru and his literary genius acknowledge and appreciated. A more well-known example is Lovecraft, who's mastery of cosmic horror was not acknowledged and appreciated until decades after his death.

I'm not saying you're gonna be like these people- but if you wanna fighting chance at a legacy, these companies and their schemes aren't the answer. You're gonna be remembered by the blood and tears you've spilt over your works, which like invisible ink, won't show until much later. devote yourself to this madness. You owe it to yourself to write something that'll live long after you've gone.

Yeah, I've received around 5-6 of them in the past two years. After a small amount of research though I found that pretty much every one of them was a scam and denied or ignored them.

 

[Ai-chan]

Yeah, I remember the time I found a message like that when I logged in to Wattpad after a years of having left. The message isn't there anymore (I don't remember deleting it), but I copy-pasted it elsewhere:



I didn't bother saving the contact details, but I definitely found this suspicious at the time even without knowing anything about the scams or doing any digging on the subject. First of all, since this is on Wattpad, the message isn't about my magnum opus story, Micah Ever After, which has only ever been uploaded by me first on Royal Road, then to here after I left that site too.

The only story I have uploaded on Wattpad is an older one called Something With School in the Title. Setting aside the fact that its name wasn't mentioned once in the message, SWSitT itself is a super vulgar, badly written ecchi harem, and not at all something I'd imagine would earn me a contract with anyone. So with all of that in mind I ignored it and prayed such solicitations wouldn't track me down to a site like this one.

Ah, and I remember at the time considering posting that message here in the forums to see what people made of it, but I chickened out thinking that I'd get made fun of for making a big deal out of such an obvious scam

Spoiler: *ramble ramble ramble*

Anyway, I totally agree with your advice. It's better to write for yourself than to jump on a chance that seems too good to be true simply for the prospect of a quick boost in fame and income. I've been told a few times that MEA could have so many more views/readers/etc. than it has now, but I try not to concern myself with statistics like that and just focus on producing a quality of work I can feel satisfied with. In my extremely humble opinion, no amount of money is worth risking loss of control over your intellectual property. And I personally don't like the idea of selling my soul over to shady companies that will happily solicit you with a smile and a handshake while hiding a noose behind their backs with their other hand.

Regardless of if said companies even plan to use said nooses, it's awful, it's scary, and people deserve better than to have to grovel at the feet of such people in order to escape those contracts.

Ai-chan remembers someone named Anna recruiting Ai-chan on NUF a couple of years back. She didn't tell Ai-chan that she came from webnovel but the message was almost the same. It makes Ai-chan wonder if webnovel employs external agents to bamboozle people who have suspicions of webnovel because Ai-chan was very vocal about webnovel (and qidian) back then.

Ai-chan can't be bothered to dig through the pages upon pages of personal messages, but it's probably still there.

 

[Toripuru-S]

Just want to take the chance to say that webnovel statistics are incredibly and blatantly fake. When I first visited the site I wondered why they might bloat up the numbers since it doesn't really attract readers or anything, but now that I think about it, it's probably to lure in authors.

Lol .

If a questionable novel platform inflated my numbers for free, I would take advantage of that !

"Thanks for providing fake reader counts . It's good for that dopamine rush! ! Oh...sorry...no...I won't publish here exclusively ...do I still get to keep the fake readers? "

 

[Vicky]

Just want to take the chance to say that webnovel statistics are incredibly and blatantly fake. When I first visited the site I wondered why they might bloat up the numbers since it doesn't really attract readers or anything, but now that I think about it, it's probably to lure in authors.

The way they tabulate views is weird, in the sense that a single view might be counted as 4 or 5.

 

[Flashwolf96]

Ai-chan remembers someone named Anna recruiting Ai-chan on NUF a couple of years back. She didn't tell Ai-chan that she came from webnovel but the message was almost the same. It makes Ai-chan wonder if webnovel employs external agents to bamboozle people who have suspicions of webnovel because Ai-chan was very vocal about webnovel (and qidian) back then.

Ai-chan can't be bothered to dig through the pages upon pages of personal messages, but it's probably still there.

Well when you put it like that, "Anna" sounds more like a persona made up by Webnovel as a representative figure in order to better help lure people in.

As a side note to everyone else too, I just quickly Googled "webnovel anna" to see if I could find out more, and this thread was the first result:

contract offer - Webnovel.Forum

a will eternal, absolute choice, battle through the heavens, child of light, coiling dragon, desolate era, emperor s domination, gate of revelation, heavenly jewel change, i shall seal the heavens, legend of the dragon king, perfect world, rebirth of the thief, renegade immortal, skyfire avenue...

forum.webnovel.com

Feel free to skim it like I did if interested, but it seems like they just talk about not getting any email replies and generally wondering what's going on with Webnovel's editors before it eventually devolves into an argument towards the end and gets locked.

 

[HugodeSantaCatarina]

The way they tabulate views is weird, in the sense that a single view might be counted as 4 or 5.

that is fucking insane. for real?

 

[KiraMinoru]

The way they tabulate views is weird, in the sense that a single view might be counted as 4 or 5.

that is fucking insane. for real?

In reality the views are tabulated depending on the number of words in the chapter. If you open a chapter and it’s 1000 words you’ll get like 4-5 views counted. If it’s 2000, it’s 8-10. Something like that. Essentially they just have some base number. Literally the instant you move from one chapter to another it adds the views again. It’s actually quite easy to get 1 millions views because of this. Just have two really long chapters then have it switch between the two pages using a macro on your keyboard(you don’t even need to scroll down or anything). Or just have an auto refresher reload the page over and over again.

As for the messages sent out, they’re all just canned messages. Each person will usually have a generalized English sounding name. Their real name is something else entirely. It’s the equivalent to the scam calls you often get from India. In fact, I’m sure the model is probably identical. Each person they can get referred to the site, they probably make some chump change. So they’ll go around looking for any new authors and send that canned message regardless of whether the story is good or not. They wouldn’t even bother to read it. They’d just check the date it was posted or a profile to see when you joined.

They typically won’t bother with more seasoned authors who’ve been around for long enough because the success chances are low.

Honestly though, they could just automate the process with a script and wouldn’t even need to pay people to do the grunt work. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve already done so. Also in the solicitations messages, pretty sure the reason they put spaces between the characters of the platform name is to cover themselves from a legal standpoint to make a claim they’re unrelated.