Sooo, I'm a bit paranoid. Just to get that out there, I might actually be very paranoid. So I get anxious easily and when I posted my stories initially on WN, I had a few things happen that my paranoid brain deciphered very negatively.
For example: FanFictions can not be put on the market. I put up a FanFiction, in a category that wasn't well known, on a site that has barely any search function when it comes to fandoms, only uploaded a handful of chapters, but I still got views and all. My first Webnovel didn't do well, but it got views as well. I later started my current main project and it hit off a good amount of readers right away. I got a contract offer, which I denied, after just a few days. And from that moment onward, despite posting a chapter three times a week, I made what? 20 Views in a week at best? While the FF and the other WN, who had been on hiatus for MONTHS still made views.
That's when I got a bit irritated. It felt as if my story had stopped being "promoted" - as if it didn't show up on lists for updated stories or anything at all, as if new readers just couldn't find my story, though it was accessible through a direct link. Again, I know I'm paranoid, but it never changed the fact that it felt wrong.
Then I looked up the website and found more than one claim that if you didn't deny each and every contract, they might find a way to steal your work. Basically, they make it so that not denying means accepting by default. And it doesn't even matter if they like the story as you wrote it, because after accepting, as others have stated, they own your IP. I've heard many stories about exploited authors who, if they weren't fast enough with their schedule, were replaced as the authors of their own story. And for all of that effort, you are shittily paid as well.
Anyway, so I scrambled to get home that day, because you couldn't deny those contracts on your phone, which they knew, because it even said that the link you needed to got to in order to deny, could not be opened on a mobile device - which is also weird, because you can just "not accept" a contract, because it won't happen if you don't, so, really, why would you need to deny anyway? If it was because they then stop bugging you, I don't know why they sent me this contract shit every day from then on. Also interesting is the fact that MANY Webnovels, because that was the original way they were conceived, are written on mobile devices and also read on them. So why would they put something on there, that cannot be accessed by a mobile device, knowing most people in china, where they are sitting, don't even have real computers at home, because they lack the space for it?
Anyway, the last one I got before I decided this was creepy and stopped uploading there, I filled out at the additional comments with a nicely written "Just fuck off already" and deleted all the chapters.
A while before that, in an effort to reboot my first Webnovel, I found out that deleting books was somehow impossible on this site. Also, when deleting chapters, if I remember correctly, the deleted chapter moved from public to draft, from draft to the bin and then you had to delete it there again. If you missed a step, the chapter would still remain on the site.
But the kicker was: A few days later or so, when I decided to also take down the covers and titles of the empty husks that were once my books, I could not enter my dashboard any longer. So I still had my account, but I was cut off deliberately from the novel editing section. I would have understood, had they deleted all my works and my account for the fuck off, but had I not immediately removed my chapters, they would have cut me off of my own IP. They basically kept my stuff and threw me out without any notification. After all, my covers and even the blurbs were still there, which were also my work.
Well, that sums up my experience with Webnovel as well:
