Killing intent editionStubbed >>25219325>What is /wng/ — Web Novel General?A general for readers and authors involved or interested in the growing phenomenon of 'web novels', serialized English fiction posted to websites such as: Royal Road, Webnovel, Scribblehub, Wattpad, Archive of Our Own, Spacebattles, HFY, various personal author websites, and more>Why read web novels?Not for prose or tight editing or deep themes, frankly. As a whole, web novels are infamous for content sprawl and pacing issues. If you enjoy having millions of words to sink your teeth into to get to know the world and characters, though, you may be interested. Keeping up with other readers on a weekly basis to discuss the story's events unfolding is another perk, in the same way discussing an ongoing TV show might be.>Why write web novels?Ease of access & potential for Patreon earnings. Many successful authors gain an audience on their website of choice and funnel their readers into a Patreon. See graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing for an idea of what some are earning.Also, once an author has earned a fanbase, transitioning into an Amazon self-publishing career is several orders of magnitude easier than starting 'dry'.>/wng/ authors.https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSNZali-jIk2MASsAWVf8N7A8BlSyzPbAFV_BhsA5Ip3SWfMPWKxaXf8Pdb7f0TgFyWis31BzirtPeR/pubhtml>Advice for Noobs!##READ THE FOLLOWING BEFORE ASKING FOR HELP##Running your story like the business it is:www.royalroad.com/forums/thread/116847On writing web serials:alexanderwales.com/how-to-write-a-web-serial/Sanderson's Writing Lectures 2025:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEUh_y1IFZY&list=PLSH_xM-KC3ZvzkfVo_Dls0B5GiE2oMcLY Recommended web novelsrentry.co/d2yvczroAnon's guide to successrentry.co/RRBasicGuideFAQrentry.co/pytefpxn
read Clara Casewell, Attorney to the Villainess by cocopi it's peak
read Reverend Insanity, its peak
>>25226315>fmc no, buy an ad
>>25226310>acting like it's some introspective and emotional piece of literary realismwho are you talking to? counterpoint: worm was to the fmc-schizo’s claim that women/fmc can’t aurafarm. no one is saying it’s some masterpiece
>>25226319it has two cute, young women though.
>>25226326no yuri or cunny, otome shit, no one is reading this garbage fuck off foid
>>25226329>yuri>cunny>otome>foidspeak english
>>25226315i might but i've been really busy, haven't even gotten to write this week
>>25226332lurk more foid, advertising your shitty otome isekai here will do nothing, i’ll just do a drive by 1 star
>>25226324that was a post in reply to >worm is emotional drivel
>>25226338ok, why did you think emotional drivel means >introspective and emotional piece of literary realism
>>25226335why are you acting exactly like "foids" do?
>>25226342the way i am acting is informed by personal research into basic female psychology. you on the other hand are a simping beta male looking for female approval so you have to act like fmc and drivel written by female authors is good, while i don’t care and can speak my mind about it.read RI
>>25226329>no cunny
>>25226340because emotional writing in any other context is praise you'd give literary work. femc seether is 14 at best, stop standing up for his childish logic
>>25226360You need to be over 18 to post here.
>>25226316Is that the one weird chinese fetish story where a guy turns dudes into women so he can lust over them without feeling gay?
>>25226315I can't imagine anything more repulsive than lawyers.
>>25226386Objection! She is a cute maid.
yaoi?
>>25226407gay
>>25226132I see it more in manga than I do in the source LNs/WNs (because reading MTL-slop is fucking exhausting), but I begin to tire of the second-wave trope invocation that comes when things like isekai become mainstream. Characters will be isekai'd and immediately invoke "this is just like one of my light novels!" or their inevitable [Analyze] skill is met with a "ah, as expected of an isekai." I can't decide if I dislike that worse than the attempted subversion, where their cries of [Status] or whatever serve only to demonstrate that this is a gritty story without such spurious game-like elements. I read so much slop that it blurs together and I'll admit I can't invoke any hard examples, though.>Recent Dropped Slop>Hospital Dungeon, by Cascodia (Rising Stars)Read through the first book, or about 25 chapters. I have a soft spot for these kinds of stories that really make an effort to establish a somewhat alien viewpoint (War Queen, my unfinished beloved...), and I think it mostly succeeds here. The first few chapters are a bit extremely alien to the point of being skimbait, though. The curmudgeonly guild inspector Elias is fun, but the setup of the rest of the cast can feel a bit contrived and bizarre. The final act of the first book is... soporific, which I suppose is intended by the "soft" solution to an existential threat to the dungeon, but does not make for thrilling reading. I might circle back around to this later.>Built to Last, by WerfutRead about ten main chapters, plus 5 or so 0.5 vignette chapters. Since I wasn't quite familiar with the signs at first, I read more than I probably should, but this is either supremely unedited from a story structure perspective or wildly disorganized AI writing. I had originally thought that these flaws somewhat contributed to the premise, before they became annoying and then ultimately aggravating. Despite being a "crafting" story, it's ultimately a story about institutions, knowledge, and transmission rather than the more typical "build OP weapon as an excuse to be OP" power fantasy. More Fushi no Kami, less Arifureta. I enjoyed its exploration of cultivator timescales: what shape does a household take when the head of the household is 400 years old, will live to 1000, and the servants live anywhere from 80 to 250 years depending on their cultivation? To accomplish its goals, what desire paths form as administrative blood vessels? In this way the repetition of the prose begins to sit heavily like the stones of the castle, and we tread and retread over the same material in the same way that the lives of the household are repetitive on the scale of decades. But there are only so many times I can read that yes, he's the 17th prince and nobody expects anything of him and yes, the servant's 60 years of knowledge managing the larder will vanish when they retire because nobody bothered to write it down.
>>25226411this second order irony you talk about is one of the things I detest most about japanese LNs. don't get me wrong, I've read a good few of them and enjoyed them, but they belong to a very insulated ecosystem that's built up some dumb culture. it's comparable to marvel quipping and third wall breaking awareness but I find it so much more grating. makes me wonder if the old "just like my japanese animes" meme roots into some sort of story telling convention>dungeon core story on rising starsI don't even look at rising stars these days because of how consistently garbage it is. I'd have missed this one if not for your review. thanks review-anon
I think The Elf Who Would Become A Dragon sucks. There's a dozen chapters where literally nothing happens for every one interesting chapter
>>25225799Can you write a childhood-friends-to-lovers story, where you introduce the characters when they're young without any implication of romantic interest, then have the relationship blossom once they're both clearly adults? Or do they not even want to take any chances with that?
Mecha-bros, we're so back
>>25226409maybe for a moid like you
>>25226411Built to Last just sounds like a worse version of Mirror Legacy
>>25226451We talk webnovels here. 41 chapters isn't a story, it's a prologue. Wake me once there's some actual content.
>>25226411I've seen it to. It's annoying as shit, yeah. The real question is, how do we advance to third-order irony? Should we advance at all?
>>25226451>"The Ice Princess is going to break some rules for a change? Ohhh the humanity~." Alexei performed, causing a chuckle to escape my lips.Please tell me this character gets splattered all over a cockpit. I cannot stand this shit.
>>25226308>bread baker who only posts AI generated wizardscover art of random sloppa was soulful
>>25226494>cover art of random sloppa was soulfulI'm that baker, I'm not baking as much since the bread hits page 10 when I'm sleeping/going to sleep or in college
>>25224661>try reading The Young Lady is a Reborn Assassin by DWS.Nice rec, thanks. It's dumb fun, at least. Though the characters are all over the place and weirdly inconsistent.
>>25226451>>25226486>get a bad grade that means you'll be sent to the penal legions>dad tells you they can find some way of dodging the draft, he still loves you>no I want to die fuck you dadwow ok this protagonist is genuinely retarded
>His Soul Is Marching On to Another World; or, the John Brown Isekai>premise is John Brown is inciting an isekai civil war to free the stereotypical catgirl sex slavesfunny and absurdI like this comedy set up if "real life figure gets isekai'd"seems like people joke about it all the time but never actually write it
>>25226602>funny and absurd>I like this comedy setup99 out of a 100 comedy novels aren't funny. Authors use comedy tag to justify their complete lack of writing skill (their stories are "quirky" and "funny" because they are incapable of writing a serious story of even the lowest quality).
>>25226602>inciting an isekai civil war to free the stereotypical catgirl sex slavesExactly what part about that trash seems "funny" to you?
>>25226624I don't know. I've read a lot of edgy grimdark shit and it doesn't impress me. At least with comedy the author isn't trying to impress me.
>>25226624It's about variety. The same joke told again and again for the length of a novel is gonna suck.
>>25226630>typical genre convention turned on its head because serious historical figure got isekai'd it's silly and ridiculous. idk what to tell you>>25226624true and I take a comedy tag on any story that doesn't have a comedic premise to indicate dogshit garbage, but I can enjoy some silliness if that's the primary intentionquirk chungus self referential ironic millennial humour is repugnant, and as prevalent as it is, that isn't the only kind of humour out there
>>25226671You mean,>typical genre convention done 1:1 except with a (le quirky element X) that actually changes nothing because the author has no imagination
w-what are gu..?
>>25226775I hate feeding the annoying spammer, but I actually read my first novel that has gu in them. So now I actually know.Sky Pride is clearly westernized cultivation but that's probably why it's readable. Do recommend. It's the #1 rated on ongoing for a reason, I have found out
>>25226778>cultivationshan'tthe greco roman one seemed conceptually cooler. why is that western cultivation story less popular?
>>25226778Your tolerance for political babble and found family slice of life bullshit is clearly higher than mine.
>>25226778>cultivation on RROk, what's the catch?
>>25226778I tried it once and faced a longass list of disembodied dialogue without a line of prose in sight and closed the tab immediately.
>>25226783>why is that western cultivation story less popular?I mean, it's an eastern genre, lol. Of course it's less popular to be westernized. It's not that uncommon, two of the biggest stories on the site are western xianxia (sky pride and BOC)>>25226784>political babblenay>found family slice of life bullshityay!>>25226790What >>25226784 said desu, the former is tolerable and the latter is why i like it>>25226797Yeah actually I agree, he doesn't use enough action beats and dialogue tags.
Do people care about slop-generated item and ability names in LitRPG? Or will they accuse the entire story of being AI generated if they feel that the flavour names/tags are churned out by a machine?
>>25226887>tagged as AI generatedno one would care>untaggedreview bombed and your village burned down
>>25226887#3 on RS is clear AIslop and people love it. If you put even a bit of effort into prooompting, no one cares
>>25226887based on my readership, the people reading web novels are bored dudes that either want power fantasies, harems but without the label to avoid being branded a coomer aka shippers, or are closet AGPs. they'll consume it as long as there is a modiCUM of effort.if you start it controversial but tone it down for a while ala Goblin Slayer, even all the more enticing for the taboo without the actual taboo part (the rape is implied or only the aftermath is shown and never really shown in medias res). people love to virtue signal but will devour taboo shit in closed doors or in low brightness screens.if you can't write a familiar story (isekai/overlord/cultivation/tower/academy slop), a striking scene early on in the story matters so much (look Frieren ch1) in reaching an audience that they'll chase that high for dozens, if not hundreds of chapters just to get a scene like that again. dont reuse that story structure for a while in order to not feel repetitive or redundant. it's more or less a safety net in writing quality for readers that you can write KINO that they'll be sold on you as long as you're consistent.
0.5
>>25226940>ask about slopified item/ability names>get a guide on how to sneak implicit rape into my story...did you mean to reply to my post?
>>25226443and it has an fmc, you are retarded for reading it in the first place when you could have spent that time reading peak
>>25226962complete non-sequiturs that go on digressive tirades are a staple of /wng/ignore them
>>25226887I'm not sure how you can even make rpg item and skill names NOT sound like slop, lol. [Empowered Strike] or [Quickdraw] or [Wolfbane Dagger] etc will be as commonly created by a human as by an AI.It's sloppy and generic by nature, unless you're doing something especially unique with it. And even then you can proooompt an AI to be unique too
bros can ai like write an ending to RI if i feed it the entire novel. also how can i do that it doesnt fit in the text box
>>25226962I'd reference old wizardry games for an easy copy. you'd be surprised with how simple naming should be for convenience.
>>25226986It could if all the current models weren't neutered like they are now. Give it to some popular AI and it will instantly kill off Fang Yuan and bring about some they lived happily ever after gynocentric ending.
>>25226970I don't care whether the main character is male or female. My favorite royalroad stories all have a female MCThe Elf Who Would Become A Dragon is just boring. Nothing happens. And I know it's "slice of life" and nothing is to be expected, but usually something interesting happens even in slice of life stories, whether it be the characters, setting, or whatever. There's nothing that pulls you in here. The MC is always the smartest person in the room, at fucking 14, while there are elves who are hundreds, if not thousands, of years old who are schooled by her for some reason. It also feels like I'm having the author's opinions shoved down my throat whenever something is explained in the novel, like about religion, or humans. Additionally it reads like some teenage drama. Why am I supposed to care about whatever is going on with the MC's mom? The MC is a total asshole and doesn't talk to anyone about anything. The whole thing would work a lot better with a first person perspective if I'm being honest
>>25226220Hey buddy, /wg/ is two doors downWe buy ads on RR here
>>25226986Use RAG.Basically make a Claude project, you can upload files.It probably won't let you upload all of RI without forking over gross money though
here's your prologue brohow would you turn this into a webnovel?
>>25227091>They don'Dropped.
>>25227091The prose feels like it's making fun of Sanderson's style like in that goodreads review meme. But written worse and not funny
I'm having fun writing my chapter today!Today's battery acid flavor: Alani Nu's Pumpkin Cream flavored energy drink, 200mg.Flavor: 1/10. It's bad! And I've still got twenty more cans of this slop to get through...Writing dialogue and conversations is so fun and easy. Word count goes brrr...
>>25227158holy based fun haverunfortunately i am too retarded to write anything i find funto improve my writing ability or to become more easily amused... hmm
>>25227091Terrible. Was it generated by AI?
>>25227158post the thing you enjoyed writing the most from today's session (quality not included. this is the slop thread)
>>25227167The main character and some side characters teasing each other and being friends, mainly. It's gonna be such a gut punch when plot happens later, lol.I don't post excerpts here, anymore.The fun part is that I've spent a fair bit of time setting up everyone's motivations and interests prior to this so now I can let some dominoes fall as a natural consequence of all that and just let it be a spectacle even as it sets up future developments.
>>25227225>I don't post excerpts here, anymore.excel schizo, the killer of cultureconvincing character dynamics are so strong. makes plot developments so much more impactfulganbatte anon
>>25227158I'm about ready to start mine.Got a box of Celsius drink mixes at my Sam's Club. Dragonfruit Lime: 2/10. The lime ruins a perfectly good flavor. Lots of twang.Berry: 6/10. It's the most middle of the road flavor you could think of. Strawberry Mango: 8/10. Pretty good. Hard to go wrong with this.
How do you come up with ideas?
>>25227283>t.
>>25227283By reading and then stealing (with a fresh coat of painting to not be blatant)It's why you have to read a shitton to write good stories.
>>25227286What this anon said but I also mix in some of my own experiences and traumas. Just a dash, though, so as not to over-season the tropes.
>>25226451Read Universe on Fire. It's unfinished but has several books and is written by a webnovelist.
>>25227283thinkit's called thinkingyou have to think anon
>>25227283Here's my process:>1. read dozens of bad webnovels>2. realize I can do it better or it'd have been cooler with X or without Y>3. write out a summary and vague outlines of a plot to carry me through book 1 at least>4. ???>5. profit
>>25227309oh my god i just threw up in my mouth a littleplease, anything but... THAT
>>25227283Ideas are cheap and endless. It's how to make them actually work in writing that's the hard part
>novel advertises itself as having an average protagonist with no cheats>look inside>protagonist immediately gets a giant windfall of resources that invalidates the whole average thingI thought I was guilty of this by having my protagonist start after the big decade-long training arc but holy FUCK
>>25227336And so the cheat was on you.
>>25227336Being rich isn't technically a cheat.
>>25227384sure but getting a disciple with SS/SSS dual special constitutions of ancient dragon and divine bones IS bullshiteven more bullshit than the Green Bottle or Heaven-Defying Bead, which are both acknowledged as golden fingers, so this is also a gold finger
>>25227384Yes it is, how else would you define a cheat? It's anything that gives an unfair advantage to the protag. There's an arguable threshold but being rich clears it in most settings
Has any writer from here actually gotten popular on any platform and earned some $?
>>25227414Define popular.
>>25227414Yes
>>25227444
>>25227414Why are you asking? Why do you care?
>>25227283Mostly from weird dreams I have. I can usually pick out one or two core character or world concepts and run pretty far with it.
>>25227414trailer trash
>>25227476Is it the same guy who always says this? It has to be64 has not posted in /wng/ a singular time. I only remember him posting in /wg/ like twice, too, over years. So he barely qualifies as a regular even thereThe real answer is Akaso. He actually posts here
Is it a big turn off to introduce a handful of terms that the reader wouldn't know in the first chapter? Although, it'll be explained later on in the story but not too later? Would that also be a hook for the reader though as it would make them curious for those terms? Writing the start is so difficult for me anons...
>>25227478it might beit's definitely the first thing that comes to mind >akasopopular is quite a stretch
>>25227481It's neither a good nor bad thing. Some people will like it, some won't. Totally depends on execution so you would have to post an excerpt
>>25227486>popular is quite a stretchI agree but I don't think there's anyone who actually links their work who is biggerPlus to some people, a couple thousand followers easily qualifies as popular
>>25227472because I’ve seen people ask for advice a lot here and if no one here has “made it” then it feels like the wrong place to ask Trailer Trash is pretty popular tho so there’s at least one guy
>>25227481you should make some effort to contextualise it so that the reader can have a stab at guessing what it is or what it means, e.g if you're describing some mcguffin that exists in the material world, give some sense of shape or size of it, whether it can fit in a pocket or has to be loaded into a cargo bay, then the reader can find out what the mcguffin represents later
>>25227490fair and reasonable
maybe there are some big shots here but don’t link their stories you never know. what if the RI schizo is the RI author?
>>25227491>because I’ve seen people ask for advice a lot here and if no one here has “made it” then it feels like the wrong place to askEven if there were several people here who had made it, this is still the wrong place to ask for advice as a beginner.It's a maybe-sorta-okay place to ask for advice if you're fairly experienced and can filter out the tards and noise, but at that point, you don't need advice, you need discussions to churn through so you can get outside perspectives. at least on writing topics. If you're here to learn how a site works or get a vague idea of the meta, you can maybe learn a few things if you ask and the right anons are here (they usually aren't). but you'd be better off just sorting by popular and looking yourself anywayThis place is more for chatting, not serious craft improvement
>>25227491seeing as many popular authors who've "made it" go on to write second stories that nobody gives a shit about, it's not really a great space to suck off authority figuresthere's extra credence given to success stories but all I've seen that doesn't sound like self aggrandizing BS is the typical stuff>have a backlog>shill>buy ads>network and review swap/shoutswap>write to marketwith writing to market being the most indefinite since you can't pin down any definite rules since anything can be falsified with an equally popular counter example, and the trend cycle in the sphere is relatively fast. new things pop up out of nowhere a few times a yearbroad thing is to write something fun and entertaining. power fantasies, feel good slice of life, cool magic systemswriting well helps but writing well is a complex topic that no one has solved
>>25227500craft discussion can be pretty good herethere's only like 3 posters who can effectively engage with it, but when they do it's quite quality
>>25227509I use to do a lot of prose dissection but the excerpts have really, really dried up sadly
If I ever make it, I promise I will credit /wng/ to my success. I promise it to you all.
>>25227513listen to big bro anon and don't do that. Not worth the heartache. You WILL get a schizo who makes it his life mission to haunt you. Tell us anonymously and we will be proud of you anonymously.
>>25227512I also like tisming out over prose and excerpts from time to time I understand why people don't post their writing anymore but that doesn't alleviate the lossthe friendly and mutually uplifting spirit of productivity... gone like slop down the trough...
>>25227512I would've been happy to share some of mine but the allusions to this spreadsheet schizo and review bombing have kind of turned me off of the idea
>>25227523If you ever drop an idea and have leftover prose that'll never see the light of day, you should post it just so we can chat I supposeBut yeah spreadsheet schizo was proof of concept of why you should stay anonymous
>>25227523>review bombingthe only instance this has happened with was FFF and he made it policy to live by "no publicity is bad publicity" and spammed his shit constantly while being as belligerent and attention as possiblelots of stories have been posted with no sign of review bombingthe more likely reaction is honestly silent disinterest
Though, yeah, I suppose 64 publicly associated in /wg/ a few times and I don't think he ever really got backlash. Then again how would we know? Unless someone has checked through all his comments and has access to his dms and emails and rating history, he very well might've.The odds go up the more you post, too. I really only saw him a few times total
>>25227526I'm not FFF-guy and I also got review bombed. The bad rating disappeared right after I opened a ticket about it, but before the moderator responded, so I guess the bomber backed off or got banned for an unrelated reason.
>>25227529>after I opened a ticket about itWhat exactly did you report? Did you report them for not getting through the first chapter or did you tell them that you posted it on 4chan?
>>25227529damn...
>>25227532I reported them bragging about it around the same time the rating appeared.But as I said, the rating vanished before moderators could even get involved. The mod actually went "wait, there's no recent bad ratings on this", and that's how I found the rating had vanished.
>>25227532NTA, but if you're a smaller story you can basically report any 0.5 and have it removed from what I've heard.If you're bigger then they'll actually investigate and see if the account was suspicious (carpet bombing 0.5s, only read chapter 1 for 8 seconds, etc)
>>25227536>I reported them bragging about it around the same time the rating appeared.so if you ever received another low rating, you can just make a post in this thread saying "just rated this piece of shit slop [however many stars]" and the mods will remove it? kek
>>25227525>If you ever drop an idea and have leftover prose that'll never see the light of daydropped this story like 5 years ago. maybe elements of it will get dusted off and reused eventually but I'm not hopefulhere are some character descriptions. always felt good about this sequence. I think it holds up decently
>>25227542If you were a ticket-abusing shitass sure, but at the same time you can abuse a lot of things this way. I've eaten bad ratings in the past without issue, I only try to get them removed when it's really, really blatantly malicious like someone who brags about bombing me, or a rating that pops up on ch1 right after I had an argument with someone.
>>25227496It's crazy how other novels of Gu Zhen Ren are kind of garbage.
>>25227538Strictly speaking it shouldn't be this way, but at the same time I understand why it is this way. A single thoughtless bad rating can do a lot of damage to a smaller fic.
>>25227564it's probably really hard to be into it when your magnum opus was banned by the government
>>25227567I'm honestly shocked he hasn't burned his life to kill Dead Wife Demon Venerable for getting RI banned.
>>25227545I agree, that reads very smoothly. The comments I would have would be mostly flow adjustments or clarity that probably don't even matter in web novelsLike how>Everyone knew that... but a more contentious subject was who they'd rather fight.'who' doesn't map perfectly cleanly to 'everyone', so you'd probably want to structure it like>Anyone would say Molar was the stronger of the two, but a more contentious subject was who they'd rather fight.Because then 'anyone' means 'a hypothetical but singular person' and links stronger to that same hypothetical individual that 'who' references, if you get what i'm sayingYou also missed an oxford comma in there, for example, which created a speed bump. Other VERY minor gripes or just ways I'd tweak it to flow betterThis is easily matching the typical high-performing royalroad fare, though. It's hard to have much to say about worksmanlike prose being done well, not to discredit worksmanlike prose - it's hard to make something smooth and easy to read
If I was going to spend time trying to hurt someone's rating because they pissed me off, I'd do it in a way that couldn't get removed. I'd create an alt with a vpn location on, make it seem legit by reading other people's works first and reviewing those positively, then go to the fic I want to bomb. I'd read enough of it to make an informed negative review and make sure not to leave any comments. Wouldn't go for one star because that'd be obvious. I'd probably go 3 or 2.5 stars and try to look as objective as possible, maybe even acting a bit sympathetic.
>>25227545I'm a little retarded, do you ever feel concerned when you're writing lengthier descriptions like this that the reader will find it difficult to locate the temporal gap between the two remarks made by the characters being described? Like from the size of the paragraph alone, it might insinuate that there's quite a lengthy pause between "Looks like..." and "Mm.", even though you're just describing appearances, and not actions or anything that would advance time within the scene. Is this retarded? Am I retarded for thinking this is a worry? Can you spend a whole page describing something that should be understood to only last a brief second?
>>25227588I've seen authors who go off on absurd pages-long tangents in between lines of dialogue supposedly happening without large pauses. It's not necessarily a good thing but it happens even in the very top tier most popular web novels, so...
>>25227575I get what you mean. thinking about it, unclear antecedents are one of the trickier line level things for a writer to catch, but is usually caught by second eyesI agree that quality of prose is at best a tertiary concern for slopping, but I find as a reader that I really appreciate strong phrases. for general narration I'm sorta take it or leave it in the webnovels I read, but a striking phrase of vivid imagery or evocative sensation can really elevate a scene and pull me in>>25227588nah, I think it's a valid concern. it probably depends on a few factors. tension, pace of the preceding passages/scene, the density and complexity of information within the interrupted dialogue/action/whateverhere for example >"Looks like [...]>"Mm."is a dialogue exchange with no subtext or information to be retained, so nothing is being asked of the reader's ability to hold this exchange in suspension during the interjection of descriptionpersonally I wouldn't worry about it too much. seems like the sort of thing any decent beta reader would catch immediately
Gave Vermis a shot on the basis of its cover art.Writing is the most reddit shit I've ever read. Shame.
>>25227603saw this while scrolling the horror tag, liked the cover, looked at the blurb and saw>his body is full of hungry bone-white worms that like to come out and play. Did I mention they talk? Because yeah, they talk.and immediately dismissed it
>>25227610I usually look past the blurb. God knows I'm guilty of redditifying my own blurb to draw reders in.
>>25227564>>25227567It's going to get way worse because of some CCP legal reforms regarding culture and the upcoming Dalai Lama thing.All the China-origin Xianxia stories worth reading have already been written, there is a point of no return where all the best works will come from outside China.
>>25227617>there is a point of no return where all the best works will come from outside China.So a repeat of when the west radically outpaces them in applying gunpowder?Also what reforms?It's weird how they have been gaining soft power but it's constantly being undercut in various ways from the inside.
>>25227617>All the China-origin Xianxia stories worth reading have already been written, there is a point of no return where all the best works will come from outside China.How does that make sense?
>>25226783Virtuous Sons is conceptually cool but I found it to be a difficult, dry read. Partially because it needs to spend so much time justifying and explaining the twist on genre conventions/xianxia philosophy, and partially because the characters are a bit insufferable. It just didn't hook me.Speaking of Greco-Roman stuff, shout out to Kairos, one of Voidherald's finished works, which was a Greco-Roman LitRPG that I thought did a good job with its integration of the system into the character's lives.
>>25227625Sort of, they had no control over getting mogged in the realm of gunpoweder. This is them shooting themselves in the foot.>>25227626They are going to get neutered and regulated into a lame cuck form of the genre. While everyone outside of their control will be free to write whatever they like and advance the genre in the same way RI did.
>>25227632>While everyone outside of their control will be free to write whatever they like and advance the genre in the same way RI did.RI would be banned on Royal Road too, so not really
>>25227626NTA but sometimes cultural movements really do outgrow their origins.Think of how the Musical outgrew Europe or how Goa Trance is now predominantly Israeli.
>>25227636Sure but he seems to be implying that it's guaranteed to happen, not that it could happen
>>25227639Well yeah that's true I was doing that but that's kind of just normal 4chan hyperbolism.The tightening of creative freedom is extremely likely to happen (and its only ever gone in that direction) and in that kind of environment creative output will be likely to suffer.RI getting fucked wasn't actually because of Dead Wife Demon Venerable, he's just a scapegoat. They were already doing reforms at the time.
>>25227283Fucking around with AI image until I have a sick as fuck cover and wanna build an entire plot around it
>point of no return where all the best works will come from outside China.Already came and went
>>25226310>worn is practically a revenge fantasy No its not. what are you even talking about?Taylor never actually gets to take revenge on any of her bullies
>>25227680she definitely takes revenge - by outgrowing and aurafarming them. it's highlighted in the narrative, with Sophia even having a pov freaking out about it. Taylor just doesn't stab them in the neck lmaonot that I agree that it's a revenge fantasy, that's a bizarre claim. it's a sideplot at best
le mao
>>25227774This is mild as far as slop titles go tbdesu
>>25227774>not reborn in High School DxDlame
>>25227776the part that got me was the jump from naruto to armament haki
>>25227774Wouldn't this count as fanfiction?
>>25227837Yes?Am I reading into your question by assuming you think that fanfiction is banned on RR? It's very much allowed, there are multiple fanfics on the best rated page
>>25227848>He's unaware
>>25227867I guess I am? What is it
>>25227837fanfiction is allowed on RR, there's a tag for it
>>25227848>>25227875Aren't there laws about making money with fanfiction?
>>25227880First, not every story on RR is making money. It's just a site you upload fiction to, dude.Second, to answer the question, it's a very murky gray area. I could name multiple long-running authors making fuckloads of money on their patreon with fanfiction.The gray area comes from whether advanced chapters really count as making money OFF the fiction itself. You certainly can't sell the chapter as a book on amazon, but advance preview, especially when it's framed as a benefit to a donation? Very murky. People get away with it en masse, it's not established law.
>>25227891>my HP fanfic got 4.5 stars on DLP>I could be making money off it all this timeEnd me.
>>25227901It's less common to be a big patreon name in the fanfic community but I went and checked an account I know who does it, and yeah, about 20k a month. There's money in it.
>>25227904>about 20k a monthfucking hell
>>25227907It's an extremely popular author. I know what the DLP forums are but 4.5 stars doesn't mean much of anything. Readers matter, not rating. Are you one of the very biggest authors there? The author I'm talking about probably is
>>25227910No, I'm not. You're right of course, and I'll cope thinking if I had tried to do it I wouldn't have made any money anyway.
>>25227904That's like the top 2-3 earnersA bunch make around 1-2k and there's a few at 4k. Then the huge gap to top.1k as a thirdie means you can quit your job though and focus all your time on writing or whatever you want.
>>25227915Top-heavy skew is true for non-fanfic too, and all art and all patreon pages and all crowd-funded earning in generalWas it just a comment or were you making a point? (not being rude, just wondering)
>>25227880>Aren't there laws about making money with fanfiction?If you get sued/want to go to print, you can just file off all the serial numbers. 50 Shades is probably the most famous example of that being a Twilight fanfic.
>>25227919I was just injecting realism so the other anon doesn't feel too bad.
>>25227926Ah, yeah. Well, it sounds like he didn't have many readers to begin with so it wasn't a lost opportunity.
>>25226315did that today. it's alright.
>>25227921Not contradicting - but it's a rare fanfic that can actually file off the serial numbers. The majority are deeply intertwined with existing lore, world, characters, and whatnotIt's only the essentially AU-fics (like 50 shades) that can be filed off like that. 50 shades is obviously not based in the Twilight world with the classic Twilight characters. It was original fiction using existing names, so it's easy to clean up. NOT the standard case
>>25227891You can get away with it using the Seras method.Publish on RR but don't link the Patreon
>>25227947>don't link the Patreonyou CANT link, I think. if you tag as a fanfic RR blocks you from linking a patreonBut yeah, I've never heard of someone being taken down for advance chapters of a fanfic. I don't really see that changing either. It's such small fry money in the grand scheme of things. Only the most outrageously litigious companies would MAYBE come for you, so just avoid, idk, nintendo and disney and that's itBut even then Pokemon fics do fine so even nintendo doesn't give a shit, and they're the most infamously litigious company in the entire world
>>25227596>>25227588>>25227545You could simply split different subjects into their own paragraphs. It's easier to retain information or to skim the text that way.
>fanfictionI know some stories are immensely popular enough and big enough following where the author could easily make money off of it. I also thought Patreon doesn't allow fanfics on their platform. But I notice a lot of authors who write fanfics still have it on their Patreon.Unless you link it through Google Docs or some other sharing platform?
>>25227874you get banned on this board for discussing fanfiction
kek it literally did the meme
>>25228029We aren't discussing fanfiction. We're discussing writing fanfiction, which is enormously different.
>>25228015What? As you see yourself, patreon clearly allows authors who write fanfic>link it through google docswhat the hell are you even saying anon? how does google docs come into this?
>>25228040>What? As you see yourself, patreon clearly allows authors who write fanficIt does? I know some small time authros got their Patreon taken down because of fanfiction on their page.>what the hell are you even saying anon? how does google docs come into this?I mean by linking their story on Google Docs platform and sharing the link through their Patreon page.
>>25228031the walls between the regions aren't physical walls like that, they're semi-porous energy fields that get harder to go through the stronger you are
>>25228048>It does? I know some small time authros got their Patreon taken down because of fanfiction on their page.I wonder how these massive, years-long pages that make more money than doctors survive, then, when they're blatantly writing only fanfic and advertising such>I mean by linking their story on Google Docs platform and sharing the link through their Patreon page.this took a second to parse, but I think you're not saying that the funnel is not docs->patreon but rather circumventing the rule by linking Docs ON the patreon release postAnd no, that's not what these big pages do. you're just mistaken somehow
>>25228058this better?
>>25228089is this AI
>>25227901>4.5 on DLPNot bad. Those guys are picky. Why not write your own webnovels?
>>25228094Yeah it's flipbook.page
>>25228098fascinating
>>25228089Thousand year ginseng replaced by thousand year white licorice, as expected of the Young Master.
>>25228098We are reaching slop levels previously not thought possible
>>25228271huhI'd say this generator is good enough that it can be usable as the starting point for a settingof course for randomgenning actual maps you want to use something like Azgaar'shttps://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/
>>25227880There are laws against making money off of drawings of copyrighted characters too but that has never stopped anyone.
/wg/-anon here. I don't often use webnovel platforms, but when I do, it's to promote my own work. What do you think a good release schedule is for a serialization of my KDP novel on Royal Road? It's about 82K words long. I'd want to release it about 2000 words at a time.Weekly? Biweekly? Thoughts appreciated
>>25228337This is different for a couple reasons.-It's more expensive to sue than the damages awarded.-Suing an independent artist is bad optics, it makes you look like a bully and stingy.-It's almost never in your interest to remove the art work, as their art of your character exposes your brand to new potential customers. Thus is free advertizing.The only point at which it becomes worthwhile is from a market replacement standpoint.If I draw you a commission of a copyrighted character, and its $50. It was a one time thing. A copyright lawsuit could probably get $2,500 and $150 from treble damages.Now if I took that art, put it on a t-shirt, and sold 1000 t-shirts. Then they are a market replacement. I could get $2,500, a licensing fee, a potential trademark infringement, and three times the sales of the shirts. 20 dollars a piece is like $60,000.>tl;dr - Don't sell a product containing a copyrighted character a bunch of times. Books do that.
>>25228441People never read the release guides.Let me sum it up for you.>dump 10 chapters at once, so that you hit the 20k word minimum for rising stars.>1 chapter per day for 1 week>1 chapter ever other day after thatWeekly? No lol, that's slow as fuck for RR.
>>25228442It's not different at all. Literally the exact same law.The problem is that there's no incentive to enforce it other than spite. You don't gain anything for doing so (obviously no one's going to pay you shit for damages and you won't be able to force them to) yet you have to pay your lawyers to carry out the process.So it happens so rarely that it's not worth worrying about at all, just go ahead and stick it to the man with your monetized fanworks.
>>25228458I didn't say it was a different law.I explained two situations and how they were enforced differently.I'm pretty sure we agree, other than not fucking yourself over by writing a fanfic and selling it for cash.
>>25228441Read my guide>Anon's guide to success>rentry.co/RRBasicGuideReleasing a trad fantasy book is really tricky, but I would still try to aim for Rising Stars because you'll get infinitely more traffic there than anything else per dollar/hour/effort spentIf you have cash to spare, buy RR ads and really try hard to get onto Rising Stars, following standard release procedures (burst launch, then 1-2x a day).Spreading them out over a long time doesn't have much point.
>>25228449>the release guidesThe "Running your story" guide is egregiously prolix and says to "do review swaps," so I haven't read too many of those, no.
>>25228479I don't agree with everything DOTF author says, and it's growing a bit outdated at this point, but a lot of what he says is solid foundationally
>>25228478Also, the sooner a fiction is marked as complete, the sooner people are actually likely to read it (for trad fantasy anyway).Too bad I'll never have this luxury seeing as I'm putting all of the volumes under a single RR fiction.
>>25228478>(Use AI for the cover if you can't afford a proper cover.)stopped there, thanks anyway I guess
>>25228494I understand the visceral distaste but it's also just realityThe third less feasible option is learning how to make an excellent cover yourself. What isn't viable is having a shitty cover
>>25228449After the initial bulk upload, from what I've seen recently most on RS are going 1 release a day for 1 month, then 3 - 4 a week after that.
>>25228496I see people say all the time say, I'd rather see a shitty handmade cover than an AI generated one. Then I make a handmade cover, and they say that I should just AI generate a cover.
>>25228503It's almost like those were completely different people.
>>25228503Sample bias. People posting about covers in online spaces are the very tiny minority who care about real art being on the coverGo scroll Rising Stars. Almost 100% ai covers.
I'd like to see some successful non-AI covers that weren't made by an artist.
>>25228525Super Supportive maybe? I cant say what is and isnt made by an artist but that one is simple
rate my new cover
>>25228554the thumbnail works surprisingly well lmao
>>25228554Why the fuck can I tell what this is?
>>25228568certified kino
>>25228554If you write anon, your covers should look like this
>>25228500Slowing releases while on RS is a suicide move, because it also cuts your views/engagement rate, which gets you booted out of the list faster. It's the most important time of your whole run, you have to step on the gas instead of braking.
>>25228613if i’m bursting with 10 chapters, then 1 chapter a day thereafter (if i get on rising stars), how many chapters would i realistically have to stockpile in order to justify a patreon?
>>25228441No one cares about some short turd
>>25228615I would recommend a starting backlog of some 50-60 chapters. One guy here will say you should have a patreon open as soon as you start, but I'd tell you to wait until the end of the first month. If you have 200+ followers after 30 days, you're going on RS almost certainly, and should get the milking engine booted up then. You're not losing any numbers that matter before then. It's still possible to hit RS after that too, but the probability goes sharply down. You shouldn't offer all your backlog to advance readers but always maintain some buffer if you really need to take a break, so adjust based on your speed.It's hard to estimate how long you'll have to keep blasting if you get on the list. If both you and your audience are active, you can stay in the top 50 even 2-3 months, and that means a lot of work. But if two months pass after launch and you're still sitting at 400 followers or less, and aren't on any lists, then you got the "no win" ticket and can do whatever you want, it doesn't matter anymore.
>>25228615Some patreons go ahead 2 chapters, some 10, some 50. Some have different tiers with different amounts.You'll want a month of backlog, ahead of how many chapters forward. So I'd suggest at least 40.
>>25228616Nah hes actually doing it the smart way.If he's not successful who cares, finish the upload, mark complete and dump to amazon and start the next story.If it gets traction on RR then he start writing book 2 of the same story.
>>25228760I repeat, no one cares about some short turd. It's meaningless to speculate about it getting "successful" because standalone novels don't get traction. It'll be too late to start writing a sequel when the run is finished. You'll only block himself from KU revenue by posting outside amazon at all. Believe me, I've actually done this myself. It was never worth it.
>dump to amazonYou need an editor, has to be formatted like an actual book. Also have to pay a real artist for a cover. It's not as simple as just booting everything that doesn't take off on RR to self-pub otherwise everyone would do it.
>this is gonna be in bookstoreshappy for him honestly. real jealous. I might snag a copy because I was interested in one from the get-go
>>25226335I would like to read Anon's web novels, though I am afraid this will get co-opted by redditors at some point
>>25228783I need Vivi to have a hot lesbian threesome with Saffra and Ember.
>>25228770the quality of amazon is really not higher than RRin fact it's arguably much lower
do not read The Greatest Archmage To Have Ever Lived by Prismo101 it's shit
>>25228796This is why I order author's copies and sell them by hand.
>>25228800nice ad author-kun, now I'll read it to be a contrarian and give it 5 stars!
>>25228800What did you expect?
>>25228783Retard signed away a massive chunk of his earnings for nothing lmao. The sharks eat even the biggest of goys like snacks
>>25228894what else should I read?
>>25228899my fic!
>>25228908okay i will :)
>>25228908Gonna post it?
>>25228944FFF-rank Unfucky Abtagonist
>>25228914enjoy :)>>25228944here you go,[This link has been removed to protect the author]
Weekly Chapter ReviewPale Lights (patreon) : So are we NOW in the final arc of the book? It feels like more and more things are pilling up for things to go wrong for the Thirteenth. 8/10Years of the Apocalypse (patreon) : Yeah , I'm loving these chapters. And oh shit , go Calen! 9/10100 Reigns (patreon) : Chill reign started. Lot's of bitching by edgelord fans in comments. 7/10Player 0.4 : How do you show you are not cheating? By cheating the proof test of course! 7/10Apocalypse Reborn : Eh ,the story is kinda static the past month. 5/10Attorney to the Villainess : Aside from the "here is some worldbuilding outside the story" , the story seems to be picking up. 6/10The Looping Moronmagus : oh shit , actual character progress! Slow releases though. 8/10
>>25228999your """reviews""" are SHITFUCK OFF
>>25229004Hey my man , missed you! Where have you been?Also , fuck you too
I wonder why I can't seem to break through the 2k words per day barrier. I don't feel mentally exhausted anymore like I used to, but it's still like I just plain can't think of anything to write as soon as I hit that magic number.
>>25228897>massive chunk of his earnings>print rights>the year is 2026I would be surprised if it's even 2% of his earnings, unless it blows up in bookstores and then who cares about the poor multi millionaire lmao
>>25228999How do you keep track of so many storiesI max out at 2 before I start forgetting wtf is happening
So the meta is to write a never ending story that goes on forever to keep the milk ranch up?
>>25229009the magic of habit building!
>>25229021The length of the story doesn't matter because your story lives or dies long before it reaches even 50k words.
>>25229026Yeah but if it lives it's not the idea to keep to keep pumping them out to keep people hooked?
>>25229030Sure, but in the west most forever patreons live off of giant hiatuses instead of content.
>>25229032Giant hiatuses crater patreon pages by 70-90%
>>25228796How could you argue it's lower?
>>25229053Because there is way more trash on Amazon.
>>25229059By quantity? I guess. Not by percent
>>25229071wrong
>>25229083It's impossible to prove but I think you're insane for thinking otherwise. The bar for entry is so much higher on Amazon (create a proper epub, link tax info and bank account) where you can just post shit to RR as a 12 year old with a gmail account.Why would RR have higher quality writing on average than Amazon? That simply makes no sense at all
>>2522908712 year olds write some of the most fire stuff though.
>>25229088They write soulfully, but not good
>>25229087because there's a much more overt profit incentive on amazonseriously, amazon is full of absolute garbage. especially as amazon has a culture of mass releasing short books as part 1 of a series and then following up on whichever is successfulamazon is god awful
>>25229094I don't think you've ever tried clicking through new releases on RR and seen just how gibberish and awful the average RR story is. AI has changed that a bit (since the average story is just fully AI gen slop now), but it used it be very funny to click through random RR stories and see genuine schizobabble 7/10 times.Amazon doesn't have that issue. The fact you have to be a grown adult that links tax info, etc, is a massive barrier of entry that results in much higher average quality. Amazon also doesn't ALLOW stuff that's too low quality (too many typos, bad formatting, etc). I can see how a profit incentive would result in less care toward a story than a hobbyist-love incentive... but RR is pretty profit-driven too these days, quite a lot of people are just using it as a jumppad to then go to amazon. So it's not that big of a difference.Personally, I wholeheartedly disagree with you, but it's also not something that matters at all
>>25229099I get where you're coming from but I've slopped as an erotica writer on amazon and what I've seen is that it's an absolute dogshit sphereI haven't perused as a writer so maybe it's not as bad as my understanding would make it seem, but I'm rather convinced it's awful>new releasesa good point. there's an ocean of 0-10 view stories on RR which weighs it but I wouldn't take that into account because it's more background noise than anything relevant to most people's reader experience
>>25229025But I'm kind of retarded and often I end up using the same words over and over again and repeating the same actions and stuff. I'm not clever enough to write lots of interesting words that describe distinct and interesting things.
>>25229103>I haven't perused as a writerreader*shidd :DD
>>25229103>here's an ocean of 0-10 view stories on RR which weighs it but I wouldn't take that into account because it's more background noise than anything relevant to most people's reader experienceHonestly that's what I thought we were talking about. The genuine average story. We're talking about the average midlister on amazon vs royalroad? The average reader experience?
The thing with the ai-gen stories is they all follow trends like Archmage or whatever the fotm is.None of them ever bring anything new to the table so that's the vector you should pursue (while still staying inside the lines of litrpg or progression or whatever)
>>25229114The trick to ai-gen is to not use it like a writer. It is much better to slop yourself a really shitty paragraph and ask it to fix it than prompt "write 700 words of an anime fight with laser swords."
>>25229119That only works if you're an ungifted beginner. If you can actually write, the slop engine just makes everything worse.
>>25229109that seems the most relevant lens yeah. you're right form a purely statistics driven viewpoint that the median story is worse on RR for the reasons you've pointed out when you're looking to either read or upload, you're not comparing yourself against the statistically average story weighed by massive success cases or an ocean of 0 view abandoned fics
>>25229119I wouldn't even use it for that.It's still going to apply the ai tone to the writing when it fixes your work just like all those ai voice overs on tiktok sound like Morgan Freemans long lost nephew. Even though we like to view the readers as cattle they still have enough intelligence to catch on.
>>25229012Who the fuck buys print rights in 2026 anyway? They wouldn't settle for anything less but full rights to all media, else why bother bidding at all?
>>25229125Hm, well, at least in the slice of Amazon relevant to Progfantasy/other RR fare, the fact that the pipeline goes RR->Amazon and not the other way around would seem to indicate that the midlister stories there are higher quality than their counterpart, no? The most successful ones get published and thus edited in the process. The less-successful ones don't hit Amazon at all
>>25228999Why would a man constantly brag about paying to eat shit? Nice trips btw
>>25229134>Who the fuck buys print rights in 2026 anyway?Indie publishers, apparently. You can click on MLA's ebook page and see that it's not owned by Aethon. The publisher field doesn't exist which means it went through the Author's KDP.He also confirmed in The Order that it's print only, and that he's self-pubbing both ebook and audio.It's probably not a common deal, but then again, it WAS the biggest hit of 2025 by like a factor of three.
>>25229140Well, incredibly dumb of aethon, but good for the author, I guess.
>>25229144Dumb of Aethon? How so? They have print rights to the most explosive RR story ever, right as LitRPG is entering the mainstream via DCCWorst case scenario, they only make a small profit. It would blow my mind if they go negative somehow. Though I guess that depends on whatever the advance was
>>25229136assumes that there's a necessary success/quality relation which I don't think is true (though quality certainly helps). I've noticed both ass and low popularity stories stub for amazon. that logical basis also doesn't account for writers who publish straight to amazon, which forms most of my opinion. again, I'm biased by erotica, but I think the average person drawn to writing slop for amazon is writing dull drivelit's hard to say without doing some autistic data analysis personally as an RR reader I feel like my reader experience is pretty good. I stumble on new shit that I enjoy all the time. there's definitely some time wasting on duds that I end up droppingI'd be curious if anyone is actually reading lots of slop off amazon who could weigh in on the distinctions between the RR/amazon culture and standards
>>25229146because nobody reads print. Maybe 5% of the fans are passionate enough to get a copy. It'll probably cost an arm and a leg and they'll barely make their investment back. Should've gotten audiobook at least, that's where the real money is these days
>>25229157Niche shit like that just gets printed on demand these days.
>>25229157Maybe so. I think both of us don't know enough about the numbers and the publishing industry to know for sure.>Should've gotten audiobook at leastDude, I'm sure every single publisher in the scene was scrambling for MLA's audio rights as fast as they could. I can't imagine what some of the advances offered were. It's not a big jump of logic to assume he knows better and said fuck that, then went self-pub to keep all the money for himself.It certainly couldn't have been a lack of trying on publishers' parts>>25229159No, it's getting an actual print run and going into Barnes and Nobles and such. That's the whole point of the Aethon Vault project, going into retail print
>>25229159Did you look at the specs of the release? You don't do foil-stamping and other customizations on demand. Shit takes work, is expensive as fuck, and printers will only do it in batches of several hundreds to thousands. Considering the steep fall-off rate of print buyers per volume, aethon will very likely end up in the red with this.
>he underestimates the power of the archmage trendyou're witnessing the birth of the next sanderson and you're laughing?
>>25229172That's funny. I guess it depends on how many they print in their batches, and whether it blows up on Amazon or not. Which it very well might not, the markets aren't the sameEither way, author made out like a bandit. Going into bookstores with a fancy print edition while keeping all profits on both ebook and audio which are the major sources. And he released mid last year on a brand new pen name. Sheesh