What if I put low effort illustration in my Webnovel

[Kamelingil]

Guys, I was thinking, why aren't there any webnovel with illustration on it even if it's too ugly? Is it because it's a waste of time or effort?

If I put a low effort art, enough to make the reader understand the setting, will it be good if I put illustrations in my webnovel?

 

[Hans.Trondheim]

Guys, I was thinking, why aren't there any webnovel with illustration on it even if it's too ugly? Is it because it's a waste of time or effort?

If I put a low effort art, enough to make the reader understand the setting, will it be good if I put illustrations in my webnovel?

Webnovel as in the site? We can't put illusts there in the middle of chapters.

If you are referring to your web novel, then you can. If you are looking for a similar novel with in-chapter illusts, you can look at mine for reference. Some readers don't like it (image in the middle of chapter), but I think they are just being nitpicky.

This is a part in one of my novels here:

 

[Not_A_Symphony]

I don't think it's a waste of time and effort although to make any type of illustrations it does take time. I guess most people either don't want to pay another to do those illustrations, can't find someone to do them on the price-point they request or simply don't know how to do them in the first place.
Of course, nowadays with generative AI you can do some "illustrations" for free but a lot of websites don't allow you to use AI material, plus if you try selling the book later on in big resellers like Amazon you may come across some copyrighted / legal issues (or so has my research told).
So, although doing illustrations for your chapters and stuff is good and super nice since it becomes super pretty, it is not for everyone (also I think that most readers really don't care that much for them as well, unless they are things that are actually incredibly related to the story like for eg: family trees, city maps, world maps, etc).

 

[ThrillingHuman]

I became a ghost in a horror game has atrocious illustrations but that adds to the vibe

 

[Puji-Maki]

Illustration is a plus, but I will still read the webnovel if it doesn't have illustrations.

I say go for it, readers appreciate it more if there are illustrations.

 

[Kamelingil]

Of course, nowadays with generative AI you can do some "illustrations" for free

I've used A.I. once and trust me, it goes terribly, too much misunderstandings, even with clear prompts, it still managed to mess everything up

 

[Terrate]

I literally just put rough sketches on mine, and my drawings aren't the best. Except for the celebration art one which was made by my best friend and is fully colored. So you're in the clear, lol.

 

[MarekSusicky]

Of course, nowadays with generative AI you can do some "illustrations" for free but a lot of websites don't allow you to use AI material, plus if you try selling the book later on in big resellers like Amazon you may come across some copyrighted / legal issues

Of course, if you are concerned about stealing artist work, use only those AI that have legally sourced datasets, such as LAION-5B dataset. (They are publicly accessable, so still might still be under copyright). IF you want 100% legal, you need to use like Google's open images dataset. Flux I recommend normally haven't posted where is their dataset from, so go instead for Stable diffusion (not 100% fine, but 99.999% fine)

I've used A.I. once and trust me, it goes terribly, too much misunderstandings, even with clear prompts, it still managed to mess everything up

I've tried exactly that, generated 2 images per chapter, sometimes more, sometimes less. This is what I did with midjourney in 2022: Death Timer In this chapter you can clearly see I struggled with the last image and it is not perfect.

As you can also see, it wasn't bad and in two years we had massive leap. If you are looking for AI image generator, I can recommend FLUX.1-dev.