Pros, cons, & audiences of every writing/webnovel site[a continual discussion]

[Representing_Tromba]

I think there's a new one called MoFic? It's sending authors invites to post on their site, with potential monetization. Haven't tried it, but I did check it out.

9/10 I suspect it to be like Wattpad in terms of reader preferences.

I will check it out.

 

[Hans.Trondheim]

I will check it out.

This one.

Coz google search will lead you to United Arab Emirate's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the Korean version of the site.

MOFIC

All doors to more stories await.

www.mofic.io

And this is their email to me.

 

[Representing_Tromba]

This one.

Coz google search will lead you to United Arab Emirate's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the Korean version of the site.

MOFIC

All doors to more stories await.

www.mofic.io

And this is their email to me.

View attachment 39788

I checked it out, and it seems pretty okay. The non-exclusivity contracts are pretty cool and the UI is pretty easy to use. The site has pretty much no natural viewers according to a site traffic checker I used which does seem odd but it is really new. You can't access the site on mobile as it says it is coming soon. However, the regular site is already up and is accepting stories. There is a contest that awards $70 to the second-place winner and $700 to 1st place.

BTW, love the gmail background!

 

[MarikoRawralton]

Sorry if my message is improperly formatted or something, I'm new to the site. This is literally my first post.

Anyway, I this MoFic thing reminds me of when WebNovel reached out to me on Wattpad back in the day asking for the rights to my story. They were doing it a lot back then, in the days before COVID. I reported it on the forums, back when those existed, and they were quickly banned and run off the site.

Personally, I stayed away for a few reasons: bad reputation, shady dealings in private messages, and the fact that my story straight up wasn't compatible with their site at the time. Stories were divided by gender and you could only use certain tags if your protagonist was male and my protag is female. Ended up just moving to Royal Road.

I'd look into who owns MoFic, but generally speaking, I'm just a bit hesitant of Asian sites for the same reasons. They tend to like stories of a certain type more than others, if that makes sense. I don't know if my story would even do well on those sites regardless.

 

[Representing_Tromba]

Sorry if my message is improperly formatted or something, I'm new to the site. This is literally my first post.

Anyway, I this MoFic thing reminds me of when WebNovel reached out to me on Wattpad back in the day asking for the rights to my story. They were doing it a lot back then, in the days before COVID. I reported it on the forums, back when those existed, and they were quickly banned and run off the site.

Personally, I stayed away for a few reasons: bad reputation, shady dealings in private messages, and the fact that my story straight up wasn't compatible with their site at the time. Stories were divided by gender and you could only use certain tags if your protagonist was male and my protag is female. Ended up just moving to Royal Road.

I'd look into who owns MoFic, but generally speaking, I'm just a bit hesitant of Asian sites for the same reasons. They tend to like stories of a certain type more than others, if that makes sense. I don't know if my story would even do well on those sites regardless.

Thank you for the information.

 

[Representing_Tromba]

I think Ritoria actually might be officially dead, as I cannot access the site at all. The servers are down and have been for a few days.

 

[Representing_Tromba]

Just updated with a BL Yoai danmei site I found called Volarereads. There are only 92 stories on the site that I can access. Not paying the $19 for full access.

 

[JayMark]

I think Ritoria actually might be officially dead, as I cannot access the site at all. The servers are down and have been for a few days.

Looks like Writoria is back.

 

[SwordSong]

I used to go on writing.com, and I think it's better suited for a writing practice workshop as for publishing platforms.

Pro: They have regular contests/prompts to hone your writing skills, and some of the senior members offer writing workshop with constructive feedback.
Cons: The layout don't really support multi-chapter series (each "chapter" has to be published separately). You can "group" them in a collection, but that feature is only available for paid members. Free accounts can only keep limited amount of stories on their profile, and if they surpass that number, the story gets locked/hidden. Also, the content is not accessible to guests, which severely limits readership.

 

[Representing_Tromba]

Breaking news! Tapas is considering removing their sub4sub category from their forums and discord because it breaks their ranking system and it is spammed so much that it makes up most of their forum and discord posts. Forum goers are divisive but mostly against sub4subs. The debate is whether they should be banned, limited, or whether it can be fixed.

 

[diqllo]

I want to produce a helpful comprehensive list of all the writing/webnovel/publishing sites and what each provide so I come asking for your knowledge. What are some of the pros, cons, audiences, popular genres, unpopular genres, communities, and scandals or unethical business practices that each site has. This can be from personal experiences to events that can be traced. If I don't have a site on this list, please let me know so I can add it. All additions are welcome as this is an incomplete list. I will also be putting this on other writing forums to get thoughts directly from the source.

What does each site offer best and what is so bad about it that you wish you never had to use it? What genre's do the readers enjoy and what genre's do they hate? Is the audience good, toxic, and/or something else? Are the communities helpful or are they gatekeeping? What business practices do you support and what do you hate or believe to be unethical? Have they done anything illegal? These are all questions I want to know before I put a story on a site so I figured this would help. It would also give an immediate source of where to publish their works.

Scribblehub:

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: promotes new stories, easy to use UI, friendly to new writers.
Cons: low moderation, lack of reader interactions.
Popular genre's: isekai, migration, smut, fantasy.
Unpopular genre's:
audiences: good but mostly lurkers.
community(forums & discord): very nice and helpful to new writers.
known scandals and/or business practices: unknown.

Royal Road:

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: large readerbase, active commenters, knows what they want.people will correct your grammar mistakes. can be great place to learn for beginners. Readers are more willing to pledge on patreon.
Cons: very high standards, knows what they want. No exposure without ads. anime stuffs, gender bender or sexual stuffs get review bombed to oblivion. Authors doing so many review swaps and shout out swap. be ready to receive a lot of hate. Little to no lewd writings.
Popular genre's: litrpg, transmigration, high fantasy.
Unpopular genre's: mostly anything else.
audiences: Very active.
community(forums & discord): 50/50 chance it is helpful or toxic.
known scandals and/or business practices: unknown.

Tapas:

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: Large readerbase, has comics too, basically Webnovel/Webtoon without any sketchy contract. Better chances for smaller stories to be featured in the community section.
Cons: mostly for comics. Tapas readers and non-Tapas licensed writers are very separate. small character limit for chapters.
Popular genre's: LGBTQ+(BL), fantasy, thriller/horror, romance
Unpopular genre's:
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community(forums & discord): Forums are very active but mostly writers and artists looking for subscribers. Discord is mostly readers and fairly nice,
known scandals and/or business practices:

Webnovel:

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: most popular reading site. copyrighted the entire medium, very well known. can make money immediately once contracted. good exposure and they will actively promote contracted stories. very nice readers, quite similar to SH. They also have low standard and they read anything. paragraph comment system that let you post memes
Cons: terrible contract deals, bots, fake interactions, stolen stories, no care for new stories. very limited exposure without contract. 2000 words per day minimum if you want to success there. Your story will also have to have hundreds of chapters.
Popular genre's: isekai, litrpg, fantasy, transmigration
Unpopular genre's:
audiences: bots and lurkers
community(forums & discord): poor and losing activity
known scandals and/or business practices: stealing/swindling the rights to peoples works, charging for unfinished stories, Chinese censorship

Ritoria(Possibly Dead Servers RIP):

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Pros: very good for romance
Cons: very bad UI, glitchy site
Popular genre's: romance, smut, supernatural, historical
Unpopular genre's: action, adventure
audiences: unknown
community(forums & discord): lots of discussion, very small
known scandals and/or business practices: unknown

Honeyfeed:

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Pros: Gentler site than Royal Road and Scribble Hub. Good for people seeking to heal their traumas from RR and SH.
Cons: Gatekeepers, more focused on weaboo style stories.
Popular Genres: Hachiman-style, kinda edgy, drama stories.
Unpopular Genres: Non-JPLN stories get less attention, though it can still get popular.
Audience: Global, though anime-focused. Will seek more JPLN-style stories than western ones.
Community: Some gatekeepers and elitists, but if you can look past beyond them, HF community can be helpful. Seriously serious though.
Known Scandals and/or business practices: Nothing of the sort.

Wattpad:

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Pros: Okay interface for stories. Established readership. Community isn't harsh.
Cons: Less features for editing. Baffling ranking system that seems completely random.
Popular genre's: Romance. Billionare Romance. Werewolf Romance. Vampire Romance.
Unpopular genre's: Everything That Isn't Romance.
audiences: Romance seekers.
community(forums & discord): No forum
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Fanfiction.net:

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Penana:

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Pro: easy to use UI.
Cons: if you write original, it will seldom gain traction.
Popular Genre: K-Pop fanfictions
Unpopular Genre: original stories
Audience: International, though mostly Southeast Asian and East Asians.
Community: pretty chill, though if you're lucky, you can encounter someone accusing you of stealing your own drawing because he saw it in a dream.
Known scandals and/or business practices:

Soyetsu:

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: Your gateway to JPLN market.
Cons: Catered to JP audience; gaijins not welcome. Site in JP, you'll hafta use Google Translate to navigate if you can't talk weeb. Site uses web hosting site called Mitemin.
Popular Genre: anything JP, but isekai, yes.
Unpopular Genre: anything non-JP
Audience: Japanese people, most can't read English.
Community: there are friendly JP peeps talking to gaijins like me, but it's seldom.
Known Scandals and/or business practices: they say it's the JP Wattpad, and I agree.

Pixiv:

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: more formatting optiona for a UI similar to Syosetu, can upload images mid-chapter without hosting site.
Cons: as an image-majority site, novels are a second priority. Also, author's notes are at the beginning of the chapter. Premium sub gives you option to schedule releases. system/editor is very barebones, and to add proper tags, you must know Japanese. Not good for newcomers.
Popular genres: whatever is popular in Syosetu coz yeah Pixiv is Syosetu with pics.
Unpopular genres: nothing comes to mind.
Audience: Japanese, though many can understand and converse in English.
Community: more JP readers for English works than Syosetu
Known scandal and/or business practices: Hentai of all sorts and depravity.

Infinite stories:

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Writing.com:

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AO3:

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Pros: No ConCrit Culture, Relaxed Content Rules, No Overbearing Moderation, No down votes.
Cons: Restriction on Original Works*, Fan-fiction focus, poor use of tags, no way to advertise your work. Monetization is banned on site!
Popular Genres: fan-fiction (with shipping and smut)
Unpopular: Original Works
Audience:
Community: No Forums. Only Reddit or Discord. No ConCrit Site Attitude. Occasional trolls and attempt at gatekeeping
known scandals and/or business practices: None / Monetization Banned
Remark (important): *) Original Works are restricted / not allowed on the AO3, which could be "bypassed" by considering your work "fannish" (by the moderator's own words) which means it couldn't be ever monetized and posted on AO3. Any attempt at monetization result in ban, links to patreon etc. not allowed. However, if you just post the story without any strings attached (no monetization, no advanced chapter patreon etc.) and declare it free and "fannish" (they love the word, it means writing for fandom) it's valid. Few people will moan about Reddit, but it is not strictly agains tthe rules.

Tumblr:

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Amazon Kindle:

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Barnes & Noble:

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Inkitt:

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Pros: great UI, you can upload your manuscript, and the site can automatically assign a chapter based on your chapter count. Wattpad-like simple UI.
Cons: can't upload pics, save for the cover. Limited formatting options.
Popular Genre: Ladies' Romance; novels with Alpha in the title, or with naked macho men in the cover.
Unpopular Genre: male-oriented works.
Audience: Ladies
Community:
Known scandals and/or business practices: nothing comes to mind.

Creative Novels:

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Moonquill:

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community(forums & discord): Royal Road sister site.
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Booknet.com:

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Spacebattles.com:

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Pros: Forum Based, Latest Post On Top, No Rating system or Active Competition,
Cons: Prudes, paranoid moderation, strict site rules. No mentions of sexuality allowed.
Popular genre's: Sci-fi and Fantasy, Fan-fiction
Unpopular genre's: None (Unless conflicting with rules)
audiences: Fan-fiction, power-fantasy, self-inserts, and all attempts to "fix" the story
community(forums & discord): Forum based. Accommodating unless conflicting with rules.
Known scandals and/or business practices: overbearing moderation. Political discussion argument spilling over to the entire forum result in random bans based on the words, or perceived political allegiances.

Questionable Questing:

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: Very active community, Forum based, easy to navigate, easy to create/edit chapters
Cons: Flooded with thread updates, overactive at times
Popular genre's: NSFW, Wyrm, Fanfiction, fantasy, sci-fi, historical fantasy
Unpopular genre's: Romance, slow burn,
audiences: Very active, talkative, interconnected
community(forums & discord): Just forums
known scandals and/or business practices: Some questionable threads(pun not intended)

Fictionpress:

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StoriesOnline:

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Pros:
Cons: erotica only
Popular genre's: erotica
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Sofurry:

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Pros: Furries. Good UI for posting novels, and passable text editor!
Cons: Furries. Less active than FurAffinity. Poor discoverability.
Popular genre's: Furry / Smut
Unpopular genre's: Non-Furry. Non-smut.
Audiences: Furry. Smut. Non-Smut stories are very rare, and get very minimal attention.
community(forums & discord): Furry. Have their own forums and discord, but considerably fewer members compared to FurAffinity.
known scandals and/or business practices: none.

Furaffinity:

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: Furries. All furry content welcomed. Visual / audio / etc. Strong AI aversion.
Cons: Furries. Short stories are common, but the UI is unfriendly for posting novels. They would either become an unformatted text, or could be uploaded as the PDF file. Better upload your novel as the single PDF file, as the site created with the visual art in mind doesn't comprehend the next chapter/previous chapter. Requires including artwork to get attention! Strong AI aversion.
Popular genre's: Furry. The short story - smut. All furry content welcomed, but you need to work around the UI for text.
Unpopular genre's: Non-Furry. Non-Smut.
Audiences: Furry.
Community (forums & discord): Furry. Main site for furry community, large community, active Discord.
Known scandals and/or business practices: None. Hacking attempt promptly resolved by active moderation.

Quotev:

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Chyoa:

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Pros: has branching chapter trees allowing for variants of chapters or 'split-offs' from the main story, also functionality for smooth merging again, and an optional game mode feature where choosing different chapters affects stats which can enable or disable later chapters. you need a hosting site, but you can embed pictures and gifs directly into the chapters
Cons: inbuilt search features range mostly from confusing to terrible, though recently updated stories do get bumped to the front page and usually stay there for several (5-ish) hours. there are some ai ad-equivalents, but they're not super intrusive
Popular genres: smut, power fantasy
Unpopular genres: anything without smut
Audiences: lots of lurkers, but there are some commenters.
community(forums & discord): unknown
known scandals and/or business practices: moderators seem pretty hands-off so long as you're not breaking any actual laws.

StoryForge:

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: No cover images, no AI, good editing software, easy to use UI
Cons: Lurker community, No cover images, very closed community, pay to progress
Popular genre's: Short stories, fantasy, romance, Sci-fi, Historical fiction, Noir,
Unpopular genre's: Smut, Fanfiction, Cultivation, Isekai, regression
audiences: Near non-existent
community(forums & discord): Community groups that require joining and act like forums. Discord is unknown.
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Substack:

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Medium.com:

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Reddit Serials:

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SufficientVelocity:

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Pros: Forum Based, Latest Post On Top, No Rating system or Active Competition
Cons: Spacebattles sister site (!!!). All the issues of the Spacebattles in different colours, strict content rules.
Popular genre's: Sci-fi and Fantasy, Fan-fiction
Unpopular genre's: Harem or Anything Conflicting with rules.
audiences: Same as the Spacebattles, sharing a lot of users.
community(forums & discord): Forum based. Active discussion on site.
known scandals and/or business practices: Spacebattles Sister Site. The forum identity is heavily based on the fact they were split from the Spacebattles over pointless disagreement, inheriting all the same issues, and even though it is largely pointless conflict between two identical twins with different hair dye, you need to know because everything revolves around it.

WebkomPH

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: UI similar to ScribbleHub.
Cons: Website sucks, overall. You can't even reorder the chapters you already released.
Popular Genre: Romance and action
Unpopular stories: preachy stories (with moral lessons and similar)
Audience: Filipinos
Community: if you can get along with us, Flips, then you're all good. Though, at times, there are crazies who compete against you for no reason.
Known scandals: occasional favoritism.

Belletristica

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: nice, simple UI
Cons: German-language, hard to get traction if you're writing English-language novel.
Popular Genre: haven't got to navigate that site much coz it is in German.
Unpopular genre: similar to my answer above
Audience: Germans
Community: it's in German, but it seems like a lively site if you can speak and understand German.
Known Scandals: possibly shutting down and changing names.

Booklat

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: dead.
Cons: dead.
Popular Genre: Romance
Unpopular genre: action, male-oriented stuff
Community: dead.
Known scandals: dead.

DeviantArt

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Fox-Teller

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Neovel

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Booksie

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Pros: Decent UI. Link directly to Amazon if you have books for sale there. New readers get a lot of interest. You can join "Houses" of like-minded people to help your book find its audience.
Cons: Requires time to build relationships, which is cool, but might take time you don't have.
Popular genre's: A wide range, including poetry.
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community(forums & discord): Within "Houses"
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Campfire Writing

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: Pretty. Browser, and Desktop and mobile apps. Can monetise or offer free. Can be free to use just to publish (upload completed ebook).
Cons: Expensive if you choose to buy all the modules for the behind-the-scenes stuff, but regularly do 20% off sales. Max of 25000 words posted without paying for a premium account.
Popular genre's: Fantasy, SciFi
Unpopular genre's: no NSFW, but not totally prudish.
audiences: Fairly small, broad, growing
community(forums & discord): Discord
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Yoru (https://app.yoru.world/en)

Spoiler: Stats

Pros: Allows you to offer stories as "Pay what you want", Free, or Premium; and accept "donations". I love that flexibility. Mobile apps.
Cons: Actively under development by a very small team, so not running totally smoothly, yet. Currently not working great on desktop browser without a login, and some other bugs still getting ironed out.
Popular genre's: Fantasy, SciFi, Girl love
Unpopular genre's: no NSFW, but not totally prudish.
audiences: Fairly small, Probably mostly women? English and Japanese speakers
community(forums & discord): Discord
known scandals and/or business practices: Too new. All good, so far

Adult-fanfiction.com https://www.adult-fanfiction.org/html-index.php

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Scribophile

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Known Aggregators:
these are sites that no one should publish their story on because they steal other peoples works. Use this list to see if anyone is stealing your work.

Spoiler: Aggregator List

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We are offering free books online read! Read novel updated daily: light novel translations, web novel, chinese novel, english Novel, japanese novel and korean novel online.

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I think I'll try yoru on all the platforms available. I wanted to try AO3, but since it's for fanfiction and not original stories, I don't think it's for me. I think isekai power-up harem litrpg stories are quite popular, even though I don't specifically write that genre in any of my stories. I'll give it a try.

 

[Maelstrom556]

Not sure how much this helps, and it is just one person's opinion, but DeviantArt is in a bad way. Sure, the actual literature posting/editing UI is actually pretty good, but the problem is with the community. For one, the site does focus more on visual art than literature, so that's already an issue there. It's only gotten so much more barren as they started to alienate a lot of creators by pushing the very things so many hate: NFTs and gen-AI. The AI in particular was super scummy, too, because when it was first introduced, the "Don't use this for AI training" option was off by default. It wasn't until much later (presumably after they scraped enough) that it became turned on by default. Since so many people have jumped ship and the literature community already wasn't that big, most of the major literature groups have been inactive for years. The few people still posting literature there will submit to groups and it just gets pushed through to group followers automatically, with group mods being inactive.

That's not the whole of it, though. A recent story I posted there did get a few comments that seemed to be some really nice engagement, but upon further inspection they had all the signs and formatting of gen-AI bot comments. It even looked like they fed my story into an AI for "analysis" and prompted it to praise and ask a question to trick me into engaging with it. And it worked for a little while because I was so ecstatic to actually have positive comments that I was blind to the signs. Dead Internet Theory isn't just a Twitter/Facebook thing.

Again, this is just my experience. Someone else may have an entirely different experience from me.

 

[JayMark]

Not sure how much this helps, and it is just one person's opinion, but DeviantArt is in a bad way. Sure, the actual literature posting/editing UI is actually pretty good, but the problem is with the community. For one, the site does focus more on visual art than literature, so that's already an issue there. It's only gotten so much more barren as they started to alienate a lot of creators by pushing the very things so many hate: NFTs and gen-AI. The AI in particular was super scummy, too, because when it was first introduced, the "Don't use this for AI training" option was off by default. It wasn't until much later (presumably after they scraped enough) that it became turned on by default. Since so many people have jumped ship and the literature community already wasn't that big, most of the major literature groups have been inactive for years. The few people still posting literature there will submit to groups and it just gets pushed through to group followers automatically, with group mods being inactive.

That's not the whole of it, though. A recent story I posted there did get a few comments that seemed to be some really nice engagement, but upon further inspection they had all the signs and formatting of gen-AI bot comments. It even looked like they fed my story into an AI for "analysis" and prompted it to praise and ask a question to trick me into engaging with it. And it worked for a little while because I was so ecstatic to actually have positive comments that I was blind to the signs. Dead Internet Theory isn't just a Twitter/Facebook thing.

Again, this is just my experience. Someone else may have an entirely different experience from me.

I can pretty much confirm your experience. DA was never much of a place for writers even at its peak.