News About Qidian International Project

Well, other than Volare regarding Gourmet Food Supplier, have any other translators or sites made similar announcements or revealed that they have been approached by Qidian's "join or else"?

 

unless you hear it from translators itself, nobody will reveal it.

Reason(s) being? Each translator groups have spesific deals, which means very spesific moolahs, that are priced differently. WW has a different deal, other groups have different deal, etc.

Nobody's going to post it out here, because
1) somebody will hijack it (for lower pay)
2) somebody will demand higher pay (because some other translators are given better treatment, etc)
3) its most likely written in the agreement clause.

Of course, with certain knowledge of these, certain groups will definitely use that to their advantage. Already we're seeing novels being "ninja-ed" because the groups that are already working with Qidian have come to their own conclusions via deductions on what or how to use that knowledge to solely benefit themselves, no matter how unscrupulous it is.


Inb4 somebody uses this "ninja-writing" and use it as a story device (or an entire new story altogether).

 

Their will eventually be a way for them to earn, as they too have to pay the translator and also the original authors and will need some of it for themselves too, but they have stated it won't be pay for view, like original qidian but be donations or patreon system something similar.

 

Yeaaaa..... and then you go ahead and support "ninja"-ing of translations and choose NovelSaga over TranslationNations.....

Can't help but doubt the "standard".

 

When will be seeing these chapters show up in Novel Updates feeds? Personally, I'm excited about this change. It means a much more stable translation community, and a legal one too. I'm also pretty sure they'll stick by their word on making it free-- as long as whales support them properly, they can afford to take the free-to-play model from games. The only problem is that the NU feeds haven't started showing this group for me-- maybe I have the wrong books on my reading list?

Anyhow, as a copyright holder they're totally within their right to say 'release with us or not at all'. In fact, they're being really cool about it-- translators who can afford to buy their licence are able to get it. You don't know how nice that is, from a legal standpoint and in comparison to other... less scrupulous brands. Cough, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The only other copyright holder I know of that is this friendly to fan creations that make money is Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek).

 

Qidian international is already on NU.

Their releases are being manually added however, as they do not have RSS feeds set up on their site yet.

 

Oh! I hope they get that resolved soon. Being a low-ranking disciple of the F5 sect, I can only afford to refresh my reading list constantly.

 

Is Nuwa (the animated series in the middle) a novel of Qidian?

Anyways, I'm happy to see you try to get into the market with less friction, as all sides can benefit from it. I'm confident you can establish yourselves because you already have your own experience and many good examples like Wuxiaworld and GravityTales (for both dealing with the community and its needs and getting revenue).

Is there any way to register to the site? The reader looks nice. I wonder if/where the comments for chapters will be placed. Also wondering what sponsor/donate options will be available.

Cheers.

 

I still think donations are the best way to make money from such novels, because in the end only the people that can afford will spend money.
Let's say it will become "pay to read", then only someone who can afford it permanently will stay. But if everyone can read it, then regular joes that can donate only once in a while, by rotation, will still contribute to the business when they can.

 

The problem with donations is that they're completely unpredictable. You can't set a salary (or in Qidian International's case, a certain payment per chapter) when you have no idea how much money you're going to be getting. There might be slow months where the amount gained in donations isn't enough to live on, or there might be certain months where loads of money comes in. For an independent translator this is great, but on QI it might mean that the translator is still getting their set rate whilst QI's profit margin increases hugely for that month.

When it's pay to read, you might know that you have 10,000 consistent readers, and last month you gained 100, and the month before that you gained 120. With stable data like that, you can make cash flow forecasts and plans for the future. Donations alone are just too inconsistent to be able to sustain any kind of long-lasting (or successful) business in this market.

 

A lot of people in real life business (meaning not online) operate in a way in which their profit fluctuate depending on certain factors and they still manage to get enough to live a good life. As long as the worst month gets you enough funds to get by, the more fructuous months will compensate for it for you to get a profit. Another strategy would be to make the workers (translators, editors etc) accept a better pay but at an extended period of time. Kinda like, insted of getting 100 monetary units per month you get 400 monetary unit once every 3 months. That will compensate for the fluctuation of profit but will be more usefull for those that will use novels as a side job and have a main job (which i hear is the case for most chinese to english novel translators).

There are quite a few strategies in which a more numerous audience can help you achieve a good sum of money. And if you consider that a more numerous mass of fans is easier to get than a considerable amount of VIPs, why not use the leeches to get income?Let me propose an idea. I don;t know if this will work, i may sound stupid, but i'm trying to help. XD

Leech profit plan: Make an advertise only section for adds on the site. To view the content of the site (read the novels) you need to have a free account. Each account needs to click on a minimum of 10 pay per click ads per day to be able to use the site. If this thing can be put to use and every reader clicks 10 times on an add-on, that can generate a substantial amount of cash, since ads will now create a predictible revenue. If you also insert a few ads that don't require clicks to generate money on the site, this will cumulate will the donations and will make even more money.

This thing is getting popular, but there are a few flaws in here. There are certain factors that will makes it hard to be an attraction for most people. And and everthing starts from the number one problem:
1) The quality of the writing is low --- we see ingenious authors that come up with great ideas and build up a great universe but the writing style sucks. We have a poor and predictible, and most severe, a repetitive plot (egg: in WDQK we have endless competitions one after another; in Renegate Immortal we have "enemy chasing you, you run and hide" scenario repeating on and on etc). Besides that we also have a time delaying, meet your qouta tactic of stating obvious thing like "that guy is a senior while he is a junior to do that will be..." + useless bragging that makes the chapter hard to swallow.
2)Not many people like to read --- nowdays most people are focused on audion-visual things such as movies or anime. As a manga fan i often came around a lot of anime fans that don;t like manga at all. So from the literature fan base made up of 100 imaginary statistic units, i believe that 90% of it won't become a pay to read chinese web novel fan because of the low quality of the novels (in comparations with the existent and more entertainging books that are out there).
3)Readers are probably mostly teens --- since the story and the writing style is not so entertaining for a mature audience, most people that will get to read these novels are teens or manga fans. Most teens don't have much money, but money is not the only probleme here. The number one problem is people change, they grow up, they get tired of the usual thing and they move on to other hobbies.

I was a big anime fan a few years ago, now i find anime boring. Then i become a big manga fan, now i only read a few manga. When i started reading chinese web novels i found them fascinating, but after a few years i kinda reached the conclusion that the novels are preaty much slightly different copies of one another. So now i only read a few novels, but my interest got piqued since i got to encounter some slightly better novels out there (Chronicles of primordial wars, Release that witch, Otherworldly evil monarch) so for now i will stick with these novels for a while.

4) Leaks will always happen --- we see huge business out there (music, movies, anime) that are still facing problems with illegal copies being distributed around. This happens even to them, and it will happen to the novel business too if certain measures that will make this useless are not taken. These measures need to be created in a way in wich takes advantage of a tight comunity, making use of even the leeches (similar with my leech profit plan from above). If people can genetare profit even if they don;t pay the money themselfs, they will be more eager to contribute. A while back I was playing a game on my phone that required me to either buy in-game coins with money for greater benefits or watch ads to get some benefits. And i have watched those ads in the end. XD

 

I don't understand why you specifically pointed at Renegade Immortal, I can understand WDQk but why RI? I mean if you compare RI and ISSTH, RI, stands out much better and quality wise it is also much better. So why did you specifically say that this novels quality is bad? I mean if you said ISSTH, than this would be very accurate when being said as ISSTH is a very mediocre novel when compared to RI. So can you tell me why do you believe this novel is mediocre?

RI was also what made Ergen a popular author along with Beseech the Devil it wasn't through ISSTH... Also I do suggest you actually read it along doing some proper research before making any statements, instead of making assumptions based on your personal view, which was based likely on either skimming or dropping a story before giving it a proper try.

 

It's very simple ISSTH is the darling of english translation readers while RI is the bastard child.

 

Although RI is 100 times better than ISSTH? Just because the translation for RI suffered people assumed that RI is worse than ISSTH, but it's actually the opposite...

 

that is not for me to say anything about, its mainly because issth had very stable great translation and was more friendly? while ri wasn't

 

Most people give up on RI before it starts getting good which is around c100 whereas ISSTH not being any better until 150 so..., although the stable release rate is great, recently Rex has been pumping 10 chapters a week if that's not a stable release rate than I don't know what is...

 

also they get scared by so many people saying bad stuff about ri, how its a masochist novel? i myself am reading ri and enjoy it so i am just guessing why others wouldnt read it

 

It's one of the stories that I actually enjoy quite a bit as well. Also I have seen quite few people (including translators at ww) that actually finished RI say that, it stands out in the ocean of xianxia, but to them ISSTH is a very generic xianxia that could be seen just about anywhere...

 

You're generalizing a fair bit there. Qidian has quite a few high-quality works and the readers aren't mostly teens. In fact, the Chinese community on Qidian shoots the authors a lot on repetitive and predictable plots.
While it's true that there're a lot of amateur writers there, after all, it's a platform where writers publish their work and develop, there are also a lot of established writers as well.