I'd like to know the difference between Kr, Jp and Cn webnovels for example: are there contracts to sign on authors? (I know cn has but idk about the rest) are there minimum word counts for each chapter? how do authors split chapters? (the cn I read usually title every chapter differently but the kr I've read titles an arc and splits it into parts, like [chapter xx] [arc title] part 1 etc) which country's novel has the highest word count per chapter? which country has more webnovels? and lastly, which country's webnovels have the highest quality? (writing style, phrasing, language, grammar etc)
At the moment how things are being released no one is in the lead properly. Cuz KR is just copy paste atm. CN problem is that there are good stuff but mostly shitty harems or cultivation stories with no substance are TLed. Very few JP series being TLed. And if so mostly being either soft incest (step bro scenes) or just edgy MCs
1. Contracts. Depends in where you publish it but if the novel gets enough traction then yes. 2. Word Count. Again this depends on the author, in general most web serials have an average of 3k-5k words per chapter. 3. Chapter/Arc split. This entirely depends on the author and his pace. 4. Highest word count. It's JP. 5. Most web novels. CN. 6. Highest quality. CN has the highest highs and lowest lows, but for general consistency I would say KR.
I only read Japanese and Chinese webnovels so all my comments apply to just these two groups. The way it works in Japan is that Syosetu is by largest web publisher - probably over 60% of the entire market. This site does not pay writers at all so all the people on it are strict amateurs. And as strict amateurs, the quality of their output is going to be pretty bad in general. In fact, the vast majority of popular novels on Syosetu are purely otaku material, and it's common for these books to not even care about what good storytelling is. I've seen a lot of popular books which have major characters with no name, no personality, and no character progression. The problem is that since the most popular books are like this, there's little reason for writers to want to improve. As a consequence, there are a few good writers out there, but the vast majority have terrible writing skills and no willingness to improve on that. As far as I know the writers have full ownership of these books so they're free to use the rights however they wish. When publishers pick up these stories as light novels, the writer will usually kill the web novel altogether. In China, the dominant publisher is Qidian, but there are a lot of other popular sites out there. However, they all have similar policies so it's pretty safe to lump them all together. These sites pay their writers in a couple of different ways so there will have to be contracts involved. The end result is that there are a combination of professional, semi-professional, and amateur writers writing Chinese webnovels. As a result of this mix, there are a lot of good writers on these webnovel sites. I find the big problem is that not all of these writers are getting translated so this quality might not get reflected on NU. Generally Chinese webnovels will release a chapter a day, so the length of these chapters is dependent on how much material an author is capable writing on a daily basis. I'd say that 2000 words is a good guess to how long this is. Often if the author manages to write more than that, they'll release multiple chapters rather than longer ones.
1. Contracts - It can. If it's going to be published. Or adapted to other mediums (Drama CD, Manga, Anime, Manhwa, etc.) 2. Minimum Word Count - CN (Usually 500-700 words per chapter if it's novels with over 1000+ chapters) (2500+ if it has less than 500). KR has average word count, usually 1500. Then JP varies. 3. Chapter/Arc - Wholly depends 4. Highest word count - For each chapter, it's usually JP who has highest word count. If it's in light novel format. 5. Most web novels: Definitely CN. They basically dominated the whole webnovel scene. 6. Highest quality: Since CN has the most web novels, there's bound to be more than 50% of trash quality. But my favorite webnovel of all time is CN (It's Not Easy to Be A Man After Travelling to The Future), so there's that. KR has more varied and unique plots, able to mix tropes from both western and eastern webnovels. They're usually the best at doing that kind of thing. JP has the cliché isekai/harem novels as its most popular. But there are novels that makes CN and KR pale in comparison. For example stories like Overlord for LitRPG Isekai genre. Violet Evergarden for drama. Kino's Journey for adventure and fantasy. No. 6 for BL. It's also important to note that JP webnovels are basically the "predecessors" of asian webnovels—lots of CN and KR borrow tropes from it.
Slight correction here: Chinese and Korean novels will borrow somewhat from Japanese anime and manga and light novels, but Japanese webnovels cannot be considered the predecessor. For example, some of the oldest Chinese webnovel sites date to before 2000, and their format is very different from Syosetu. Korean webnovel sites are a bit different from both, but they adhere much closer to the Chinese model than the Japanese one. Also, as far as I can tell, most of books aren't otaku-oriented the way the vast majority of the Japanese ones are. They're very different animals and the relationship is pretty tenuous.
I dunno about KR and CN, so here are some answers on the JP side. JP has no contracts on Syosetu, but LN publishers often offer deals to popular WNs on Syosetu and get them adapted to LNs... At this point, they sign contracts. There is none on the JP side since there isn't a contract or anything. Average character count seems to be around 4000-5000 per chapter, but I've seen novels with 2000-3000 characters, and even 1000-2000 characters at times. It varies a lot on the JP end. Sometimes the author makes chapter 45 part 1, 45 part 2 and 45 part 3 each having a different title. Sometimes it's chapter 45, 46 and 47, but the titles are "Battle for Potato City (1)", "Battle for Potato City (2)" and "Battle for Potato City (3)" Arcs usually don't appear on the chapter titles, but there is usually something that shows the start of a new arc when looking at the table of contents at the very minimum. And well, not all novels put titles on their chapters... It's common to do it, but some novels just go "Chapter 45" and that is that. No clue on those, but I'd say the answer to the third one is "None". Good and bad authors exist everywhere. Popular stuff will usually be better, but not always. Hidden gems will always exist, but good luck finding them. I've found garbage on Syosetu and I've also found amazing stories... The same will be held true on the popular websites for KR and CN novels. Don't overthink it too much on the quality aspect. Good writers and bad writers exist everywhere, so the country of origin won't change that. If anything, I can say that... The Japanese system of simply posting non-monetized novels online ends up pushing people towards just doing whatever they want. This means you might see a pretty wide variety of stuff in both quality and themes... You'll also see lots of passion stories made by the authors. The Chinese system that enforces daily releases with a minimum word quota ends up heavily pushing novels towards being as big as possible and by having as much padding as possible in order to milk the novel as much as it can be milked... Good stuff can still come out of this system, but the system itself pushes you towards writing garbage if you want to optimize the monetization, so you should probably expect a larger amount of garbage among popular authors than what you'd expect on other websites. ... I dunno a thing about the Korean system, so no comments there. But again, those are just comments on the overall system that their webnovels revolve around. It says nothing about the quality of the novels or about the quality of the authors... It just says what one system pushes more than the other.
It does though, and it's not really a matter of nationality either. Japan produces a lot of the best writers in the world. The problem is that these writers have no interest in platforms like Syosetu, and the platform in turn doesn't care about quality. For me the question isn't whether an author in question is good or not; it's about whether they know how to produce creative writing, whether they're interested in improving their craft, and whether they're willing to put some effort into their books. For the vast majority of Japanese webnovel writers, the answer for these questions is "no". So why do I still read Japanese webnovels? It's because they can come up with all sorts of cool ideas without worrying about whether they can work out. I find that there is still value in checking these out even though the overall quality is terrible. I find that this is almost wholly untrue. Yes, the minimum word quota does exist, but what it promotes is that authors post something everyday. These books can still be of greatly varying lengths, and it's not uncommon for them to be 100 chapters or fewer. Also the amount of monetization is small enough that its policies only affect the top couple percent of popular books. For everything else, the writer will be motivated in exactly the same way as any other system.
I did say that this system pushed the more popular novels to be garbage with lots of padding. I never said that all popular novels were garbage, or that the mid-tier novels were also garbage. It is what it is. The system pushes you towards writing garbage if you're at the top of the rankings... If you do a good job even with this system pushing you towards making garbage, all the more power to you, I was just talking about what the system did.
What happens is that the Qidian system pushes writers willing to write garbage to write garbage. But guess what, all systems that reward success do so as well. Look at all the big best selling writers once they get so popular that they're become editor-proof. Some of them will still put the hard work into producing good books but others end up releasing schlock. And if we're interested in comparing the webnovel systems, Syosetu is way more likely to produce the most awful material, but I don't see it get anywhere near the same amount of blame.
I specifically mentioned that the popular stories on stuff like Qidian are more likely to be garbage due to the system incentivizing the production of garbage. Syosetu's system does not incentivize popular stories to produce garbage at all, because the only thing you gain from becoming popular, is becoming more likely to get a LN adaptation... At this point you'll be re-doing your story with an editor's help and whatnot. The unpopular or mid-popular stories on both systems are unaffected... And once again, just because the Qidian system incentivizes you to write garbage once you're popular, it doesn't mean you have to. You can still release high-quality stuff on Qidian while being popular, but as the system incentivizes you to write garbage once you're popular, you'll end up seeing more garbage among the popular stories in Qidian when compared to popular stories in websites with different systems, as those systems don't actively incentivize you to write garbage after you already gained popularity. Seriously, I'll just quote my original post at this point: I was being very specific here. I'm specifically referring to the system itself highly pushing popular authors towards writing garbage, and on the very same post I still highlighted that good things could still come out of it... It is what it is, it's a system that incentivizes garbage, which ends up increasing the overall percentage of garbage on the people that are able to become highly popular within the website... Other websites that don't incentivize garbage can still have garbage on their top ranks due to readers' bad taste, but as the system itself doesn't incentivize garbage, this percentage will naturally be smaller when compared to a system that actively pushes you towards writing garbage.
My point is that, by allowing terrible books on the site to become super popular, Syosetu incentivizes all books there to be garbage. Technically it deincentivizes authors to write good books, but that amounts to the same thing. But this is all wrong. My point is that Qidian can enable popular writers to produce garbage, but it often doesn't happen because different writers work differently. So sure, some authors take advantage of this and go into lazy storytelling mode, but this happens under all systems; perhaps especially the publishing world. Furthermore, there are so many books that aren't affected by this that it's super easy to avoid the problematic ones (at least if you don't have to rely on translations).
That's on the readerbase, not on the Syosetu system. My point is that Qidian's system actively pushes you towards writing garbage (if you're one of the top writers)... You don't need to, but the system pushes you towards it, so the percentage of garbage on the top-end should be higher, since the system itself pushes you towards that. Syosetu's system pushes you towards nothing. It's on you. If you write garbage and got popular... It happens. Readerbase taste dictates what goes to the top in the end. I'm not denying that. I've reiterated a few times that good works do come out of said system indeed. My point is just that if your system naturally pushes you towards garbage, you will end up having more garbage than with a system that doesn't push garbage. Like, If you have a game that incentivize daily log-ins, the amount of people that log-in daily will be higher than the amount of players that log-in daily on a game with no rewards for daily log-ins... Both games will still have daily log-ins, and both games can still have high-quality content in them... But the one that incentivizes daily log-ins will naturally have more daily log-ins because the game is actively pushing you to keep on logging in daily. It's the same here. If you have a system that pushes you towards writing garbage once you reach the top end, then there will be a higher percentage of garbage on the top end when compared to systems that don't incentivize garbage... And that doesn't suddenly make the system bad, nor does it make all the stories on the top end of said system bad... It just makes a higher percentage of garbage being there when compared to other systems. There will still be good stories on the top end regardless, but the percentage of garbage will be higher when compared to the percentage in other systems.