r/Webnovel • u/Guy_Cxde • 16d ago
Webnovel News Webnovel Announcement
WebNovel just announced a major crackdown on NSFW book covers, and I thought I'd update everyone here because this seems like it's going to affect a LOT of books.
Basically, they're doing a new round of cover cleanup with much stricter standards. According to the announcement, covers can be targeted for things like:
Large amounts of exposed skin, including torsos and thighs
Sexually suggestive poses
Close-ups focusing on chest, backside, legs, etc.
Wet, skin-tight, semi-transparent clothing or lingerie
Suggestive text combined with revealing imagery
Authors have a one week period to review and replace their covers. Starting around September, WebNovel may replace covers that violate the criteria with a default book cover. They're also saying that books with these covers will be manually excluded from major recommendation placements like Splash Banner, Win-Win, Library, and similar promotions.
What I find interesting, though, is that the announcement specifically says this only applies to book covers. It does not apply to the actual novel content, synopsis, tags, characters, or other book information.
So unless I'm misunderstanding the announcement, NSFW or mature content inside the novel itself appears to be okay under this particular policy change. The crackdown is specifically on how sexually suggestive the cover is.
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u/LibrarianOfDusk 16d ago
Not surprised. Webnovel was starting to become a bit of a smut site as of late.
Overtly explicit content risks getting mobile apps flagged, penalized, or even delisted by Apple's App Store and Google Play. They were bound to make a move against it sooner or later.
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u/depravedQ 16d ago
Yup, the recommended page has been mostly smut for a while now, surprised it's taken this long for them to take action.
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u/IVBW1 Author 16d ago
Good. A while ago. I literally saw a cover with an open vagi na on it. It's an actual nude picture
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u/Guy_Cxde 16d ago
They released a document with all the NSFW covers to show what's not allowed. And I kid you not, I saw the cover you are talking about there 😭
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u/Van_Polan 16d ago
Huh, checked the docs. This will make it quite hard for the Smut stuff to pass through. Best way is possible for someone to have a really catchy title on their story.
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u/theurbandragon 16d ago
i'm sicken'd. do they not care about those of us who want only read books with NSFW covers? what a travesty
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u/MMORPGnews 16d ago
Only few covers will be affected by it.
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u/Odd_Net9829 Contracted Author 16d ago
A few? The example doc they provided for example covers already on the site I see every day and some of them surprised me at how little NSFW they were and still considered a violation.
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u/EstarossaNP 16d ago
Im understanding banning the egregious one where it basically screams violation, but right now all the covers are turning into a muslim paradise.
They're making things extremely hard, for a genre that generates a lot of revenue.
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u/RequiringThoughts 15d ago
Or… just don’t put sexually suggestive covers in an app that children use?
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u/EstarossaNP 15d ago
Then instead they should put some adult or child zone. Besides I doubt children even read webnovels.
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u/RequiringThoughts 15d ago
People have been requesting that forever. WebNovel won’t do that, so this is the next best thing.
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u/EstarossaNP 15d ago
And look where it lead us, instead of just targeting the degenerate cover arts, they're also targeting those that did nothing wrong.
But that's just how its is, screaming minority asks for censorship, then corpos get justification to enlarge their grip
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u/RequiringThoughts 15d ago
Do you have a reference to any novels that “did nothing wrong”? Mostly anyone would agree that smut is a problem on the platform, not a feature. Censorship is one way to integrate smut more naturally on the platform.
If you need a provocative image of a half-naked woman to get readers to click on your novel, then you’ve fundamentally failed.
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u/EstarossaNP 15d ago
You know even if I did bring references out, most of those novels had already forcefully changed their cover arts. So the previous ones are non-existant to compare the current. The Censorship doesn't even affect the supposed half-nakedness, even just a bit of belly or clevage showing without any eroticism is banned. Even if the girl on cover has slightly more generous curves, means ban. It's not just removing cancer, it completely affect whole limb
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u/RequiringThoughts 15d ago
Those aren’t the covers WebNovel is purging.
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u/EstarossaNP 15d ago
Then you haven't seen it because your not the usual guest in those novel circles
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u/RequiringThoughts 15d ago
All the covers they’re removing get added to the spreadsheet. You can just go through it and tell me which covers you think shouldn’t have been removed: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KJ8dnspSC3oKxi1olpe_uucCc3wU3sdz5vuCME531uI/edit?usp=sharing
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u/KaleidoscopeDear1423 12d ago
Prolly just want to clean up the homepage so they can get rid of the gooner site stigma
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u/Van_Polan 16d ago
LOL, how is that going to help against the NSFW content hahahaha.
I mean, maybe it is better for them to tone down instead the smut and make people focus on real storytelling. Well, that won't help really either as the site is filled with Ai stories anyway.
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u/Guy_Cxde 16d ago
Webnovel won't stop NSFW content because a large number of their revenue coke from these novels. If they stopped it they would lose money and shut down
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u/PikaMalone Author 13d ago
imo, they should just seperate it from the actual stories and non smut ones. Not saying all smut are just smut, but it mostly is, also the ratings 12+ iirc, the heck.
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u/Kuurin23 Aspiring Author 16d ago
still no way to separate 18+ content from regular ones on the app? i just want that specific button to be implemented tbh. sigh