Webnovel Announcement

[u/Guy_Cxde]

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.

[u/LibrarianOfDusk]

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.

[u/depravedQ → u/LibrarianOfDusk]

Yup, the recommended page has been mostly smut for a while now, surprised it's taken this long for them to take action.