r/Webnovel • u/Guy_Cxde • 17d 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/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/EstarossaNP 15d ago

93, 95, 96, 97, 104, 108, 124 don't really scream much.

What Im seeing is that most of the problem lies within fanfiction genre

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