The First Culprit for a Web Novel's Failure, a Lost Ethos.
Exploring the most common mistake that kills web serials on the long run.
What is a story’s Ethos?
Case Study: Casual Heroing
I’ll make it even easier for you to understand what the Ethos is by looking at my own mistakes made in Casual Heroing. I repeated what I’m about to say so many times that it might look like I’m boasting, whereas, in reality, I’m simply regretful about my past actions.
Casual Heroing started at the beginning of December and was off Rising Stars by mid-January if my memory is to be trusted. I opened the Patreon for it on the 1st of January—the first two months, it did well, but nothing exceptional. However, by the time we reached March-April-May, it grossed almost 4,000 Euros each month, falling short of a couple of hundred each time. We are talking about a novel that barely had 3,000 followers, meaning that each follower on the novel was consistently converting to more than 1 Euro in revenue.
In June, that revenue sharply decreased.
Why? Well, this is the original synopsis for the book:
Why does everyone think that you have to become a hero if you get a supreme relic? TO HELL WITH THAT. I'm getting none of that adventuring bull. What do you say? Ranks? Tiers? Bronze, Silver, and Gold adventuring teams? Sure, keep it. It’s all yours.
I'll be opening a lovely pastry shop and using Fireballs to cook creme brulée, for your information. And, oh, that’s so interesting, teleporting, you say? Yeah, sure, I'll teleport a cup of coffee on my nightstand in the morning, thank-you-very-much!
Stop bothering me with your quests, legendary adventures, and all that nonsense! You either buy some pastry, or I’m going to report you to the watch for loitering!
Now, while Casual Heroing has some critical structural problems, there’s a reason why I mostly don’t pay attention to reviews and comments as much as I look at the revenue a book is generating: Casual Heroing got massive hate in the first ten chapters. But did that affect the revenue or the overall success of the novel? I did not.
What killed the first signs of exponential growth is simple: a divergence from the promised plot. In other words, its inexistent consistency in delivering the same narrative that had initially attracted the readers.
It is really that simple. The hate for the Main Character flirting around or being offensive toward French people didn’t do much other than anger a very vocal minority of extremely sensitive people—a minority, I suspect, that probably does not pay for what they read in any case.
And since I write these articles for fellow authors, let me make something very clear before moving forward.
Authors need to improve their craft and make cash. They are both equally important priorities. I truly and utterly despise either extreme—both authors who are just about making their writing better in a vacuum chamber with no feedback loop, and author who are only after the market and its money, I truly have no respect for. None. Improving is a matter of feedback, and receiving good feedback means, often, a good product—at the very least in some regards. And when a good product enters a good feedback loop, there’s always someone willing to pay for said product.
Let’s go into a metaphor to exemplify how changing the guiding principles of your novels is a terrible idea. And since we are talking about products, imagine that your local department store sold Toasters that stopped being toasters and started making orange juice after 180-days. It’s likely that someone felt very smart in their little corporate office because of this random choice, but isn’t it truly asinine? Maybe someone thought it was clever to have a transformative product - because they believe that any fresh overhaul is an improvement, the idiots - but why would a consumer want their toaster to become an orange juice extractor? And imagine your parents’ reaction if this product feature wasn’t even advertised and, one day, your father, tired from a long day of work, just looking forward to his very-deserved crunchy toast, finds orange juice spilling on the goddamn floor.
My own father would probably make a point of driving back to the store and getting his money back. Which is pretty much what the readers did in Casual Heroing.
See, Authors are weird beasts—they often want the next fresh piece of the plot. Readers, they want the same book to never end. The compromise is to have a set of guiding principles in your books and make sure that you and your readers are on the same page.
The first ten chapters of Casual Heroing were, in hindsight, flawless in the eye of the majority of paying readers. I delivered what I had promised in the synopsis, and I even managed to introduce the love interest in a way that was somewhat organic and not forced. I have no intention of patting myself on the back—it was just good enough to catch the attention of a few readers and to start having a few people talk about my book.
But then, I made the fatal mistake of introducing a whole new narrative—one that had nothing to do with the original one.
The original plot was about a slacker with a massive artifact that had to save the day but was kind of forced to. The new one was about him actually turning into a full-time hero of sorts with jarring changes in the flow of the novel. It’s not that the new plot wasn’t good—in fact, it was decent. The problem is that it wasn’t the one I had promised in the synopsis and, as such, it wasn’t the one my readers were interested in. Overnight, the plot had massively changed from a cozy slice of life with some casual heroing on the side to a grimdark world with full-time heroing.
The result was a massive drop in subscriptions and, more importantly, in review scores. In other words, the readers that had enjoyed the first part enough to subscribe to Patreon and leave a review didn’t enjoy the new plot at all.
Sticking to the Ethos of your novel
I already mentioned this in another article, but let me source three paragraphs from it that very well provide you with another example.
When you read The Wandering Inn, you start realizing that there are some internal rules that the author follows religiously. The more you read, the more your perspective starts to superimpose with the rules, and you become extremely sensitive to any rule-breaking: this, by the way, is the reason why some chapters of web serials can be terribly boring but still not increase the churning rate of the series; as long as something is consistent, it’s most likely good [enough].
The Wandering Inn’s consistency might take more than one dedicated essay, but let’s just examine a few points to understand better what we are talking about.
No single event is capable of upsetting the world at large at once. Whether it’s the Death of Magic coming back, or Nawalishifra forging a blade that could end wars upon wars, the internal consistency dictates that events can only upset the plot to a point. There’s not one event that ripples through the entire narrative. The Death of Magic might be back, but there are still so many POVs that will be unaffected. Flos’s vassal refuses to use the blade and breaks it down even though it could guarantee to win the battle - and then the war, by extension - even when his wife has just died trying to defend Reim, the capital. This rule needs a deep analysis because it’s tied to the meteorological pace of the series, meaning that events cannot advance the timeline too fast. Once you establish a pace, you cannot deviate from it. Even if you are suggesting that you can, like in Nawalishifra’s case, you need to go back to the baseline right after by breaking the blade. You get hints of the immense chaos there could have been, but chaos in the series is never actualized, just projected.
This is because The Wandering Inn, albeit with a few deaths far in-between, has the ‘happy ending’ stamp on it. So far, only Calruz has truly taken the dark path, and that happened off-screen before his redemption. And as mentioned in the article linked above, this is all about consistency; the ‘ethos’ is one of the aspects of consistency and possibly the most important of them. PirateAba even said around the beginning of the novel that this was not going to be a tragedy, albeit some later parts do go in that direction. But it was stated by the author that The Wandering Inn was meant to be what we might consider a comfortable read - at least for 95% of its length. I can’t find where this was stated in broad terms, so it would be swole if someone could leave me a comment with that. There’s chaos, there’s pain, there’s suffering, but they are also a minor part of the overall slice-of-life world. And it’s exactly the overwhelming majority of slife-of-life moments that makes the epic parts so good.
In fact, I’d argue that most books would do good to add a 5% of something that ‘breaks’ the ethos of their novel.
Authors need a clear idea of the kind of story he wants to tell. If they are not sticking to the Ethos of their novel, they risk losing the essence of the series. This can very well be the reason why some web serials are terrible: if the author hasn’t figured out the Ethos of his novel, he can’t stick to it. Furthermore, if he doesn’t stick to it, he can’t give the readers a consistent experience. And this is where you need to find the Ethos of your novel. Are you writing a lighthearted story? A serious one? A tragic one? A comedic one? The list goes on. Once you have decided on the Ethos of your novel, you need to make sure you stick to it. If you are writing a tragic story, you need to make sure that there is ‘tragedy’ in it. If you are writing a lighthearted story, you need to make sure that there is humor in it. If you are writing a comedic story, you need to make sure that there are jokes in it. And so on and so forth.
Applying this knowledge
I don’t like fuzzy articles with no actionable value. So, let’s get down to business and see how you can work with the ‘ethos.’
First things first: always start from the assumption that you are an idiot with incredible, latent potential. That is how I proceed to do business in order to avoid the trap of thinking I know-it-all or being too discouraged to write a story.
The Ethos can easily come out from a well-written synopsis. If you can extract the essence of your story in a good synopsis, that’s your Ethos right there—which is also marvelous because now there’s a straight connection synopsis-readers-story.
I must confess, apart from Casual Heroing’s synopsis, which is a meme’s paraphrases, I haven’t written very good ones. Let’s, in fact, rewrite the synopsis of I Wear It Black:
Follow James Clark as he is thrust into a weird tutorial with the co-workers he hates so much and that he ratted out to the IRS, collaborates with a sassy horse, and learns how to ride through hellish landscapes and skewer monsters with his lance. Humanity will soon learn, after coming back to Earth after the Tutorial, that they are not the apex predator anymore. Not by a long shot. All this while enjoying some well-placed geeky and movie-buff references!
This is the version that the very kind author of All the Skills helped me with. It’s a good one if we look at it in general terms, and certainly better than most you see splattered about on RoyalRoad. But it also does not reflect the real Ethos of the story that well.
First of all, I Wear It Black has a very strong dark component, veering toward grimdark, as in, if we trust Wikipedia, a subgenre of speculative fiction with a tone, style, or setting that is particularly dystopian, amoral, and violent.
So, let’s change the ‘he is thrust into a weird tutorial.’ It sounds silly. The story is anything but silly, though. We’ll make it…
Follow James’s dark journey […]
Much better and more indicative of what they really should expect from it.
One of the main highlights of I Wear It Black is the great depth of The System, meaning that there are hundreds of abilities and dozens of classes available and they are written down. I have the classes and abilities of pretty much any even remotely important secondary character. That adds a level of crunch that the average LitRPG does not have. HOWEVER! He is a lancer! That’s a monumentally important element that we want out in the very first sentence. So…
Follow James, corporate slave and obsessed jouster, in his dark journey as him and his sociopathic co-workers are thrust into a violent Tutorial where everyone assembles their own unique class with a myriad of possible builds at their hands.
Well, we covered The System, the crazy co-workers that many complained about, and the jousting. But let’s reiterate the latter…
Follow James, corporate slave and obsessed jouster, in his dark journey as him and his sociopathic co-workers are thrust into a violent Tutorial where everyone assembles their own unique class with a myriad of possible builds at their hands. He’ll learn how to put his lancing skills to use in this hellish landscape […]
Then, since the name is quite literally ‘I Wear It Black,’ and therefore you can imagine what kind of class he’s expected to pick up…
Follow James, corporate slave and obsessed jouster, in his dark journey as he, his sociopathic co-workers, and a powerful stallion are thrust into a violent Tutorial where everyone assembles their own unique class with a myriad of possible builds at their hands. He will learn how to put his lancing skills to use in this hellish landscape as his savior complex and his good intentions are slowly painted black.
We incorporated the driving forces of the Ethos of the novel:
Jousting is the main form of combat
The System is deep and has a strong influence on the people
There’s a slow descent into near-villainy motivated by a strong need for a savior role
There are more elements—but those are underlying tenets that I won’t share. They are pretty clear in the novel, but you would have a better time if you just read it.
No TO-DOs, Only Results
I have roamed around several sectors, from trying to start a business to working my way up in the spaced repetition community. In both pursuits, I was moderately successful—but the one thing I observed was a very common ground was how people love to be sold on a streamlined process. Spaced Repetition has a bunch of people coming up with courses on how to hack studying and whatnot, and business has the same but ten steps above on a logarithmic scale.
Personally, I mostly kept out of selling courses in any of the two spheres because I wasn’t proficient enough, on a level, but mostly because it can become a massive pain in the ass to manage those ventures from a fiscal standpoint, and I do loathe filing my taxes. But the first thing I’d have done if I went there would be selling a ‘formula.’ Everyone loves a formula. In a way, even LitRPGs sell ‘success formulas’ to the readers, just fictional ones and through projection [also through the superimposition of animus].
So, keep in mind that the synopsis example is not the key to getting to know your novel on the deepest level so that you can respect its Ethos in the long term. It’s a path. For some, it will not work. For others, it will be perfect. But the lesson is that flexibility is needed to achieve results.
You will spend most of the time in a cloudy state, feeling insecure about the next step. I’m good at dissecting things, but even I don’t see some of the mistakes I’m making. And it takes analyzing and researching books of all kinds, writing down my thoughts to streamline them and discover hidden details, and also conversations with other authors. The latest breakthrough came from a [voice] chat with an author. And it was massive. It was so big that I’m still pondering whether or not I should share it at large for free.
So, you’ll be uncomfortable when you realize you don’t know much about your own novel, whether it is about its success or failure. But traveling down this rocky road armed with the right tools will slowly set you apart from the rest.
Conclusions
Individuating the Ethos of a novel is the first step toward its long-term success. The Wandering Inn is probably the biggest testimony to that. If you don’t know the Ethos of your own novel, it’s not going to be long before you start actually diverging from what attracted readers to your novel in the first place.
My next article should be How to Write: Primal Hunter. I am skittish with it because it’s going to be humongous—I’ll deliver by mid-October.
If you want to chat with me about web novels, feel free to send me an email at jacopofowl@gmail.com
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Your quote about how authors should write for both monetary and personal reasons is an interesting one and it's made me re-evaluate my reasons for pursuing my web novel. How do you feel about collaborative projects like the SCP wiki, which use the CC BY 3.0 SA license and whose members look down upon writing wiki articles for avenues such as Patreon? The only real feedback SCP writers receive are upvotes and respect in their specific community.