WebNovels

r/WebNovels • u/endlessmoth • May 03 '20

[D] Announcing the Webnovel Directory — Give us your recommendations!

79 Upvotes

There's a lot of new and little known webfiction being posted to this subreddit — which is great; the scene needs more eyes on the smaller players. But for someone new to webfiction, or only versed in a particular subscene, there's sure to be big names they've never heard of.

So, we're announcing a web fiction directory: a subreddit wiki to collate quality webfiction and reviews. It should be organized to make finding the best of the best as easy as possible, and it should reflect the opinions of the community.

After some thought, we've come up with a system, and all you have to do is leave a post below with as many recommendations or reviews as you care to provide. Two things to keep in mind:

a recommendation is as simple as saying "I recommend this." Nothing more to it. You should recommend stories you like even if they're already on the list.
a review is a rating (0-5 stars, halfstars allowed), and an explanation of why you think the story deserves that rating. At least a sentence or two, but at least a paragraph is ideal. Try not to just describe the story's plot (that's what descriptions are for!), but actually tell what it does well and what you like about it.
you can also give a disrecommendation, effectively downvoting the story.

Ideally, ratings should make use of the entire range offered; the average rating should be 2.5 stars, not 4 stars. Something like this should be kept in mind:

5.0 - Sublime
4.5 - Excellent
4.0 - Great
3.5 - Very Good
3.0 - Good
2.5 - Mixed
2.0 - Disappointing
1.5 - Bad
1.0 - Embarrassing
0.5 - Atrocious

Here's an example:

I recommend Worth the Candle, The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, and Entirely Presenting You. I disrecommend Mother of Learning and Chrysalis.

I rate The New Humans 3.5/5 stars. It has excellent, almost literary prose, and its the character work is moving. While the plot takes a few surprising turns, it takes a while for it to really get going (it's somewhat meandering in the beginning). The setting is unique (rural superheroes in 1960s australia??), and the author makes great strides toward realism. The metaphysics of powers is unlike any other super serial out there.

The directory itself has a few designs:

if a story is recommended by anyone, it will be in the directory.
stories with reviews are listed in a category above stories with no reviews (i.e. only recommendations)
sorting works like this: total number of a stars plus half net recommendations (so each recommendation is effectively half a star), divided by the total number of reviews, laplace smoothed to 2.5/5. This means that stories with better averages and more recommendations rank higher, but stories with a small number of high reviews don't shoot up to the top, and adding a recommendations never decreases a story's score.

Please, recommend all your favorite webnovels below. We'd really like this directory to become something comprehensive.

128 comments

r/WebNovels • u/Sea-Chair-4682 • 6h ago

[DISC] What four protagonists would you put on a Web novel Mount Rushmore?

3 Upvotes

I'm not asking for the four best or most well written characters, what I'm trying to find out is the four most impactful Web novels and their protagonists representing the series they're from.