Burying Bait With Bait
Ever since the professions of "author" and "novelist" had come into existence in the Wirod Dimension, there had always been publishers lurking around, waiting to fleece them.
Why?
Simple.
Authors had no way of knowing their actual sales figures, no way to verify how famous their work had become, and absolutely no means of confirming whether their settlements were being paid out according to contract.
Exploiting this information asymmetry, here is what publishers could get away with:
"We sold about three thousand copies, so your payout comes to this much."
—when in reality the book had sold over five thousand.
"You did read the contract, didn't you? See that fine print in the corner? It says you're obligated to write a minimum of ten volumes."
—fleecing naive rookie authors who didn't know better.
"Like I told you, the advance we paid you up front was the entirety of your compensation. Do I need to read the contract to you? There's no reason for us to pay you anything further."
—stripping authors of their copyrights under contracts that bordered on outright fraud.
Of course, successful authors still emerged now and then.
But those were either legendary masters whose works had blown up on a continental scale, leaving publishers unable to treat them carelessly—
"Aham! This is my dear nephew's work! Of course we'll push it!"
"Haha! Thank you so much, Uncle!"
—or authors with some backdoor connection to the publisher in the first place. Almost none of them were ordinary cases.
On top of that, from a publisher's perspective, there was no guarantee a submitted manuscript would take off, and printing physical books carried real financial risk. They couldn't just print and sell any author's work.
But Net Novel was completely different.
View counts—a metric updated in real time, in hard numbers—were exposed for everyone to see.
Anyone could serialize their work without any burden, with a light heart, and receive payouts exactly matching their view counts.
Thanks to this, it was perhaps inevitable that countless authors sick of publisher tyranny, along with rookies and aspiring writers, came flooding into Net Novel in droves.
Now, up to this point, publishers could still accept it.
The problem was........
"Author? Author! What do you mean you won't serialize your next work with us?"
"Exactly what I said. I'm thinking of moving to Net Novel."
"After all the years we've worked together, doing this out of nowhere is—well, it's unbecoming!"
"Say whatever you like. I've made up my mind. I'm not without remorse. Frankly, if my first book hadn't been such a runaway success, how you all would have treated me was a foregone conclusion."
Even among the blockbuster authors shouldering publishers' sales records, some had begun to defect.
For publishers, this was a devastating loss.
"Author, think about it. Soul Net? How long do you think that thing will last? I took a look inside, and it's mostly people posting for fun. Soul Net may be thriving now, but any emerging business or culture is like a wildfire—it can go out at any moment. Just keep your contract with us."
"That's right, Author! We'll raise your royalties a little more."
Some publishers tried to persuade their star authors to stay.
"Soul Net? Look into that thing. I need to know exactly what we're dealing with!"
Others scrambled to investigate the rival that had appeared out of nowhere.
But no matter how hard the publishers struggled,
"My mind is already made up."
There was no stopping the authors from leaving.
And Elsie Bwener was most certainly not sitting on his hands while all this unfolded.
"We'll run a full-scale advertisement for your next serial on the Net Novel main page."
"Your signing bonus will be two hundred gold coins of the Balrod Empire, and we'll pass along ad revenue based on your view counts. How does that sound?"
"The view counts themselves are something we can't touch or tamper with in any way—they're recorded by the Dimension itself. You needn't doubt that part."
"Don't think about anything else. Just focus on writing something entertaining and racking up views. Do that, and we'll pay you down to the exact digit."
He signed contracts with the great authors publicly declaring their intention to switch over, enriching Net Novel's ecosystem while aggressively courting the big names who hadn't yet shown any interest in defecting.
Money?
That was never an issue.
"I'd like to commission an advertisement for my guild's new product."
"We want to run an ad for the new magic developed by the Crimson Magic Tower. We'll pay handsomely, but we'd like to adjust the terms—can you make it so the ad runs only in the Adventurer Gallery?"
"Here's ten thousand gold coins of the Balrod Empire. We want to advertise our merchant caravan's wares."
Advertisers who had witnessed Soul Net's explosive growth and the monumental success of the Flaming Hammer Blacksmith Guild were knocking on his door every other day.
And so Elsie succeeded in luring in a whole crowd of great authors through aggressive marketing, while publishers ground their teeth watching their own writers defect to Net Novel.
And of course—
".......Net Novel. Those bastards. Take them down by any means necessary."
"They're our competition. If we don't strangle them in their cradle, we're the ones who die."
"Throw money at them, throw connections at them, shake them. Shake them however you have to. They have to fall."
The publishers were not about to sit quietly and watch this trend run its course.
And the first weapon they reached for in their counterattack was none other than this:
The publishers flooded onto Soul Net, mass-producing posts under anonymous accounts.
After all, there was no place on earth better suited to spreading rumors than Soul Net itself.
A horde of anonymous accounts suddenly churning out Net Novel slander.
Net Novel—and its settlement structure and business model—was unprecedented anywhere in the entire Wirod Dimension.
Because of that, this manufactured sentiment inevitably began to sway the many writers who had poured in after witnessing the monumental success of Exorcism Records.
"Those publisher bastards are playing dirty."
Clever, if nothing else. It was a smart strategy.
Leveraging the nature of Soul Net with a swarm of anonymous accounts launching simultaneous opinion campaigns—it looked dead real to anyone watching.
This had to be crushed early.
Left alone, the web novel business he'd painstakingly nursed from a single ember could well have withered and died before it truly began.
The question was how to respond.
Explain that view counts were technically and magically impossible to manipulate?
Boring. Pedantic. Nobody would read it.
Whereas: "They're rigging rankings through view manipulation and shortchanging authors on their payouts"?
Now that was easy to absorb and easy to believe.
Which meant posting a long-winded clarification as a gallery-wide announcement would have been professional suicide.
"So they come out filthy and underhanded, huh? Well then. I suppose I'll just return the favor in exactly the same way."
And having run communities for a long time, I knew something:
There was, in fact, one proven way to bury or drown this kind of deliberately planted bait.
Community bait had to be buried with bait.
I went straight to the chat function and fired off the same request to all the popular authors at once.
And right on cue, the proof posts began appearing in the Novel Gallery on Soul Net.
Compared to the horde of anonymous accounts suspected of being paid off by the panicked publishers, their numbers were tiny.
But their impact was overwhelming enough to crush the anonymous rampage in a single stroke.
Every single post from the anonymous accounts was nothing but text—no attached images whatsoever.
But the proof posts from the real writers came with images.
The interior of a lavish new home.
The gleam of a freshly purchased carriage.
That alone was enough to turn the tide of opinion inside the Novel Gallery, which had been wobbling under the publishers' manipulation campaign.
And then, one more thing.
The authors weren't just talking about their successes.
Wasn't that what Soul Net had always been about?
A space where people honestly told their stories from behind the shield of anonymity.
The moment famous writers and Net Novel's top-ranked authors began sharing their failures and hard-won experience, the controversies the publishers had manufactured started dying out at remarkable speed.
Doubt.
Public opinion turning against them.
And then the Novel Gallery manager, having watched one spam-flood too many, drew the blade.
And so the opinion-manipulation campaign the publishers had planned crumbled into failure.
I smiled.
"How's it taste, you bastards?"
Right about now, they were getting a proper taste of the fire licking at their own heels.
And back in my days in Korea, as a longtime observer of the genre-fiction scene, I knew there was really only one appropriate response a publisher could make in this situation.
"Just write something genuinely entertaining. Something that pulls readers in."
Until now, they'd had no real competition to speak of, so half-efforts had been enough to survive. But with Net Novel in the picture—
Unless the publishers started putting out truly gripping stories, their decline would only continue.
So—would the publishers of the Wirod Dimension end up like those of my past life's Japan?
Would subculture genre fiction and serious pure literature split cleanly apart, each forming its own separate ecosystem?
Or would it follow Korea's path, where genre literature flourished to bizarre excess while the literary tradition itself withered on the vine?
Not my problem.
This was an answer the publishers—not I—would have to pay to find.
I logged into Net Novel and soaked in the bustling atmosphere of the place.
"Good. It really is growing."
The mood was far from bad.
And yet, since Exorcism Records, not a single work worthy of being called a blockbuster had emerged.
What could you do?
Now was the time to wait, and to be patient.
Ecosystems were never built overnight.
I closed the Soul Net window.
And I began to wait.
For the next great hit that would follow in Exorcism Records' footsteps.
At first, the publishers had regarded Net Novel with fear and jealousy in equal measure.
"That lunatic is sucking up every author in sight!"
"At this rate we could be facing bankruptcy!"
"Anyone who knows a single 1st-level spell can connect to Soul Net. People will just chant a spell and read novels there—who's going to lug around heavy, expensive books?"
But as time passed, the publishers' worries and anxieties began, little by little, to fade.
"I don't see a single true blockbuster since Exorcism Records, do you?"
"Unlike print publishing, the system rewards daily serialization—so the prose gets infantilized, and the content devolves into lightweight fluff and cheap gags."
"Honestly......... I'd say this is just a different ecosystem entirely."
"Vulgar potboilers, the lot of them. It'll be a passing fad. Mark my words."
The publishers relaxed.
Deep down, they prayed Net Novel would fail to produce another hit and simply sputter out and die.
And then, one day, while the publishers sat rubbing their hands together awaiting Net Novel's downfall—
To be more precise: nearly a full year after Net Novel's launch—
A blockbuster to rival Exorcism Records itself—one destined to inherit its legacy in a straight line—had begun its serialization on Net Novel.