YM778.TV Chapter 31: What Does Social Death Feel Like?
He was very thirsty, and without a second thought, he came to the shore and drank crazily.
The sweet taste filled his mouth.
But as he drank, he felt that something was off. He opened his eyes and found that Senior Sister was soaking in the bubble tea lake.
Hmm, no wonder it’s so sweet.
Just as he was thinking this, he woke up.
He looked at the time. It was only 3 a.m. on September 7th.
He had only slept for four to five hours, but he couldn’t fall back asleep.
When he was woken up by Xun Liang’s barking at six in the morning, his mind was still in a mess.“Brother Jiang, did you stay up late watching videos again? Take care of your health,” Xun Liang teased when he saw Jiang Miao’s dazed expression.
He couldn’t be bothered to argue with him. He slid down from his loft bed and asked casually, “Hey, Dog, let me ask you a question. What does it mean if you dream about kissing a girl at night?”
“Means you’re in love.” Xun Liang was full of question marks. “Brother Jiang, did you have a wet dream?”
“I was just asking,” Jiang Miao denied. “If anyone’s in love, it’s you. I saw you enter the grove with your girlfriend yesterday.”
“We’re pure!” Xun Liang said righteously. “We’re just doing what couples should do.”
Jiang Miao: “Pfft.”
Dreaming was a very magical thing.
No matter how absurd the dream might be, the consciousness in the dream would always believe that everything was real.
But once the dream shattered and you woke up, the memories in the dream would dissipate bit by bit.
Unless you deliberately remembered it, you would have basically forgotten it by the time you brushed your teeth.
After Xun Liang’s interruption, Jiang Miao didn’t retain much of the dream that had caused him to lose sleep last night, except for Senior Sister’s charming face that kept lingering in his mind.
Oh no. Writing romance novels is starting to make me go crazy…
After quickly washing up, the three roommates went downstairs, grabbed breakfast in the cafeteria, and headed to the school’s sports field.
After watching his two roommates head off for military training once again, Jiang Miao heartlessly strolled to the office in the multipurpose building office to enjoy the air conditioning.
Although it was a little shameful, having the chance to skip military training, enjoy free air conditioning, and spend most of his time slacking off and writing—it didn’t get more comfortable than this.
If he had known that the Political Work Group was this cushy, even if Senior Sister hadn’t pulled strings to get him in, he would have shamelessly applied to enter before the military training.
Settling in his office chair, Jiang Miao turned on his computer, logged into the author’s dashboard, and checked the current stats of his new novel.
[Daily Report]
Number of Tips: 7
Recommendations: 311
Monthly Votes: 0
Reading Lists: 374
After clicking on the daily report details, he saw the current total number of reading lists had reached 4,102, successfully exceeding the 4,000 mark last night.
Great. Jiang Miao clenched his fists in excitement, feeling a surge of motivation.
From the looks of it, his novel had been added to more than 2,500 reading lists just from the trial recommendation on the desktop site.
Next week, once it was on the desktop site’s Popular Picks and the app’s Featured New Arrivals, the increase in reading lists might far exceed this week’s 2,500.
Today was Sunday, and the recommendation spots would change at 2 p.m.
At that time, his novel My Girlfriend Is a Content Creator would be able to enter a better recommendation section on the mobile app.
Even though it was just a category recommendation spot, it would still be far better than one on the desktop site.
In this era of mobile internet, most of the traffic was concentrated on mobile devices.
Therefore, the recommendation spots on the app were the targets that authors were competing for.
In particular, the featured recommendations on the homepage, which included the coveted Cover Recommendations[1], Popular Picks, and Editor-in-Chief’s Choice. These three recommendations were the strongest combination for any novel on the platform.
Getting recommendation spots in all three of these would easily boost the average subscription[2] count by at least a thousand.
For novels with great potential, just these three spots could propel them to soaring heights, possibly even reaching the milestone of 10,000 subscriptions.
However, all of this was still too far off for Jiang Miao. The most attainable homepage recommendations for him were still Featured New Arrivals and Galaxy Recommendations.
These two recommendation spots were the dream of every author in their new novel period.
In particular, the Galaxy Recommendations basically symbolized the crown jewel of new releases, with only a handful of novels achieving this each week.
Below them was a mountain path paved with the corpses of countless failed novels.
For Jiang Miao to climb from his current position in the app’s Featured New Arrivals section, he still had to overcome the Category Spotlight and the Six Categories Recommendations.
Only by continuously overcoming these obstacles and emerging victorious against the encirclement of other new novels would he have a glimmer of hope of ascending to the Galaxy Recommendations.
But even so, for most novels making it to the Galaxy Recommendations, reaching 3,000 subscriptions was still a distant dream.
On average, out of all the newly released novels each week, it was already not bad if three to five went premium.
This was the world that web novel authors had to face.
It was brutal and unforgiving, with no room for retreat.
Even veteran authors who had been on the Galaxy Recommendations countless times would still have to face the same cruel promotion route when starting a new novel.
The only real advantage was having a slightly better reader base.
However, if the quality of the new novel wasn’t up to par, the readers and recommendation spots would quickly say goodbye to you without special consideration for past achievements.
Rubbing his tired eyes, Jiang Miao pushed aside these thoughts for now and opened his writing software to start today’s struggle.
But as he continued writing, he looked at the chapter list beside him and suddenly remembered that he had written an extra chapter last night.
In other words, he only needed to write one more chapter today?
Oh yeah~ Long live yesterday’s me!
In that case, I’ll leave this chapter to this afternoon’s me.
As soon as this thought crossed Jiang Miao’s mind, he felt his eyelids grow heavier and heavier, as though lead balls were weighing them down.
Mmm, I can’t take it anymore. So tired.
Anyway, it’s only morning now, and I won’t write until the afternoon.
It should be fine if I just take a short nap…
Before Jiang Miao could finish his thoughts, he was already slumped over his desk, fast asleep.
On the monitor, the writing software continued to emit a soft glow.
“Senior Sister, good morning.”
“Good morning, everyone.”
“Is there something you need, Senior Sister?”
“Oh, it’s nothing much. I just came by to take a look and see if there’s anything you need with your work.”
“Everything’s fine. We’ve gotten used to it after a week.”
“That’s good. Thank you for your hard work, everyone.”
The familiar voice gradually drew closer, but the sleeping Jiang Miao didn’t react at all.
Soon, the surroundings fell silent again.
Everything returned to calm.
But storms and tsunamis were brewing under the calm surface.
Until Jiang Miao groggily woke up, stretched his back lazily, and yawned comfortably…
Then he felt the back of his hand touch something.
He turned his head and saw Senior Sister sitting beside him, looking at the monitor with great interest.
Boom!
At this moment, Jiang Miao only felt dizzy. His blood was rushing to his head, breathing was difficult, and his vision was blurry.
It was as if the entire world was collapsing.
Is this…
… the taste of death?
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- Having the cover appear on a large banner on the homepage. ↩
- The term subscription might be a bit misleading, so I’ll explain it here. It’s not really a subscription in the traditional sense, but the average number of purchases made per chapter. ie. 10,000 subscriptions means that there was an average of 10,000 purchases made on every chapter in a novel, either through purchasing chapters individually or subscribing to the entire novel. ↩