Author: Yang Chen（314）
When writing your webnovel, what "surface appearance" means is the packaging and appearance of your novel.
In our daily lives, we're well aware of the importance of packaging in influencing how well a product sells. Oftentimes, the packaging is even more important than the product itself. Yet, many authors tend to neglect their work on the packaging of their webnovel. They believe that this is the responsibility of the website staff, and that only the website staff can help design and beautiful their novel's page.
What authors don't realize is that no matter what website you post your novel at, you as an author can modify quite a lot about your novel's appearance. These factors are quite influential in the success or failure of your novel. Since improving your novel's surface appearance is vastly easier than improving the content of your novel, it could be said that this is especially important as well as efficient.
As for the surface appearance of your novel, it can be categorized into the seven types below.
1. Your novel's title
In your packaging, one of the most important elements is your novel's title. For any novel, in most normal circumstances, the reader will find out your novel's title before any other information about it. The title is the most important factor in whether a reader chooses to click on it and read your synopsis or not. It also helps the readers to understand the most important elements of your novel. And so, there's no need for me to speak any further about the importance of your novel's title.
In that case, what type of a novel title is a good one? I believe that a good novel title should accomplish the following points.
（1） Simple
Simple here refers to using easy to understand words that even elementary school students can recognize, rather than using some highly esoteric or difficult words that few people can read in order to sound fancy.
（2） Only English words in the title
Don't use a title with words from other languages. Nor should you have numbers, punctuation, or individual letters in your novel's title. This will make your novel title look more professional as well as make it easier for readers to search for your novel.
（3） Easy to read and remember
Perhaps "easy to remember" will make some authors confused, but actually, it's connected to being easy to read. A good novel title should flow quite well when people try reading it out loud. That's why you shouldn't use words that are difficult to pronounce. Otherwise, if readers can't even remember the title of your novel, how are they possibly supposed to remember your story?
（4） Not too long
This is also an issue about readability. If your novel's title is overly long, it's not easy for readers to search for it or remember the name. Normally speaking, the average book's title has around two to six words in it.
About the length of your novel's title, there's something else that needs to be noted. Amongst authors, there's a saying that the shorter your novel's title is, the better, because this helps your novel to be ranked farther in the front. In a way, this is correct, because many websites often put the novels with the shorter titles first when giving recommended reads on the front page, so the titles that are shorter will naturally be at the forefront. However, this alone shouldn't make us conclude that a shorter title is always better.
The influence of a novel's title has so many factors involved, and being on the recommended list is only a tiny portion. If you can have a better position on the recommended list, of course, that's a good thing, but if you choose a shorter title just for this, then you'll definitely lose more than you gain. Besides, even if you have a really short novel title, can you guarantee that there are other recommended novels out there that don't have equally short names? What if you're in the middle? Honestly speaking, there's no real difference in being at the left or in the middle of the recommended novels section.
（5） Not esoteric
When choosing your novel's title, it should be just like writing your novel. You should consider your general audience. And since you're writing a webnovel, your general audience would obviously prefer to read words in an easy to understand manner. If your novel title is overly esoteric or poetic, or sounds too philosophical, then your novel's popularity will be greatly affected. The majority of readers probably won't even click on your novel to read the synopsis.
（6） Appropriate bandwagoning
From a certain standpoint, bandwagoning can be advantageous. For example, since "Library of Heaven's Path" is a highly popular novel, perhaps you could write a book titled "Library of Hell's Path," which will naturally bring your novel some attention.
However, it's obvious that this actually isn't so much of a good thing for either the readers or the website, so it's quite easy for your novel to become suppressed if you bandwagon too much. For instance, if you really do call your novel "Library of Hell's Path," then it'll be quite difficult for you to receive a recommendation on the front page because it'll be too similar to the popular "Library of Heaven's Path." Not only that, there are also disadvantages for the author, because using such a copycat name will make some readers displeased as well, making it harder to attract some readers.
And so, that's why newcomer authors should only bandwagon appropriately and observe what type of novel titles are the most popular. Then, you should create your own original title that's similar in spirit but not in style.
（7） Express the uniqueness of your novel
A good novel title should express the uniqueness of your novel. The best-case scenario would be that your title expresses the main wish-fulfillment point of your novel. For example, a novel named "Returning to the Yuan Dynasty" can already tell you the two major information points that this novel is about returning to the past and historical fiction. Or, the famous franchise "Spiderman" tells you simply from the title that the story is about someone with spider-based abilities as well as being a superhero story.
In conclusion, when naming your novel, a good method would be to organize your novel's keywords and special vocabulary as well as all the most interesting factors in your novel, then categorize and modify them while seeing which point or points would be the best to put in your novel's name. Finally, come up with an excellent novel title based on the above seven points.
2. Choosing your genre to categorize your novel as
After choosing your novel's title, you should choose the specific genre your novel belongs to. Actually, perhaps it's not quite appropriate to use the word "choose" here, because the genre is really decided by the content of your story, not what you as an author choose.
About choosing your genre, the most important, and basically the only rule there is, is to "never do false advertising." That's because the end result of false advertising will be bad for everyone.
For example, even though you're clearly writing a novel about mystical abilities in a modern-day setting, you placed your novel into the alternate history genre. This way, readers that enjoy alternate history novels will happily start reading your novel but will leave disappointed, while readers that enjoy modern novels with mystical abilities won't even be able to find your novel by genre.
For most novels, it won't be difficult to classify its genre at all. However, there are some novels that have elements from multiple genre types. Perhaps your novel is both modern as well as xianxia, with science fiction and military added as well, and even fantasy. This doesn't mean that your story is bad, however, this type of story will often confuse the author. Just what overall genre should the author classify such a story under?
First of all, what you should consider is the matter of which story elements are truly the most important. This is the foundational issue at hand.
However, if you as an author really feel like all the elements are equally important, then you'll just have to make a decision and choose one genre on your own. There are two factors you should consider here. First is that popular genres will have more readers, and the second is that less popular genres will have fewer novels and thus less competition.
These two factors are a matter of not being able to have your cake and eat it too. For newcomer authors, you can choose a genre based on your own confidence in your novel's ability. But normally speaking, it's more recommended to choose a less popular genre to categorize your novel as.
All of the same could be said for your story's synopsis as well. Make sure that your story's synopsis matches the genre that it's supposed to be under.