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The Novel Overseas Roadmap: From Tomato 855 Fallen Accounts to Royal Road Labeling

2026-10-16 · ~9 min read · novel submission · overseas roadmap · AI creation · platform policy · Payoneer

When AI-written novels head to market, the first question isn’t how well they’re written but which land will take them. On this day, two parallel researches — one with twelve rounds of live Google verification plus official-page direct access, one with deep-search cross-validation — drew a complete world policy atlas for the four novels.

I. Domestic: there is no “warning only” tier

The research’s first conclusion is brutal: domestically there is no warning tier for pure AI text, with the penalty gradient going straight to the cap. Tomato processed 855 AI accounts in one February 2026 special campaign, rejected 112,700 and processed 40,000 in June alone, penalized 49 gold-badge authors for full-text AI ghostwriting, and permanently banned 17 accounts; Qidian processed about a hundred AI novels with over 10,000 average subscriptions in August 2026 (Xian Guan Zhi among them); Jinjiang took the lead in February 2025 with the first AI-assist creation management rule, allowing only proofreading-level assistance, with violators locked-chaptered, yellow-carded for a month, permanently banned from rankings, and VIP refunded. The industry baseline was laid out simultaneously: 50.21 billion yuan reading market in 2025, 32.694 million authors, 646 million users; short-drama adaptation became the new风口 (Zhangyue and ChineseAll’s short-drama revenue share already exceeds the web-novel body). Two aggravating factors: after the AI Content Labeling Measures took effect September 1, 2025, the “did you use AI” declaration is a legal obligation; and pure-AI-generated text is not protected by copyright law — even if the platform doesn’t ban you, you cannot defend the book if it’s copied.

II. Abroad: two live roads, declaration and labeling

Abroad is another picture. KDP is declaration-based — AI-generated content (text/images/translation, still counts if edited further) must be declared, invisible to readers, no ranking demotion, no royalty deduction, verified by official-page direct access; not declaring is the landmine (enforced from 2026, unannounced takedown, royalty deduction, account termination, with a third-party case of twelve books annihilated in 48 hours); from September 21, 2026 the new-title cap is cut to two per format per week, and the high-volume exception application channel has been deleted — aimed squarely at AI volume. Royal Road is the only one with a written AI policy: official three categories (assisted/AI-Assisted/AI-Generated), AI text must be labeled, the platform itself pays no稿费, and successful authors rely on off-site Patreon ($10k-40k/month for the head, $400-1,800 for the waist). Wattpad’s official guidelines still have no explicit AI ban but the contest strongly discourages it; Webnovel itself is the industry’s largest AI translation user (new AI-translated works +281% year-on-year). Two deceased were recorded: Tapas officially announced its full-site shutdown on March 31, 2027, and Radish closed on December 31, 2025. The real-time re-verification (21:49) confirmed all load-bearing clauses of the main route unchanged, while domestically it got colder — from October 12 Tomato newcomers can only go “complete-then-sign” (write 150-300 thousand characters, one whole-book review, only three application chances), and Qidian and Qimao editors have issued “refusing AI manuscripts” statements.

III. The roadmap is set and the four bots are commissioned

The roadmap is thereby set: testing period on Royal Road only (the only test field on the net where “labeled AI is also legal + has real English readers + doesn’t lock copyright + zero account risk”), monetization period RR free serialization to gather fans → Patreon early access (main income) → completed volumes on KDP for 70% royalty → Payoneer settlement home. The four bots are commissioned into pipeline roles: Architect planning (worldview bible, power system, volume outlines, foreshadow ledger), Coder writing (chapter by chapter per outline cards, format templates locked to avoid AI format traces the RR community has summarized), Reviewer editing (three reviews: plot holes/character drift, AI common ailments, platform compliance), Tester data (follow/favorite/completion rates, opening A/B). One human editing layer is set as iron law — ten to fifteen minutes a day, serving as both the quality layer and the evidence layer of “the author exists.” The legal dimension was taken apart item by item: cross-border writing on normal themes is fully legal; the only content with criminal precedent is explicit material (the Haitang case: the top author earning 1.84 million was sentenced to four years six months, with the charging threshold as low as 10k illegal income plus 10k clicks), SFW being the hard red line; payment through licensed channel Payoneer (on KDP’s official PSP list), never underground money changers; tax-wise W-8BEN uses the ID number as Foreign TIN, pressing the treaty withholding from thirty percent to ten. The copyright dimension clarified the truth of “exclusive”: exclusivity follows “work + signature,” not people and registration — RR/Patreon/KDP regular listing are never exclusive, the only exclusivity being the voluntarily checked KDP Select/KU (90-day auto-renewal, unpublishing doesn’t release, account-level breach consequences); while domestic signing basically requires first-publication unpublished, so a book can only pick one direction.

IV. Fourteen military rules and one roadside interception

The execution layer condensed into fourteen military rules, the first three being death-if-stepped-on level: one email for the whole chain, username as lifetime brand, one account per platform plus 2FA recovery codes saved; publishing layer: bots only produce drafts but humans always click upload (automated publishing violates ToS and必 triggers risk control), the AI-Generated label with no omissions, no script-style formatting, update rhythm better stable than explosive, stockpile ten to twenty chapters before starting, covers must not carry copyrighted characters; content layer: the SFW hard red line not loosened because “the platform allows it,” the foreshadow ledger is the lifeline, don’t skip the human layer. Two roadside interceptions were recorded: the user said “one book a day is fine” — held down by KDP’s two-per-week cap, platforms’ targeted cleanup of batch AI, and the reality that “a book listed isn’t a book read”; the correct mass-production target is chapters not books; the user said “forget multi-account, I’ll open two or three” — intercepted directly: RR’s this-year ban wave cleaned exactly alt-account mutual-boost chains, KDP is guilt-by-association, and multi-accounting is the only action in the whole route that actively walks into the ban judgment box; the legitimate multi-opening is “one account, many books” (RR has no substantive limit on book count, KDP has no title cap beyond two-per-week creation and about three-to-five pen-name quota) — accounts converge, assets diverge. The final act was the KDP identity verification page’s field-by-field guide: Full Name must be the ID-card pinyin not the pen name, and from this moment KDP=Payoneer=bank card three pinyins identical to the letter, birthday in US month/day/year, address per ID card not current residence.

Real coordinates

novel submission overseas roadmap AI creation platform policy Payoneer

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