The engine is locked-in, so the author just provides the strings and switches. It’s basically a gamebook.
It’s funny you mentioned Dumas because his book The Count of Monte Cristo is a superb novel, but my goodness gracious, it’s always way longer re-reading it than you remember. It’s like your brain summarizes all the interesting parts and you forget that it takes 75 pages just to set him up (frame him) to get to prison and another 300 before he escapes.
As for Dickens, though, it’s become something of a permanent meme these days that he was paid by the word when he actually wasn’t. Don’t feel bad, I’ve heard that accusation from plenty of smart people in the field of English literature who really ought to know better.
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According to the link, he still had a set number of pages to fill each month, which explains the amount of filler and repetition. To be fair, Dickens’s novels were never meant to be “binged”; the intended way to read them is to stop at the cliffhanger at the end of each chapter and then wait a month until reading the next.
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Thanks for sharing your story. I’ll inform my coworkers and hope they can do something about that.
plz don’t get this wrong. We have already revised the contract and now you can choose paid by words as well as by chapter and more.
Thanks for letting us know about that. Actually we are a brand new and also independent department and we have revised our contract so it will be different. Novel and intfic essentially are two different media and we are well aware of that, so a different mode of payment is necessary.
The Writer Benefit page and Author’s Guidebook only talk about payment by word count.
They also don’t say anything about what’s in the “termination” clause…
Apparently, I’m not allowed to say anything more on the subject as doing so goes “against community standards”. Very well, so it goes. I’ll just conclude by saying I will tell every author I know to avoid your company 
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