Naver Webtoon announced that the ‘2022 Greatest Contest on Earth’, the largest web novel contest in Korea, has concluded its five-month journey with the announcement of the winners of the second round of web novels.
Every year, Naver Webtoon discovers talented webtoon and web novel writers through the largest contest on earth. This year, a total of 75 award-winning works were selected in the web novel category, and a prize money of 1 billion won was paid to the authors. This contest, which was held over two rounds, received a total of 9,100 web novels, standing out as the largest web novel contest in Korea.
The grand prize works for the second round of the 2022 World’s Greatest Contest in the web novel category were writer Nora Kim’s ‘Instinctive Proposal’ (romance genre category) and writer Minibaragi’s ‘I Had My Enemy’s Baby’ (romance fantasy genre category). The grand prize for the romance genre went to ‘A Friendly Uninvited Guest’ (writer July’s Roro) and ‘Visible Love’ (writer Kang Hyeong-min), and in the romance fantasy genre, ‘I Became the Duke’s Cross-dressing Servant’ (writer Maybe Y) and ‘Incomplete Divorce’ ‘The End’ (writer Lasolle) was selected as the grand prize winner. In addition, a total of 34 web novels were selected as second-round winners, including excellence awards (4) and special selections (10) by genre.
The Greatest Contest on Earth supports the expansion of intellectual property rights (IP) in various ways, including publishing the winning work as an official web novel, producing it as a webtoon, and having it officially serialized on Naver Webtoon.
In fact, Naver Webtoon’s popular work ‘Marry My Husband’ is also based on the winner of the 2019 Greatest Contest on Earth. Thanks to the solid original work, the webtoon was translated into 9 languages in 8 months, exceeding 150 million global cumulative views. ‘Sister, in this life, I am the queen (Written/Illustrated/Original work: Omin/Themis/Repaljinf)’, which ranked high on Naver Webtoon’s popularity list after only 10 episodes, is also based on the winning web novel from the world’s largest contest. The original work, which depicts ‘The Graceful Revenge of a Lady of the Outcasts’, is a work that delicately depicts the era and the emotions of the characters, and has been downloaded over 25 million times.
Naver Web Novel General Manager Park Je-yeon said, “As the value of stories grows, web novels are reaching their heyday as original IP.” He added, “Naver Web Novel has been striving to discover writers by introducing Korea’s first web novel contest in 2013, and will continue to develop web novels.” “We will strive to expand the domestic web novel creation ecosystem by supporting various contests to expand the base.”
Source: Pangyo Techno Valley Official Newsroom
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