>>24671873
>and I also chew my fingernails just knowing it might not meet minimum specs to work.
Keep in mind that you're operating with a lot of unknown variables, and you don't want to mistake the forest for the trees or vice versa (the 'market' vs individual readers within the market).

Any given work of fiction (in this case, webnovel) is going to be exposed to a number of individual readers within a market, which comprise a subset of the total market: this is effectively random, with some shoutouts tipping the scale gently in one direction or another (ie, if you got a shoutout from casualfarmer, you're going to get a lot of soft cultivation fans looking at your work).

Of that set of individual readers, you can determine a "minimum" level of "quality" (in terms of say, prose (used as a VERY general term)) which won't turn off more than some fraction of the set. That minimum could be "every reader finds it tolerable" or "at least X number of readers find it tolerable" at the other extreme.

Additionally, there's the "hook factor," which is determined by the premise of the story and demographics of the characters and the details of the setting. This could be "hero must defeat the demon lord," "FeMC elf with big tits," and "isekai medieval !europe with magic system" as examples, respectively. Some subset of the set of readers exposed to your work will be "hooked" and they will make a quality judgment whether or not they can stand to read it. And of course, readers have different amounts of free time, and there is competition for that free time.

The unknown variables compound on each other until you get something like the Drake Equation, where there are simply too many unknowns to make a proper estimate.

Can you improve your odds by cleaning up your prose? Certainly. But you never know if your premise is so great and your hook so catchy that it's worth publishing even with not great prose. And then after launch, popular things tend to become more popular over time (the matthew effect, ie, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer), so initial successes or failures snowball. RS on RR compounds this effect.

In summary, it's mathematically impossible to know if what you have is "good enough." There are too many unknown variables. It's best to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, while doing the best you can with what you can control, and not taking it personally when something doesn't stick. Just keep trying until you get lucky. ONCE you've gotten lucky, you can keep the snowball rolling.