Read werewolf novels for $29.99 a week: KissNovel is another new mask for Chinese web-novel going global

KissNovel is an English romance novel app made by a Hong Kong company. It went live on Google Play at the end of July, got 27k installs in just over three months, and squeezed into #73 on the US Books Top Grossing chart. It has nothing new: the genres, paywall and ad buying are the same playbook Chinese web-novel going global has used for eight years, and its only more aggressive edge is pricing. Below: how it charted, where the money comes from, why it's now sliding, and whether you should follow.

Four one-star reviews in a single day

On Nov 4, 2026, KissNovel's US App Store page picked up four one-star reviews in a single day, all describing the same problem. One user, Goldielocks18, wrote: "There's no way to cancel the subscription in the app. It says to cancel in Apple subscriptions, but this app isn't listed there at all. Support never replies, I sent three messages, and even after deleting my account it kept charging me. I ended up freezing my card and calling my bank."

Another user, PerryProngs, said it more plainly: "It says you can cancel anytime, but it charges straight to your card, and you can't cancel it in Apple subscriptions the way it claims."

Scrolling further back, a UK user wrote in Oct 28: "Why so expensive? Only two options, $29.99 a week or $149 a year. My other apps cost less than half of this for a year. You can't buy coins on their own."

These reviews sum up KissNovel: readers get hooked on a story, pay for a weekly plan, then find they can't get out.

What it is

An app for reading English romance web novels. The store page lists 14 subgenres: billionaires, CEOs, werewolves, shapeshifters, vampires, mafia, arranged marriage, secret babies, enemies-to-lovers, second chances, revenge, hidden identities… Reviews name specific titles: "I Accepted My Alpha's Rejection While Carrying His Pup", "Paid to Leave, Pregnant with His Children", "Rejected at 17".

The books aren't long. One Australian user said "the longest book here is 14 chapters", another said "I was interested in a story, and it's very short". A few chapters are free; after that you need a subscription. Daily tasks earn a few rewards, but reviews repeatedly complain "the rewards are too small".

This is the same product GoodNovel, Dreame and WebNovel sell, with the same features: font size, night mode, bookshelf, daily tasks.

How big it is and how fast it's growing

On Google Play, cumulative installs reached 29 in Oct 21,235, and 6 in Nov 27,370. Over 8 days it added 6,135 installs, an average of 700 more per day. Ratings grew from 768 to 981.

The iOS version came about 7 weeks later, launching in Sep 14. The US store has 457 ratings at 4.2 stars, with 7 added in the last 91 days; UK 63, Australia 46, Canada 30 (App Store, 11-06). Its best ranks were #16 in New Zealand Books Free, #20 in Australia, and #27 in the UK, with #35 in Canada Books Top Grossing.

It charted on Top Grossing not because it sold much, but because the Books category has a low bar. On the US Play Books Top Grossing chart, KissNovel with 27k installs sits alongside GoodNovel (#4) and Dreame (#6), which have tens of millions of installs. Add a price of $29.99 a week, and only a few paying users are enough to push it into the top 80.

But momentum is fading. Over these 9 days, its US Books Free rank fell from 52 to 128, the UK from 35 to 104, Australia from 29 to 61, and Canada from 55 to 138. Daily new ratings dropped steadily from 44 to 12. Only the Top Grossing rank barely moved, staying between #62 and #75 (Google Play, 10-29 to 11-06). New users are shrinking while existing paying users are still being charged, a shape that looks like a campaign that was ramped up and is now being wound down (inference).

Who's behind it

The developer is Hong Kong Ruijiu Technology Co., Ltd., incorporated in October 2025, with an address in San Po Kong, Kowloon. The same company also runs a voice-room social app, "HiPlay", which launched on iOS in April this year. This is a very common pattern for Chinese teams going global through a Hong Kong entity: start with social, then move into web novels.

A small detail: its privacy policy says "Last updated: May 2024 17", a year and a half before the company was founded. The template was likely carried over from another product, suggesting the team probably built similar products before (inference).

The name is also worth noting. A leading brand in romance web-novel overseas expansion is "Kiss: Read & Write Romance," from Maple Interactive (part of China Literature). 36kr reported it as one of the top 30 Chinese non-game revenue earners going global. On TikTok, the #kissnovel hashtag was originally a promotion tag for Kiss's alt-account network. KissNovel takes both the brand term and the category term. Whether it's riding on Kiss's search traffic on purpose can't be verified.

Where users come from

It is almost certainly bought, but nothing traceable shows it under its own name.

The Google Ads Transparency Center returns nothing for the company name, product name or domain (11-05); the TikTok European ad library has nothing either (11-05); searching "kissnovel" in the Meta ad library shows 0 active US ads (11-06). Searching "kissnovel" on TikTok turns up mostly 2024 videos from Kiss telling viewers "Download Kiss app, search 6xxxx", plus GoodNovel and others' search-by-book-ID videos, none driving to KissNovel. Over the last 60 days there were zero mentions on X, no media coverage, and no discussion on Reddit.

Yet 700–800 installs a day and simultaneous charting across Play and iOS in four English-speaking markets does not look like organic traffic. The usual approach in this niche is to work through agencies that open accounts, or to use a pile of fake-persona Facebook pages posting "Read the full story here", which lead to a web reader that pushes readers to download the app at the hook, without naming the app in the copy. NovelBar, a similar app, works this way: multiple Facebook pages with purely numeric IDs run ads linking to website.novelbars.com/share/... KissNovel probably does the same (inference, not directly confirmed in an ad library).

Where the money comes from

There is only one revenue source: subscriptions. iOS reviews say there are two tiers, $29.99 a week and $149 a year; in the UK it's £20 a week. The Play listing's in-app purchase range is $5.99–149.99. One US review mentions buying 1,000 coin packs, so a coin tier may have existed or may exist only in some channels.

The key is the payment method. Many reviews say the subscription doesn't show in Apple's or Google's subscription management: "it charges straight to your card". One US user's advice: "If you subscribe with a credit card, they can't cancel it for you; subscribe through Apple so cancellation is in your hands." Others report being charged exchange-rate fees, a changed billing name, being charged $7 despite cancelling within the 19.99-day trial, and being charged a day early. In other words, it pushed a large share of users into off-store card payments rather than in-store purchases (inferred from reviews).

This is good for revenue: no store commission, and cancellation friction means weekly subscriptions keep billing for several extra weeks. It is bad for reputation: in the US iOS reviews of the past month, nearly all substantive reviews are one-star complaints about not being able to cancel, while five-star reviews are mostly one or two words like "Good", "Nice", "Great app". The three most-upvoted Play reviews (30, 18, 16 people marked "helpful") are all charge complaints too.

Who it's competing with

This isn't a blue ocean. English-language romance web fiction is one of the most mature categories for Chinese companies going global. It took off around 2018, and today about twenty to thirty of the top 80 spots on the US Google Play Books Top Grossing chart are in this genre (11-06):

KissNovel is itself a follower, and not even a big one among followers. New masks enter every month.

If it were you

Verdict: Worth understanding, but don't follow it. It charted on a playbook validated eight years ago and now crowded, plus a charge method that is already drawing widespread bad reviews; its own new installs are falling.

Who it suits: teams already doing web novels going global, with an existing content library and reader app, who will set up pages on Meta and buy ads. For them, KissNovel is just another data point: short books (a dozen chapters), only expensive weekly plans, Play before iOS.

Who it doesn't suit: solo indie developers and small teams without content. The cost of this business is not in the app but in content and ad buying: without thousands of romance books that hook readers, you have to buy rights, batch-translate, or use AI to write, and the latter two carry quality and platform-review risk. Without a sustained ad budget, you can't stay on the Books charts for even a week.

How to build it: If you must play here, don't build the hundredth werewolf romance app. The openings are in what nobody has done yet: first, languages not yet crowded (this type of app has far fewer Spanish, Portuguese, and German versions than English, but the leaders are already moving in). Second, do the "hooked by the story" moment cleanly: one-time purchase of a book, transparent pricing, payment inside the store, one-tap cancellation. Make KissNovel's bad reviews your selling point. This makes money more slowly than it does, but it lasts longer.

How to acquire users: There's only one path in this category: Meta and TikTok performance ads, with creatives built from the most intense scene in the story (rejected, betrayed, leaving pregnant), landing in a web reader where you ask for money or send them to the app once they reach the hook. First run a small English-market budget to prove the payback model, then add languages.

When is the window: For a copycat there is no window. This category is full. For KissNovel itself, the window depends on when Apple and Google start acting on complaints that subscriptions can't be cancelled.

What would mean we got it wrong: ① If in November its free-chart rank stops falling and daily new ratings climb back above 40, it means the growth isn't just buying traffic. The high-price short-book model can sustain itself, and the math is worth redoing. ② If a small team without a large content library gets an AI-written short romance into the Books top 50 in some non-English market, it means the content-cost barrier has been broken and small teams have a shot. ③ Conversely, if within one or two months it is delisted from stores or faces mass refunds, it means off-store billing has been shut down.