The story behind China’s online literature boom
The e-book market is exploding on China. According to official estimates, there were 353 million online literature readers by June 2017 and more than 90 percent of them — nearly 327 million — access literature through their mobile phones. Although the popularity of online literature means emerging authors have an opportunity to showcase their work to a growing audience, for some writers and readers alike, this new publishing model is creating some unforeseen negative effects.
One big indicator of this explosion in online readership has been the market value surge of China Literature, China’s biggest online literature platform and a subsidiary of IT giant Tecent. The company’s value skyrocketed in the Hong Kong stock market after its initial public offering in November, globalvoices.org wrote.
The company has a 70 percent share in China’s online literature market, with 9.6 million online works — primarily in the fantasy, palace-fighting, tomb-raiding, conspiracy, and romance genres — created by 6.4 million writers to serve an average of 192 million monthly users.
Its income not only comes from readers’ content payments, but also from copyrights on the website’s most popular works, such as the ‘Legend of Concubine Zhen Huan,’ ‘The Secret of the Grave Robber’ and ‘The Journey of Flower,’ which have been adapted into TV dramas.
The company claims China’s online literature market has become one of the world’s four biggest cultural moneymakers after Hollywood blockbusters, Japanese comics and South Korean idol TV dramas. Such rhetoric promotes the business of online literature as a national project that exhibits China’s commercial power.
In China, the copyright of a hot online novel can be sold for millions of yuan because a large fiction fan base can guarantee the popularity of an adapted TV series or a movie. In fact, in recent years, China’s TV and video markets have increasingly been dominated by online novel adaptations.
For example, ‘The Journey of Flower,’ a martial arts fantasy novel published on a literature website, has become one of China’s most successful works and later published in book form. The tale, about a god and goddess fated to kill each other, who then fall in love in the afterlife, has turned into a franchise that includes a video game, a movie and a hit television series that has become the first drama in China to pass 20 billion views online.
Popular writers who release their works on the China Literature platform must sign contracts with the company, stipulating copyright ownership in China Literature’s favor and listing a set of “self-censorship” guidelines that must be followed.
The contract writers are paid through a pyramid pay-forwords model which is highly exploitative as the algorithm allocates a higher pay rate per word and varies based on the popularity of the writer. In 2016, China Literature paid nearly RMB 1 billion yuan — approximately US$150 million — for 5.3 million writers, in which just over one hundred top authors gained more than 1 million yuan. The average payment was less than two hundred.
At the same time, the payment system does not encourage good quality work because writers tend to churn out large number of words in order to increase their income under the payfor-words model. Hence, a typical online novel contains one million Chinese characters or more. China Literature’s writers published a staggering 41.4 billion words in 2016.