The Story Behind China’s Online Literature Boom
The e-book market is exploding on mainland China. According to official estimates, there were 353 million online literature readers by June 2017 and more than 90 percent of them 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. 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, romance genres — created by 6.4 million writers to serve an average of 192 million monthly users.
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.
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-for-words model which is highly exploitative as the algorithm allocates a higher pay rate per word and varies based on the popularity of the writer.
Moreover, writing has become an interactive process with pressure from reader feedback dictating the creative writing process. To woo readers, many writers have to invent bizarre plots as well as update a few thousand characters every day, or readers cancel subscriptions.
Many writers argue that the monopoly problem has harmed the literature field. At the same time, the monopoly of online literature restricts readers’ choice, as the novel reading apps are full of contemporary online literature, whereas finding a copy of a classic novel is next to impossible.
