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 — 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.

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.

Its income not only comes from readers’ content payment, but also from copyrights on the website's most popular works, such as “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.

An intellectual property frenzy
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 market have increasingly been dominated by from online novels adaptations.

For example, “The Journey of Flower”, a martial arts fantasy novel published on a literature website, Jinjiang wenxue city, in 2009, 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.