Jessie Jiang and Simon Elegant report this week in Time about Chinese authors turning to online publishing to avoid censorship:
The tradition of online literature in China […] goes back to the mid-’90s, when the bulletin-board system, or BBS, first appeared on the Chinese Internet as a platform to share opinions and in many cases literary creations. “[…] I read my first online novel some 15 years ago on a BBS,” says Zhang Kangkang, a renowned novelist and vice chairwoman of the Chinese Writers Association. […T]he BBS still prevails in China today as a relatively free place to express dissidence, while no such leeway is allowed in the traditional media. The same rigid censorship that drove millions of users to BBS and other online forums likely also ushered many book readers into cyberspace. “All [print] books are required to go through three rounds of government-supervised editing, which could take months, before they can be published on the mainland,” says Zhang.
Launched in 2005, Shanda Literature controls over 90% of the country’s online novel market spread across three different websites. The sites’ users pay to read the content, but the fees are usually very low. As the Time article says, “[T]hey can access up to 75% of a book for free and pay only about 0.04 yuan (less than one cent) per 1,000 words for the rest of the book.” With a total user base of 25 million — which is growing at 10 million per year — the company earns an estimated 100 million yuan ($15 million) per year. That’s even with a seemingly negligible user fee and with sending half of the payments to the writers.
Standout books that find success online are being converted into print format, movies, and computer games. A fantasy novel called The Star Games sold its online game rights for 1 million yuan this past January.
Similar to Japan, China is now experiencing a growth trend in cell phone reading. Shanda Literature has plans to tap into this and is also working on a social networking site. There are also plans to include some professional authors, such as Yu Hua, in the mix of mostly amateur writers.
Photo by Robert S. Donovan, used under its Creative Commons license
