u/goodmore233

Hi everyone, this is Lucas. Today let's talk about an interesting topic: how Chinese web novels actually get "produced."

After more than two decades of development, the Chinese web novel industry has evolved into a fairly mature industry. Broadly speaking, this industry leans toward mass-producing "readable" stories rather than relying on a handful of top authors to create works that will be remembered. Its commercial logic is somewhat similar to Hollywood, and may differ significantly from the Western publishing industry that English-speaking readers are familiar with.

Before joining Wuxiaworld, I worked as an editor at one of China's top web novel platforms for over eight years. Through this article, I hope to give you a better understanding of this industry and answer some of the questions you might have. For instance:

How do authors talk themselves into churning out thousands of words every single day?

What do Chinese authors actually earn, and where does their money come from?

What role does AI play in the Chinese web novel industry?

Some Chinese companies have recently been launching overseas original-fiction businesses. If you're considering writing on those platforms, this article should give you something useful.

And if some of the details and stories along the way bring you a bit of fun, even better.

What follows is an introduction to how a piece of work goes from the idea stage, through the production line, to becoming a commodity that can be sold for money.

Suppose you're an author. You want to publish a novel on a Chinese web novel platform, and you'd like that novel to bring in a decent income. Here's what your work is about to go through. And I, as your editor, will be there at every stage to guide and assist you.

I. The Signing Stage

This is the first step, and also the most important — you need a contract. Almost all authors need to sign with a platform in order to gain visibility and a path to monetization. If you want to keep your work's full IP in your own hands rather than handing it over to a platform as your agent — sure, that's fine. But then how are readers going to actually see your work?

If you've decided to sign with a platform, here's the process:

1. Picking a platform. There are many platforms in the Chinese web novel industry, but in recent years most small and mid-sized platforms have scaled back their original web fiction business and pivoted toward short dramas and AI-animated dramas. Part of the reason is that they can't compete with the two giants, Qidian and Fanqie. Which platform you go to depends on your work's genre, style, and your own expectations. If you write female-oriented works, you can consider Jinjiang, or the female-oriented sites under established platforms like Qidian, Zongheng, and 17K. If you write male-oriented works and want readers to pay for your content, go to Qidian. If you want readers to read your book for free, go to Fanqie. If neither of these two appeals to you, you can also try Zongheng, 17K, Qimao, and other platforms.

2. Submitting your manuscript. You need to get your work in front of a platform editor. If they like what they see, you can talk about a contract. There are two ways to submit.

(a) Email submission. This is what's commonly called "neitou" (内投, internal submission). The author sends the opening of the work (usually 6,000–20,000 characters of actual text) along with an outline to an editor's email, or finds another way to get the manuscript onto the editor's computer. If the submission is accepted, the editor will get in touch about a contract. If it's rejected, try a different editor, or a different platform.

(b) Direct posting. If you can't be bothered with email back-and-forth with an editor, you can also just publish your work directly on the platform. Part of an editor's day-to-day job is to browse newly posted books on the site, looking for work worth signing. If an editor notices your novel, they'll reach out to you through the platform's DM system.

There's also a third path that new authors don't get to see: poaching. Editors will actively reach out to long-established authors and invite them to publish on their platform, offering very generous rates. This kind of poaching reached its peak in 2012–2013. At that time, Qidian's management and its capital backers had a falling-out, several founders left Qidian and started Chuangshi Chinese Web, and they pulled out their checkbooks to poach authors from their former employer. 

Well, you all know what happened next: Yuewen Group was formed, Qidian and Chuangshi were both folded into Yuewen, and these executives — along with the authors they'd poached — all went back.

3. Signing. Now we get to actually signing the contract. In the early days, contracts were paper: the author had to print the contract, sign it, mail it to the platform, the platform stamped it, and then mailed a copy back to the author. Pretty cumbersome. Now most contracts are signed electronically, which saves a lot of time for both authors and editors, and saves on shipping fees too.

Generally speaking, the platform provides a standard contract with fixed terms. The gist is: the author exclusively licenses the property rights of the work to the platform as agent, and during this period the platform pays for the use of that IP in some agreed-upon way. "Exclusive licensing" means that after signing, the author can't freely use their own IP either. The licensing has a term; when the contract expires, the author can take the rights back.

I have to say, Chinese web novel authors are usually the weaker party in this arrangement, and even top-tier authors aren't spared. Every time a major platform revises its contract terms, it sparks considerable controversy among authors.

By comparison, authors in the West and in Korea have it considerably easier when it comes to IP arrangements.

There are three main types of contracts.

(a) Revenue share contract. The most common type. The platform and the author split the work's electronic subscription revenue, as well as IP revenue, according to a set ratio.

(b) Flat-fee contract. The platform pays the author per character — usually calculated with a fixed payment amount per 1,000  characters. The payment is unrelated to the work's performance, which means: if the work flops, the platform still has to pay; if the work blows up, future income has nothing to do with the author. This kind of contract was more common a decade or so ago, often used to poach authors with high rates. Now it's much less common, because whether the work succeeds wildly or fails badly, one side ends up feeling cheated.

(c) Minimum guarantee contract (MGS). A hybrid of the two above. The author receives a guaranteed monthly income based on word count. If the work's earnings exceed a certain threshold (commonly known as "earning out the guarantee"), the platform pays additional income on top, calculated as revenue share. This contract type is used more by Zongheng and Qimao, because it guarantees a floor for the author's income while still offering a high ceiling, which helps attract experienced mid-tier authors to compete with the two giants Qidian and Fanqie.

On top of all this, the platform offers some additional perks — for example, if you update a certain number of characters every day in a given month, you get a few hundred RMB as a "daily-update bonus." This is income on top of what the contract specifies.

Once the contract is signed, you'll be assigned an editor, who will be responsible for the work's content adjustments and ongoing operations.

That said, on a platform like Fanqie, you might also get an AI as your editor — a bot called "Fanfan." Fanqie now has an enormous number of works, and signing is very easy. Most of these works are actually signed with this AI rather than with a human editor, especially for new authors.

Fanqie is a free-to-read platform, and its parent company is ByteDance — the developer of the well-known Chinese LLM "Doubao." This platform doesn't shy away from AI. At one point, it added a clause to its user agreement stating that authors acknowledged and permitted the platform to use their works to train AI, which provoked a lot of angry reactions from authors. These days, you can see AI-heavily-involved works all over the platform — well, reading these books is free anyway.

II. The Launch Stage

After signing, you can start preparing to publish your work. Some works have actually already been posted on the platform before signing. At this stage, your editor will help you make your work look as enticing as possible.

1. Book title. I don't think I need to explain how important this is. Book titles in the early years tended to be short, especially in genres like xuanhuan and xianxia, where four-character titles were preferred. Later, with the rise of Feilu, long book titles started appearing on the scene. These titles usually follow a "genre + ': (colon)' + hook" format and often run more than ten characters. Long titles are more direct, and convey more information. When a batch of book titles is displayed in the same spot on a site, a long title is more likely to catch a reader's attention.

The side effect, of course, is obvious. This kind of title easily gives readers a "gaudy" or "unserious" first impression. Readers who don't enjoy this style will see the title and walk away immediately.

Fanqie is the expert at title-tweaking. The good works on this platform usually come with several long titles plus one four-character formal-sounding short title. They push different titles to different users based on user profiles. So if you try to search for a book by title on Fanqie, you probably won't find it — the book might not even be called that name on your app. Readers generally find specific works by searching for the author's name.

If your title looks dull, the editor will help you come up with a better one.

When I was working as an editor, there was no AI to fall back on. Helping authors come up with titles nearly made me go bald. I'm not sure whether people use AI for title generation these days, but it seems like it should work — a lot of the time, a book title is really just a permutation of a few keywords.

2. Synopsis. A short paragraph that introduces the core selling points of the story, sometimes coming off as a bit over-the-top. Even though it's called a "synopsis," it's not really a brief summary of the plot — it's a piece of marketing copy. I remember a user on Reddit once complaining about Chinese novels' synopses, saying that some works stuff a bunch of cool-sounding elements into the synopsis, but you can hardly find any of those elements in the actual text. I think they have a point.

If you don't know how to write a synopsis, you can ask your editor for help. Honestly, writing a synopsis is much easier than coming up with a title, and you can revise it at any time.

3. Cover. Most of the time, the covers of Chinese web novels are not particularly polished. Especially male-oriented works.

In the early years, most covers were made by taking a stock image, then layering on the book title, the author's pen name, and the platform logo. Making a cover was easy — there were plenty of online shops offering this service, with their own libraries of stock images for the author to choose from. Authors could also just grab images off the internet themselves. Whether those stock images had commercial usage rights was anyone's guess. The most basic cover only cost about 5 RMB. Some platforms were willing to provide covers for their authors, but they were done the same way — outsourcing to designers for batch production. For a few important works, the platform's in-house art designer would create something specifically for that book, to ensure uniqueness and clean copyright.

That said, in any era there are people who go their own way. For example, Angry Banana's My Heroic Husband — the author drew a very crude cover himself on a drawing tablet. The cover of Yuan Tong's The Record of Unusual Creatures was made by the author himself in Word.

As awareness around IP grew, some platforms began making a deliberate effort to avoid using copyright-questionable stock images. They built their own (presumably copyright-clean) stock libraries and provided online tools so authors could pick images from the library and generate covers on their own. This is why, in a certain period, you'd see several books on the same Qidian page using the exact same image as their cover.

By now, the vast majority of covers are AI-generated. The cost is very low, and authors can shape covers according to their own vision. Most readers read novels on their phone apps, where the cover image is the size of a fingernail — no one notices whether the cover was hand-painted or AI-generated. Even if they do know it's AI-generated, they don't care.

This is very different from how readers in the West feel about it.

Very few Chinese authors commission a hand-painted cover from an artist. For a new author, this is a luxury — a lot of the time, a novel's total income won't even cover the price of one commissioned cover.

These days, if you need a cover, your editor will either ask you to use AI to make one yourself, or they'll make one for you. Of course, if you really object to this, or you've got money to spare, you can also hire an artist to draw one.

4. New-book launch activities.

For some well-known authors, when they release a new book, the platform will set up a dedicated activity page to promote it, usually with extra fan interactions, giveaways, and so on. Qidian's Platinum Authors, Zongheng's Master Authors, and Grandmaster Authors typically get this kind of treatment. For more on author rankings, see my other post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/1piqro3/an_overview_of_chinas_webnovel_author_rankings/

III. The Operations Stage

Once the work is successfully launched, you and your editor need to think about how to make it stand out in the platform's enormous library. Of course, if you don't have an editor, you're on your own.

1. The work's data. Without a doubt, the most important metric is the work's revenue. But for the vast majority of works, the new-book window doesn't make any money. Chinese editors and operations teams rely on a work's other data to assess its potential. This data is also a key basis for how many promotion resources a work can get in its early days.

Paid platforms like Qidian primarily look at library adds and follow-read data. This refers to how many readers, during the new-book window, have added the work to their bookshelves, and how many readers with recent paying behavior actually read the latest chapter within 24 hours of it being updated.

Follow-read data from non-paying users has limited reference value, because once the work starts charging, those users probably aren't going to pay either.

Free platforms like Fanqie and Qimao care more about user retention — at a given word-count milestone, how many users are still actively reading. Free platforms push works to readers actively, rather than relying on readers to search for works themselves. A work with high retention means more efficient promotion, longer reading time, and therefore more ad impressions. These platforms make money primarily by serving ads inside works, with advertisers as their source of income.

To get accurate data on a work, free platforms run several rounds of tests. When a work hits a certain word count, the platform pushes it to a set number of users to observe how it performs. If the work passes all these test rounds, it gets added to a high-quality work pool, which means more exposure and promotion opportunities going forward. If the data doesn't make the cut — most likely, the work is eliminated. Works under MGS contracts will be asked to wrap up early; works under revenue share can keep going — but they won't get much exposure either.

2. Rankings. This is a public ranking system, open to any work that hits the data thresholds. The common rankings include:

(a) New-book ranking. Only shows new books, usually those published in the last month and under 300,000 characters. This is also the most accessible ranking for new authors. That said, if a wave of veteran authors releases books in the same period, the competition gets fierce.

(b) Recommendation vote ranking. Reflects how much support readers are giving a work. Since all registered users get a certain number of recommendation votes for free, this ranking's prestige isn't particularly high.

(c) Monthly ticket ranking. Reflects support from paying users. Users get a number of monthly tickets after spending a certain amount on the platform each month. Sometimes they can also get extra monthly tickets by tipping a work.

(d) Sales ranking. Reflects a work's actual earnings. Qidian's sales ranking updates in real time, showing how a work has sold in the last 24 hours, so it shifts very quickly. If a work consistently sits in the top spots on the sales ranking, its status is unquestionable.

Some platforms also have other types of rankings, many of which I don't actually know the underlying data algorithm for. Some of them might be curated manually by editors and operations — they look like rankings but really function as promotion slots.

It's worth noting that ranking data doesn't fully reflect a work's true quality, because authors can manipulate rankings, or organize their readers to do so. In the early years, watching two top-tier authors fight for first place on the monthly ticket ranking was a great spectacle for readers. Of course, on a big platform like Qidian, manipulating rankings does require some financial muscle. In other words, ranking manipulation is itself part of how the ranking game works.

If you're interested in how rankings work in detail, take a look at Webnovel. That platform's rankings are basically a copy-paste of Qidian's system.

3. Promotion slots.

On a platform's website and app, you can see all sorts of works displayed at various positions. These positions are the promotion slots — where works get shown to readers.

On paid platforms like Qidian, Zongheng, and 17K, the works displayed in promotion slots are fixed, curated by editors and operations. Qidian has a lot of books and a fixed number of promotion slots, so there's fierce competition between works. Of course, every editor has a certain amount of resources at their disposal, and if your work is good enough, your editor will fight for you.

Free platforms like Fanqie and Qimao rely much more on algorithm-driven personalized recommendations. The platform analyzes a reader's preferences and pushes a curated batch of works to their app. Works with high retention are, naturally, more likely to be pushed.

Qidian used to have a fairly well-developed "PK" mechanism: new books would be displayed in fixed slots, then go through multiple rounds of PK based on follow-read and library-add data. Winners advanced. The process was relatively transparent. Last year, to fend off the impact of free platforms, they tried changing the recommendation mechanism — they removed the fixed display slots and switched to algorithm-driven personalized recommendations based on user preferences, the same logic free platforms use. It didn't work out. Earlier this year, tensions between authors and the platform finally erupted, with several well-known authors leading the charge and publicly criticizing the new mechanism for its opacity and data manipulation. In the end, Qidian rolled back to the original mechanism.

IV. Money Time!

After round after round of competition, your work has finally made it. That means it's time to make money.

1. Electronic subscriptions.

On paid platforms, works typically start charging at around the 200,000-character mark (some earlier, some later). The standard subscription price is 5 cents RMB per thousand characters. This price hasn't changed in many years. Currently, the highest-subscribed work on Qidian is Lord of the Mysteries, with an average of over 300,000 subscriptions per chapter. That means for every thousand characters he writes, his works will generate more than RMB 15,000 in revenue for the platform. 

The more you update, the more you earn. Chinese authors typically update over 4,000 characters a day, and some go past 10,000. The most famous "king of updates" is Eagle Eats Chicken, author of Tribulation of Myriad Races, who in the pre-AI era could write 17,000 characters a day.

These days, if a work updates particularly fast, it's hard not to suspect AI is involved. Not long ago on Qidian there was a book pulling more than 30,000 characters a day in updates, climbing up the rankings on update count alone. It got caught using AI pretty quickly and was disciplined.

Free platforms calculate royalties based on a work's reading volume and reading time. The unit rate fluctuates with ad pricing and other factors. The "more updates equals more earnings" logic applies to free platforms too.

The above all refers to revenue share works. For MGS works, the author first receives word-count royalties at the guaranteed rate; if the work's earnings hit the threshold, additional income is calculated as revenue share.

In addition, third-party channel income is also an important part of an author's royalties. Fanqie, as the largest-traffic platform, integrates a large number of CP works (content from other content providers), such as 17K. So you can see works from many different platforms on Fanqie. The channel side splits revenue proportionally with the work's home platform, and the platform then settles royalties with the author.

Some channels deliver remarkable traffic. While I Have a Sword was serializing on Fanqie's channels, on Azure Phoenix Peak's monthly royalties at one point exceeded 2 million RMB, most of it coming from channel income.

Around 2014–2015, with the widespread adoption of smartphones, mobile reading took off rapidly. Riding on Android's pre-installed apps ecosystem, a large number of novel apps appeared on the market. These platforms didn't really produce much content themselves; they imported content from other sources and acted as distributors. The mobile reading market in that period was thriving but lawless — such as developed more than a dozen platforms and kept sublicensing the imported content among its own sub-platforms, taking a cut at each handoff. By the time the original content provider got paid, they might be getting less than 10% of revenue. And what reached the author was even less. These days, channels are generally required to provide detailed sales data, so this kind of thing is much harder to pull off.

By the way, most Chinese web novel platforms have a tipping or donation system. Readers can directly spend money to support a novel, and the amount donated is split between the author and the platform according to a predetermined revenue-sharing ratio—yes, the platform takes a cut.

These platforms also typically feature a ranking page that displays how much users have spent on a particular title. The users at the top of these rankings are often the biggest supporters, having spent substantial amounts of money backing the work.

2. IP monetization.

Besides electronic reading, the author and platform can also sell IP rights. Sometimes IP sales can be very lucrative. The main types are as follows:

(a) Game adaptations. Around 2015, the Chinese gaming market entered a "money for the taking" era. Massive amounts of capital flowed into the gaming industry, and game companies, flush with investor money, went on a rights-buying spree. A well-known novel's game adaptation rights could go for over 10 million RMB. At the time, a lot of platforms were willing to offer top-tier authors high rates — there was no way to recoup that purely through electronic subscriptions, but if the IP could be sold, that meant several times the profit. And this stuff isn't a one-time sale either — it can be resold.

Later, the gaming industry started contracting, and client-side MMOs basically died. Regulation also tightened, and shoddy cash-grab games could no longer easily secure publishing licenses.

There are some works that sold their game adaptation rights for high prices back then, but the games still haven't started development to this day. Those rights are probably going to die on the shelf.

If they drag on any longer, the rights will expire.

(b) Live-action film&drama/ donghua / manhua adaptations.

I'm grouping these together mainly because I'm equally unfamiliar with all three of these industries. Among them, live-action adaptation rights are the most expensive, but not many subjects can actually be adapted into live action — China's regulation on this is strict. Donghua was very active a few years ago, and a number of excellent works came out of it, like A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality. Donghua can adapt works from all kinds of genres, and the review process isn't as strict as for live action. Of course, plenty of donghua adaptations have flopped too, getting torn apart by fans of the original. Manhua is probably the most common, because there are no genre restrictions, it's easy to adapt, and many manhua adaptations have been translated and exported overseas. Platforms like Tapas have brought in a lot of manhua adaptations of Chinese web novels.

As for licensing fees, a lot of that information isn't public, and I don't know that much about it. I once signed a work that successfully got a donghua adaptation. The amount paid out to the author was equivalent to several years of my salary as an editor.

(c) Short drama / AI-animated drama adaptations.

These two are products of the short-video platform era, and they don't really count as traditional film and TV. In fact, short dramas and AI-animated dramas are spinoffs of the web novel industry — their early content was heavily dependent on existing web novels. Licensing fees usually aren't very high, but many of these are non-exclusive licenses, meaning a single work can be adapted into several different short dramas or AI-animated dramas.

In the past two years, a large number of Chinese web novel companies have pivoted toward short dramas and AI-animated dramas. The domestic market is approaching saturation, so they've started moving into overseas markets. If you're interested, feel free to check it out yourself — I'll skip the details here.

(d) Audiobooks.

This is the most common source of IP income. Some users prefer listening to a book over reading it on their phone, and audiobooks have always had a substantial market in China. The licensing fees for audiobook adaptations aren't high, but the bar is low, and a lot of upper-mid-tier works have a shot at getting picked up for an audiobook.

(e) Overseas translation.

Thanks to cultural proximity, Chinese web novels have always performed well in Southeast Asia. Works get translated into Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and so on. In the English market, more of what's being translated right now is female-oriented work. There aren't many companies actively translating male-oriented work into English.

That said, if your work is good enough to catch the eye of a guy named Lucas from Wuxiaworld, then if all goes well, your work will end up on this platform, with multiple translators, editors, and project managers pouring their hearts into it. Your editor will tell you that your work has successfully sold its English translation rights, and on your next royalty payment, you'll see an extra sum of money.

(f) Print publication.

Alright, I have to admit, getting a web novel published in print is hard, especially male-oriented works. They tend to be very long, which means high cost and a long publishing cycle. Plus, web novels often contain content that publishers consider "inappropriate for the times." Even a great work like Lord of the Mysteries couldn't escape being edited down during publication.

Even if a work does get published, the author and the platform probably won't make much money from it. It's more about prestige and recognition. And if you want to join one of the various writers' associations, having a print-published work helps a lot.

V. Success, or Failure?

In the end, the dust settles. Your work has been completed. You may have made money, or you may not have. As an author, please welcome your ending.

1. Entering the palace and becoming a eunuch.

This is a slang term commonly used in the Chinese web novel industry, meaning that the author has stopped writing and abandoned the work. The expression comes from a joke.
“下面呢？”“没有了。”(What’s next? nothing .)

It’s a pun in Chinese. The phrase “下面” (xiàmian) can mean “below” or “underneath,” it can also mean “what comes next,” and, in certain contexts, it can even refer euphemistically to a man's private parts.

For new authors, becoming a eunuch is a pretty common choice. A lot of the time, the work isn't performing well, and it just can't deliver the kind of income that satisfies the author. As an editor, I've seen this happen plenty of times. And it's hard for me to really push the author to keep going — because their book genuinely isn't making money.

In fact, before I became an editor, I was once a eunuch too. In 2015, I wrote a Western fantasy novel. After it started charging, it had only ten paying readers. That meant if I wrote 6,000 characters a day, I'd only earn the price of a bowl of instant noodles. I realized writing books wasn't going to feed me — but at least I'd read a lot of books, so I went and became an editor instead.

Some well-known authors also turn eunuch. Not because they can't make money, but because their creativity has hit a wall, or simply because they don't feel like writing anymore. The most famous eunuch is Feng Huo Xi Zhu Hou, the author of Unsheathed. He's written many books in the past, each one ending abruptly halfway, and then after a while readers find that he's released a brand new one. Lots of readers have waved cash at him begging him to finish the story, but he doesn't budge. Readers gave him a nickname: "Chief of the Imperial Eunuchs" — i.e., the head of all the eunuchs. These days, when Chinese readers refer to him, they call him "the Chief" instead of his actual pen name.

Becoming a eunuch isn't anything shameful. You fall down, you get back up, change the genre, change the story, start over.

2. Staying mortal, but going one step further.

In my experience, less than a third of new authors successfully finish a complete work.

If you stick it out and finish an entire work — then, regardless of whether or not it made you a lot of money, you have already succeeded. Congratulations, you now have a complete work of your own, and you've gained experience throughout the creative process. This is going to be a good foundation for your writing journey.

Keep going. Finish one book, then start another. You'll get better and better. Many top-tier authors were once unknown, but after a few books of accumulated experience, they found the path that belonged to them.

In the end, they made their mark.

3. Attaining the Dao, becoming immortal.

For a new author, climbing to the top with your debut work is extremely difficult.

First, you have to stand out from a crowd of newcomers. The fact is, your competition isn't just other newcomers — there are also plenty of "reincarnated old monsters" disguised as newcomers (veteran authors writing under a new pen name) and "heavenly demons from beyond" (well-known authors from other platforms, especially from Feilu).

Then, you need to claw your way up to the front of the rankings, and face off against the "Nascent Soul elders" who've been sitting there for years, proving with your own strength that you have a right to be here.

And finally, the most important thing: you need recognition and support from tens of thousands of readers.

It is indeed difficult, but difficult doesn't mean impossible. Because someone has actually done it. For example, Ji Yueren, the author of The Mirror Legacy.

A final note: The content of this article comes from my years of editing experience and reflections. I hope it's been helpful to you. Due to length constraints, there's a lot I couldn't really go into in detail. If there's any content you'd like to discuss further, or any topic you'd like me to cover, feel free to comment below.

Hi everyone, this is Lucas. Today let's talk about an interesting topic: how Chinese web novels actually get "produced."

After more than two decades of development, the Chinese web novel industry has evolved into a fairly mature industry. Broadly speaking, this industry leans toward mass-producing "readable" stories rather than relying on a handful of top authors to create works that will be remembered. Its commercial logic is somewhat similar to Hollywood, and may differ significantly from the Western publishing industry that English-speaking readers are familiar with.

Before joining Wuxiaworld, I worked as an editor at one of China's top web novel platforms for over eight years. Through this article, I hope to give you a better understanding of this industry and answer some of the questions you might have. For instance:

How do authors talk themselves into churning out thousands of words every single day?

What do Chinese authors actually earn, and where does their money come from?

What role does AI play in the Chinese web novel industry?

Some Chinese companies have recently been launching overseas original-fiction businesses. If you're considering writing on those platforms, this article should give you something useful.

And if some of the details and stories along the way bring you a bit of fun, even better.

What follows is an introduction to how a piece of work goes from the idea stage, through the production line, to becoming a commodity that can be sold for money.

Suppose you're an author. You want to publish a novel on a Chinese web novel platform, and you'd like that novel to bring in a decent income. Here's what your work is about to go through. And I, as your editor, will be there at every stage to guide and assist you.

I. The Signing Stage

This is the first step, and also the most important — you need a contract. Almost all authors need to sign with a platform in order to gain visibility and a path to monetization. If you want to keep your work's full IP in your own hands rather than handing it over to a platform as your agent — sure, that's fine. But then how are readers going to actually see your work?

If you've decided to sign with a platform, here's the process:

1. Picking a platform. There are many platforms in the Chinese web novel industry, but in recent years most small and mid-sized platforms have scaled back their original web fiction business and pivoted toward short dramas and AI-animated dramas. Part of the reason is that they can't compete with the two giants, Qidian and Fanqie. Which platform you go to depends on your work's genre, style, and your own expectations. If you write female-oriented works, you can consider Jinjiang, or the female-oriented sites under established platforms like Qidian, Zongheng, and 17K. If you write male-oriented works and want readers to pay for your content, go to Qidian. If you want readers to read your book for free, go to Fanqie. If neither of these two appeals to you, you can also try Zongheng, 17K, Qimao, and other platforms.

2. Submitting your manuscript. You need to get your work in front of a platform editor. If they like what they see, you can talk about a contract. There are two ways to submit.

(a) Email submission. This is what's commonly called "neitou" (内投, internal submission). The author sends the opening of the work (usually 6,000–20,000 characters of actual text) along with an outline to an editor's email, or finds another way to get the manuscript onto the editor's computer. If the submission is accepted, the editor will get in touch about a contract. If it's rejected, try a different editor, or a different platform.

(b) Direct posting. If you can't be bothered with email back-and-forth with an editor, you can also just publish your work directly on the platform. Part of an editor's day-to-day job is to browse newly posted books on the site, looking for work worth signing. If an editor notices your novel, they'll reach out to you through the platform's DM system.

There's also a third path that new authors don't get to see: poaching. Editors will actively reach out to long-established authors and invite them to publish on their platform, offering very generous rates. This kind of poaching reached its peak in 2012–2013. At that time, Qidian's management and its capital backers had a falling-out, several founders left Qidian and started Chuangshi Chinese Web, and they pulled out their checkbooks to poach authors from their former employer. 

Well, you all know what happened next: Yuewen Group was formed, Qidian and Chuangshi were both folded into Yuewen, and these executives — along with the authors they'd poached — all went back.

3. Signing. Now we get to actually signing the contract. In the early days, contracts were paper: the author had to print the contract, sign it, mail it to the platform, the platform stamped it, and then mailed a copy back to the author. Pretty cumbersome. Now most contracts are signed electronically, which saves a lot of time for both authors and editors, and saves on shipping fees too.

Generally speaking, the platform provides a standard contract with fixed terms. The gist is: the author exclusively licenses the property rights of the work to the platform as agent, and during this period the platform pays for the use of that IP in some agreed-upon way. "Exclusive licensing" means that after signing, the author can't freely use their own IP either. The licensing has a term; when the contract expires, the author can take the rights back.

I have to say, Chinese web novel authors are usually the weaker party in this arrangement, and even top-tier authors aren't spared. Every time a major platform revises its contract terms, it sparks considerable controversy among authors.

By comparison, authors in the West and in Korea have it considerably easier when it comes to IP arrangements.

There are three main types of contracts.

(a) Revenue share contract. The most common type. The platform and the author split the work's electronic subscription revenue, as well as IP revenue, according to a set ratio.

(b) Flat-fee contract. The platform pays the author per character — usually calculated with a fixed payment amount per 1,000  characters. The payment is unrelated to the work's performance, which means: if the work flops, the platform still has to pay; if the work blows up, future income has nothing to do with the author. This kind of contract was more common a decade or so ago, often used to poach authors with high rates. Now it's much less common, because whether the work succeeds wildly or fails badly, one side ends up feeling cheated.

(c) Minimum guarantee contract (MGS). A hybrid of the two above. The author receives a guaranteed monthly income based on word count. If the work's earnings exceed a certain threshold (commonly known as "earning out the guarantee"), the platform pays additional income on top, calculated as revenue share. This contract type is used more by Zongheng and Qimao, because it guarantees a floor for the author's income while still offering a high ceiling, which helps attract experienced mid-tier authors to compete with the two giants Qidian and Fanqie.

On top of all this, the platform offers some additional perks — for example, if you update a certain number of characters every day in a given month, you get a few hundred RMB as a "daily-update bonus." This is income on top of what the contract specifies.

Once the contract is signed, you'll be assigned an editor, who will be responsible for the work's content adjustments and ongoing operations.

That said, on a platform like Fanqie, you might also get an AI as your editor — a bot called "Fanfan." Fanqie now has an enormous number of works, and signing is very easy. Most of these works are actually signed with this AI rather than with a human editor, especially for new authors.

Fanqie is a free-to-read platform, and its parent company is ByteDance — the developer of the well-known Chinese LLM "Doubao." This platform doesn't shy away from AI. At one point, it added a clause to its user agreement stating that authors acknowledged and permitted the platform to use their works to train AI, which provoked a lot of angry reactions from authors. These days, you can see AI-heavily-involved works all over the platform — well, reading these books is free anyway.

II. The Launch Stage

After signing, you can start preparing to publish your work. Some works have actually already been posted on the platform before signing. At this stage, your editor will help you make your work look as enticing as possible.

1. Book title. I don't think I need to explain how important this is. Book titles in the early years tended to be short, especially in genres like xuanhuan and xianxia, where four-character titles were preferred. Later, with the rise of Feilu, long book titles started appearing on the scene. These titles usually follow a "genre + ': (colon)' + hook" format and often run more than ten characters. Long titles are more direct, and convey more information. When a batch of book titles is displayed in the same spot on a site, a long title is more likely to catch a reader's attention.

The side effect, of course, is obvious. This kind of title easily gives readers a "gaudy" or "unserious" first impression. Readers who don't enjoy this style will see the title and walk away immediately.

Fanqie is the expert at title-tweaking. The good works on this platform usually come with several long titles plus one four-character formal-sounding short title. They push different titles to different users based on user profiles. So if you try to search for a book by title on Fanqie, you probably won't find it — the book might not even be called that name on your app. Readers generally find specific works by searching for the author's name.

If your title looks dull, the editor will help you come up with a better one.

When I was working as an editor, there was no AI to fall back on. Helping authors come up with titles nearly made me go bald. I'm not sure whether people use AI for title generation these days, but it seems like it should work — a lot of the time, a book title is really just a permutation of a few keywords.

2. Synopsis. A short paragraph that introduces the core selling points of the story, sometimes coming off as a bit over-the-top. Even though it's called a "synopsis," it's not really a brief summary of the plot — it's a piece of marketing copy. I remember a user on Reddit once complaining about Chinese novels' synopses, saying that some works stuff a bunch of cool-sounding elements into the synopsis, but you can hardly find any of those elements in the actual text. I think they have a point.

If you don't know how to write a synopsis, you can ask your editor for help. Honestly, writing a synopsis is much easier than coming up with a title, and you can revise it at any time.

3. Cover. Most of the time, the covers of Chinese web novels are not particularly polished. Especially male-oriented works.

In the early years, most covers were made by taking a stock image, then layering on the book title, the author's pen name, and the platform logo. Making a cover was easy — there were plenty of online shops offering this service, with their own libraries of stock images for the author to choose from. Authors could also just grab images off the internet themselves. Whether those stock images had commercial usage rights was anyone's guess. The most basic cover only cost about 5 RMB. Some platforms were willing to provide covers for their authors, but they were done the same way — outsourcing to designers for batch production. For a few important works, the platform's in-house art designer would create something specifically for that book, to ensure uniqueness and clean copyright.

That said, in any era there are people who go their own way. For example, Angry Banana's My Heroic Husband — the author drew a very crude cover himself on a drawing tablet. The cover of Yuan Tong's The Record of Unusual Creatures was made by the author himself in Word.

As awareness around IP grew, some platforms began making a deliberate effort to avoid using copyright-questionable stock images. They built their own (presumably copyright-clean) stock libraries and provided online tools so authors could pick images from the library and generate covers on their own. This is why, in a certain period, you'd see several books on the same Qidian page using the exact same image as their cover.

By now, the vast majority of covers are AI-generated. The cost is very low, and authors can shape covers according to their own vision. Most readers read novels on their phone apps, where the cover image is the size of a fingernail — no one notices whether the cover was hand-painted or AI-generated. Even if they do know it's AI-generated, they don't care.

This is very different from how readers in the West feel about it.

Very few Chinese authors commission a hand-painted cover from an artist. For a new author, this is a luxury — a lot of the time, a novel's total income won't even cover the price of one commissioned cover.

These days, if you need a cover, your editor will either ask you to use AI to make one yourself, or they'll make one for you. Of course, if you really object to this, or you've got money to spare, you can also hire an artist to draw one.

4. New-book launch activities.

For some well-known authors, when they release a new book, the platform will set up a dedicated activity page to promote it, usually with extra fan interactions, giveaways, and so on. Qidian's Platinum Authors, Zongheng's Master Authors, and Grandmaster Authors typically get this kind of treatment. For more on author rankings, see my other post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/1piqro3/an_overview_of_chinas_webnovel_author_rankings/

III. The Operations Stage

Once the work is successfully launched, you and your editor need to think about how to make it stand out in the platform's enormous library. Of course, if you don't have an editor, you're on your own.

1. The work's data. Without a doubt, the most important metric is the work's revenue. But for the vast majority of works, the new-book window doesn't make any money. Chinese editors and operations teams rely on a work's other data to assess its potential. This data is also a key basis for how many promotion resources a work can get in its early days.

Paid platforms like Qidian primarily look at library adds and follow-read data. This refers to how many readers, during the new-book window, have added the work to their bookshelves, and how many readers with recent paying behavior actually read the latest chapter within 24 hours of it being updated.

Follow-read data from non-paying users has limited reference value, because once the work starts charging, those users probably aren't going to pay either.

Free platforms like Fanqie and Qimao care more about user retention — at a given word-count milestone, how many users are still actively reading. Free platforms push works to readers actively, rather than relying on readers to search for works themselves. A work with high retention means more efficient promotion, longer reading time, and therefore more ad impressions. These platforms make money primarily by serving ads inside works, with advertisers as their source of income.

To get accurate data on a work, free platforms run several rounds of tests. When a work hits a certain word count, the platform pushes it to a set number of users to observe how it performs. If the work passes all these test rounds, it gets added to a high-quality work pool, which means more exposure and promotion opportunities going forward. If the data doesn't make the cut — most likely, the work is eliminated. Works under MGS contracts will be asked to wrap up early; works under revenue share can keep going — but they won't get much exposure either.

2. Rankings. This is a public ranking system, open to any work that hits the data thresholds. The common rankings include:

(a) New-book ranking. Only shows new books, usually those published in the last month and under 300,000 characters. This is also the most accessible ranking for new authors. That said, if a wave of veteran authors releases books in the same period, the competition gets fierce.

(b) Recommendation vote ranking. Reflects how much support readers are giving a work. Since all registered users get a certain number of recommendation votes for free, this ranking's prestige isn't particularly high.

(c) Monthly ticket ranking. Reflects support from paying users. Users get a number of monthly tickets after spending a certain amount on the platform each month. Sometimes they can also get extra monthly tickets by tipping a work.

(d) Sales ranking. Reflects a work's actual earnings. Qidian's sales ranking updates in real time, showing how a work has sold in the last 24 hours, so it shifts very quickly. If a work consistently sits in the top spots on the sales ranking, its status is unquestionable.

Some platforms also have other types of rankings, many of which I don't actually know the underlying data algorithm for. Some of them might be curated manually by editors and operations — they look like rankings but really function as promotion slots.

It's worth noting that ranking data doesn't fully reflect a work's true quality, because authors can manipulate rankings, or organize their readers to do so. In the early years, watching two top-tier authors fight for first place on the monthly ticket ranking was a great spectacle for readers. Of course, on a big platform like Qidian, manipulating rankings does require some financial muscle. In other words, ranking manipulation is itself part of how the ranking game works.

If you're interested in how rankings work in detail, take a look at Webnovel. That platform's rankings are basically a copy-paste of Qidian's system.

3. Promotion slots.

On a platform's website and app, you can see all sorts of works displayed at various positions. These positions are the promotion slots — where works get shown to readers.

On paid platforms like Qidian, Zongheng, and 17K, the works displayed in promotion slots are fixed, curated by editors and operations. Qidian has a lot of books and a fixed number of promotion slots, so there's fierce competition between works. Of course, every editor has a certain amount of resources at their disposal, and if your work is good enough, your editor will fight for you.

Free platforms like Fanqie and Qimao rely much more on algorithm-driven personalized recommendations. The platform analyzes a reader's preferences and pushes a curated batch of works to their app. Works with high retention are, naturally, more likely to be pushed.

Qidian used to have a fairly well-developed "PK" mechanism: new books would be displayed in fixed slots, then go through multiple rounds of PK based on follow-read and library-add data. Winners advanced. The process was relatively transparent. Last year, to fend off the impact of free platforms, they tried changing the recommendation mechanism — they removed the fixed display slots and switched to algorithm-driven personalized recommendations based on user preferences, the same logic free platforms use. It didn't work out. Earlier this year, tensions between authors and the platform finally erupted, with several well-known authors leading the charge and publicly criticizing the new mechanism for its opacity and data manipulation. In the end, Qidian rolled back to the original mechanism.

IV. Money Time!

After round after round of competition, your work has finally made it. That means it's time to make money.

1. Electronic subscriptions.

On paid platforms, works typically start charging at around the 200,000-character mark (some earlier, some later). The standard subscription price is 5 cents RMB per thousand characters. This price hasn't changed in many years. Currently, the highest-subscribed work on Qidian is Lord of the Mysteries, with an average of over 300,000 subscriptions per chapter. That means for every thousand characters he writes, his works will generate more than RMB 15,000 in revenue for the platform. 

The more you update, the more you earn. Chinese authors typically update over 4,000 characters a day, and some go past 10,000. The most famous "king of updates" is Eagle Eats Chicken, author of Tribulation of Myriad Races, who in the pre-AI era could write 17,000 characters a day.

These days, if a work updates particularly fast, it's hard not to suspect AI is involved. Not long ago on Qidian there was a book pulling more than 30,000 characters a day in updates, climbing up the rankings on update count alone. It got caught using AI pretty quickly and was disciplined.

Free platforms calculate royalties based on a work's reading volume and reading time. The unit rate fluctuates with ad pricing and other factors. The "more updates equals more earnings" logic applies to free platforms too.

The above all refers to revenue share works. For MGS works, the author first receives word-count royalties at the guaranteed rate; if the work's earnings hit the threshold, additional income is calculated as revenue share.

In addition, third-party channel income is also an important part of an author's royalties. Fanqie, as the largest-traffic platform, integrates a large number of CP works (content from other content providers), such as 17K. So you can see works from many different platforms on Fanqie. The channel side splits revenue proportionally with the work's home platform, and the platform then settles royalties with the author.

Some channels deliver remarkable traffic. While I Have a Sword was serializing on Fanqie's channels, on Azure Phoenix Peak's monthly royalties at one point exceeded 2 million RMB, most of it coming from channel income.

Around 2014–2015, with the widespread adoption of smartphones, mobile reading took off rapidly. Riding on Android's pre-installed apps ecosystem, a large number of novel apps appeared on the market. These platforms didn't really produce much content themselves; they imported content from other sources and acted as distributors. The mobile reading market in that period was thriving but lawless — such as developed more than a dozen platforms and kept sublicensing the imported content among its own sub-platforms, taking a cut at each handoff. By the time the original content provider got paid, they might be getting less than 10% of revenue. And what reached the author was even less. These days, channels are generally required to provide detailed sales data, so this kind of thing is much harder to pull off.

By the way, most Chinese web novel platforms have a tipping or donation system. Readers can directly spend money to support a novel, and the amount donated is split between the author and the platform according to a predetermined revenue-sharing ratio—yes, the platform takes a cut.

These platforms also typically feature a ranking page that displays how much users have spent on a particular title. The users at the top of these rankings are often the biggest supporters, having spent substantial amounts of money backing the work.

2. IP monetization.

Besides electronic reading, the author and platform can also sell IP rights. Sometimes IP sales can be very lucrative. The main types are as follows:

(a) Game adaptations. Around 2015, the Chinese gaming market entered a "money for the taking" era. Massive amounts of capital flowed into the gaming industry, and game companies, flush with investor money, went on a rights-buying spree. A well-known novel's game adaptation rights could go for over 10 million RMB. At the time, a lot of platforms were willing to offer top-tier authors high rates — there was no way to recoup that purely through electronic subscriptions, but if the IP could be sold, that meant several times the profit. And this stuff isn't a one-time sale either — it can be resold.

Later, the gaming industry started contracting, and client-side MMOs basically died. Regulation also tightened, and shoddy cash-grab games could no longer easily secure publishing licenses.

There are some works that sold their game adaptation rights for high prices back then, but the games still haven't started development to this day. Those rights are probably going to die on the shelf.

If they drag on any longer, the rights will expire.

(b) Live-action film&drama/ donghua / manhua adaptations.

I'm grouping these together mainly because I'm equally unfamiliar with all three of these industries. Among them, live-action adaptation rights are the most expensive, but not many subjects can actually be adapted into live action — China's regulation on this is strict. Donghua was very active a few years ago, and a number of excellent works came out of it, like A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality. Donghua can adapt works from all kinds of genres, and the review process isn't as strict as for live action. Of course, plenty of donghua adaptations have flopped too, getting torn apart by fans of the original. Manhua is probably the most common, because there are no genre restrictions, it's easy to adapt, and many manhua adaptations have been translated and exported overseas. Platforms like Tapas have brought in a lot of manhua adaptations of Chinese web novels.

As for licensing fees, a lot of that information isn't public, and I don't know that much about it. I once signed a work that successfully got a donghua adaptation. The amount paid out to the author was equivalent to several years of my salary as an editor.

(c) Short drama / AI-animated drama adaptations.

These two are products of the short-video platform era, and they don't really count as traditional film and TV. In fact, short dramas and AI-animated dramas are spinoffs of the web novel industry — their early content was heavily dependent on existing web novels. Licensing fees usually aren't very high, but many of these are non-exclusive licenses, meaning a single work can be adapted into several different short dramas or AI-animated dramas.

In the past two years, a large number of Chinese web novel companies have pivoted toward short dramas and AI-animated dramas. The domestic market is approaching saturation, so they've started moving into overseas markets. If you're interested, feel free to check it out yourself — I'll skip the details here.

(d) Audiobooks.

This is the most common source of IP income. Some users prefer listening to a book over reading it on their phone, and audiobooks have always had a substantial market in China. The licensing fees for audiobook adaptations aren't high, but the bar is low, and a lot of upper-mid-tier works have a shot at getting picked up for an audiobook.

(e) Overseas translation.

Thanks to cultural proximity, Chinese web novels have always performed well in Southeast Asia. Works get translated into Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and so on. In the English market, more of what's being translated right now is female-oriented work. There aren't many companies actively translating male-oriented work into English.

That said, if your work is good enough to catch the eye of a guy named Lucas from Wuxiaworld, then if all goes well, your work will end up on this platform, with multiple translators, editors, and project managers pouring their hearts into it. Your editor will tell you that your work has successfully sold its English translation rights, and on your next royalty payment, you'll see an extra sum of money.

(f) Print publication.

Alright, I have to admit, getting a web novel published in print is hard, especially male-oriented works. They tend to be very long, which means high cost and a long publishing cycle. Plus, web novels often contain content that publishers consider "inappropriate for the times." Even a great work like Lord of the Mysteries couldn't escape being edited down during publication.

Even if a work does get published, the author and the platform probably won't make much money from it. It's more about prestige and recognition. And if you want to join one of the various writers' associations, having a print-published work helps a lot.

V. Success, or Failure?

In the end, the dust settles. Your work has been completed. You may have made money, or you may not have. As an author, please welcome your ending.

1. Entering the palace and becoming a eunuch.

This is a slang term commonly used in the Chinese web novel industry, meaning that the author has stopped writing and abandoned the work. The expression comes from a joke.
“下面呢？”“没有了。”(What’s next? nothing .)

It’s a pun in Chinese. The phrase “下面” (xiàmian) can mean “below” or “underneath,” it can also mean “what comes next,” and, in certain contexts, it can even refer euphemistically to a man's private parts.

For new authors, becoming a eunuch is a pretty common choice. A lot of the time, the work isn't performing well, and it just can't deliver the kind of income that satisfies the author. As an editor, I've seen this happen plenty of times. And it's hard for me to really push the author to keep going — because their book genuinely isn't making money.

In fact, before I became an editor, I was once a eunuch too. In 2015, I wrote a Western fantasy novel. After it started charging, it had only ten paying readers. That meant if I wrote 6,000 characters a day, I'd only earn the price of a bowl of instant noodles. I realized writing books wasn't going to feed me — but at least I'd read a lot of books, so I went and became an editor instead.

Some well-known authors also turn eunuch. Not because they can't make money, but because their creativity has hit a wall, or simply because they don't feel like writing anymore. The most famous eunuch is Feng Huo Xi Zhu Hou, the author of Unsheathed. He's written many books in the past, each one ending abruptly halfway, and then after a while readers find that he's released a brand new one. Lots of readers have waved cash at him begging him to finish the story, but he doesn't budge. Readers gave him a nickname: "Chief of the Imperial Eunuchs" — i.e., the head of all the eunuchs. These days, when Chinese readers refer to him, they call him "the Chief" instead of his actual pen name.

Becoming a eunuch isn't anything shameful. You fall down, you get back up, change the genre, change the story, start over.

2. Staying mortal, but going one step further.

In my experience, less than a third of new authors successfully finish a complete work.

If you stick it out and finish an entire work — then, regardless of whether or not it made you a lot of money, you have already succeeded. Congratulations, you now have a complete work of your own, and you've gained experience throughout the creative process. This is going to be a good foundation for your writing journey.

Keep going. Finish one book, then start another. You'll get better and better. Many top-tier authors were once unknown, but after a few books of accumulated experience, they found the path that belonged to them.

In the end, they made their mark.

3. Attaining the Dao, becoming immortal.

For a new author, climbing to the top with your debut work is extremely difficult.

First, you have to stand out from a crowd of newcomers. The fact is, your competition isn't just other newcomers — there are also plenty of "reincarnated old monsters" disguised as newcomers (veteran authors writing under a new pen name) and "heavenly demons from beyond" (well-known authors from other platforms, especially from Feilu).

Then, you need to claw your way up to the front of the rankings, and face off against the "Nascent Soul elders" who've been sitting there for years, proving with your own strength that you have a right to be here.

And finally, the most important thing: you need recognition and support from tens of thousands of readers.

It is indeed difficult, but difficult doesn't mean impossible. Because someone has actually done it. For example, Ji Yueren, the author of The Mirror Legacy.

A final note: The content of this article comes from my years of editing experience and reflections. I hope it's been helpful to you. Due to length constraints, there's a lot I couldn't really go into in detail. If there's any content you'd like to discuss further, or any topic you'd like me to cover, feel free to comment below.

Hi everyone, this is Lucas. Today let's talk about an interesting topic: how Chinese web novels actually get "produced."

After more than two decades of development, the Chinese web novel industry has evolved into a fairly mature industry. Broadly speaking, this industry leans toward mass-producing "readable" stories rather than relying on a handful of top authors to create works that will be remembered. Its commercial logic is somewhat similar to Hollywood, and may differ significantly from the Western publishing industry that English-speaking readers are familiar with.

Before joining Wuxiaworld, I worked as an editor at one of China's top web novel platforms for over eight years. Through this article, I hope to give you a better understanding of this industry and answer some of the questions you might have. For instance:

How do authors talk themselves into churning out thousands of words every single day?

What do Chinese authors actually earn, and where does their money come from?

What role does AI play in the Chinese web novel industry?

Some Chinese companies have recently been launching overseas original-fiction businesses. If you're considering writing on those platforms, this article should give you something useful.

And if some of the details and stories along the way bring you a bit of fun, even better.

What follows is an introduction to how a piece of work goes from the idea stage, through the production line, to becoming a commodity that can be sold for money.

Suppose you're an author. You want to publish a novel on a Chinese web novel platform, and you'd like that novel to bring in a decent income. Here's what your work is about to go through. And I, as your editor, will be there at every stage to guide and assist you.

I. The Signing Stage

This is the first step, and also the most important — you need a contract. Almost all authors need to sign with a platform in order to gain visibility and a path to monetization. If you want to keep your work's full IP in your own hands rather than handing it over to a platform as your agent — sure, that's fine. But then how are readers going to actually see your work?

If you've decided to sign with a platform, here's the process:

1. Picking a platform. There are many platforms in the Chinese web novel industry, but in recent years most small and mid-sized platforms have scaled back their original web fiction business and pivoted toward short dramas and AI-animated dramas. Part of the reason is that they can't compete with the two giants, Qidian and Fanqie. Which platform you go to depends on your work's genre, style, and your own expectations. If you write female-oriented works, you can consider Jinjiang, or the female-oriented sites under established platforms like Qidian, Zongheng, and 17K. If you write male-oriented works and want readers to pay for your content, go to Qidian. If you want readers to read your book for free, go to Fanqie. If neither of these two appeals to you, you can also try Zongheng, 17K, Qimao, and other platforms.

2. Submitting your manuscript. You need to get your work in front of a platform editor. If they like what they see, you can talk about a contract. There are two ways to submit.

(a) Email submission. This is what's commonly called "neitou" (内投, internal submission). The author sends the opening of the work (usually 6,000–20,000 characters of actual text) along with an outline to an editor's email, or finds another way to get the manuscript onto the editor's computer. If the submission is accepted, the editor will get in touch about a contract. If it's rejected, try a different editor, or a different platform.

(b) Direct posting. If you can't be bothered with email back-and-forth with an editor, you can also just publish your work directly on the platform. Part of an editor's day-to-day job is to browse newly posted books on the site, looking for work worth signing. If an editor notices your novel, they'll reach out to you through the platform's DM system.

There's also a third path that new authors don't get to see: poaching. Editors will actively reach out to long-established authors and invite them to publish on their platform, offering very generous rates. This kind of poaching reached its peak in 2012–2013. At that time, Qidian's management and its capital backers had a falling-out, several founders left Qidian and started Chuangshi Chinese Web, and they pulled out their checkbooks to poach authors from their former employer. 

Well, you all know what happened next: Yuewen Group was formed, Qidian and Chuangshi were both folded into Yuewen, and these executives — along with the authors they'd poached — all went back.

3. Signing. Now we get to actually signing the contract. In the early days, contracts were paper: the author had to print the contract, sign it, mail it to the platform, the platform stamped it, and then mailed a copy back to the author. Pretty cumbersome. Now most contracts are signed electronically, which saves a lot of time for both authors and editors, and saves on shipping fees too.

Generally speaking, the platform provides a standard contract with fixed terms. The gist is: the author exclusively licenses the property rights of the work to the platform as agent, and during this period the platform pays for the use of that IP in some agreed-upon way. "Exclusive licensing" means that after signing, the author can't freely use their own IP either. The licensing has a term; when the contract expires, the author can take the rights back.

I have to say, Chinese web novel authors are usually the weaker party in this arrangement, and even top-tier authors aren't spared. Every time a major platform revises its contract terms, it sparks considerable controversy among authors.

By comparison, authors in the West and in Korea have it considerably easier when it comes to IP arrangements.

There are three main types of contracts.

(a) Revenue share contract. The most common type. The platform and the author split the work's electronic subscription revenue, as well as IP revenue, according to a set ratio.

(b) Flat-fee contract. The platform pays the author per character — usually calculated with a fixed payment amount per 1,000  characters. The payment is unrelated to the work's performance, which means: if the work flops, the platform still has to pay; if the work blows up, future income has nothing to do with the author. This kind of contract was more common a decade or so ago, often used to poach authors with high rates. Now it's much less common, because whether the work succeeds wildly or fails badly, one side ends up feeling cheated.

(c) Minimum guarantee contract (MGS). A hybrid of the two above. The author receives a guaranteed monthly income based on word count. If the work's earnings exceed a certain threshold (commonly known as "earning out the guarantee"), the platform pays additional income on top, calculated as revenue share. This contract type is used more by Zongheng and Qimao, because it guarantees a floor for the author's income while still offering a high ceiling, which helps attract experienced mid-tier authors to compete with the two giants Qidian and Fanqie.

On top of all this, the platform offers some additional perks — for example, if you update a certain number of characters every day in a given month, you get a few hundred RMB as a "daily-update bonus." This is income on top of what the contract specifies.

Once the contract is signed, you'll be assigned an editor, who will be responsible for the work's content adjustments and ongoing operations.

That said, on a platform like Fanqie, you might also get an AI as your editor — a bot called "Fanfan." Fanqie now has an enormous number of works, and signing is very easy. Most of these works are actually signed with this AI rather than with a human editor, especially for new authors.

Fanqie is a free-to-read platform, and its parent company is ByteDance — the developer of the well-known Chinese LLM "Doubao." This platform doesn't shy away from AI. At one point, it added a clause to its user agreement stating that authors acknowledged and permitted the platform to use their works to train AI, which provoked a lot of angry reactions from authors. These days, you can see AI-heavily-involved works all over the platform — well, reading these books is free anyway.

II. The Launch Stage

After signing, you can start preparing to publish your work. Some works have actually already been posted on the platform before signing. At this stage, your editor will help you make your work look as enticing as possible.

1. Book title. I don't think I need to explain how important this is. Book titles in the early years tended to be short, especially in genres like xuanhuan and xianxia, where four-character titles were preferred. Later, with the rise of Feilu, long book titles started appearing on the scene. These titles usually follow a "genre + ': (colon)' + hook" format and often run more than ten characters. Long titles are more direct, and convey more information. When a batch of book titles is displayed in the same spot on a site, a long title is more likely to catch a reader's attention.

The side effect, of course, is obvious. This kind of title easily gives readers a "gaudy" or "unserious" first impression. Readers who don't enjoy this style will see the title and walk away immediately.

Fanqie is the expert at title-tweaking. The good works on this platform usually come with several long titles plus one four-character formal-sounding short title. They push different titles to different users based on user profiles. So if you try to search for a book by title on Fanqie, you probably won't find it — the book might not even be called that name on your app. Readers generally find specific works by searching for the author's name.

If your title looks dull, the editor will help you come up with a better one.

When I was working as an editor, there was no AI to fall back on. Helping authors come up with titles nearly made me go bald. I'm not sure whether people use AI for title generation these days, but it seems like it should work — a lot of the time, a book title is really just a permutation of a few keywords.

2. Synopsis. A short paragraph that introduces the core selling points of the story, sometimes coming off as a bit over-the-top. Even though it's called a "synopsis," it's not really a brief summary of the plot — it's a piece of marketing copy. I remember a user on Reddit once complaining about Chinese novels' synopses, saying that some works stuff a bunch of cool-sounding elements into the synopsis, but you can hardly find any of those elements in the actual text. I think they have a point.

If you don't know how to write a synopsis, you can ask your editor for help. Honestly, writing a synopsis is much easier than coming up with a title, and you can revise it at any time.

3. Cover. Most of the time, the covers of Chinese web novels are not particularly polished. Especially male-oriented works.

In the early years, most covers were made by taking a stock image, then layering on the book title, the author's pen name, and the platform logo. Making a cover was easy — there were plenty of online shops offering this service, with their own libraries of stock images for the author to choose from. Authors could also just grab images off the internet themselves. Whether those stock images had commercial usage rights was anyone's guess. The most basic cover only cost about 5 RMB. Some platforms were willing to provide covers for their authors, but they were done the same way — outsourcing to designers for batch production. For a few important works, the platform's in-house art designer would create something specifically for that book, to ensure uniqueness and clean copyright.

That said, in any era there are people who go their own way. For example, Angry Banana's My Heroic Husband — the author drew a very crude cover himself on a drawing tablet. The cover of Yuan Tong's The Record of Unusual Creatures was made by the author himself in Word.

As awareness around IP grew, some platforms began making a deliberate effort to avoid using copyright-questionable stock images. They built their own (presumably copyright-clean) stock libraries and provided online tools so authors could pick images from the library and generate covers on their own. This is why, in a certain period, you'd see several books on the same Qidian page using the exact same image as their cover.

By now, the vast majority of covers are AI-generated. The cost is very low, and authors can shape covers according to their own vision. Most readers read novels on their phone apps, where the cover image is the size of a fingernail — no one notices whether the cover was hand-painted or AI-generated. Even if they do know it's AI-generated, they don't care.

This is very different from how readers in the West feel about it.

Very few Chinese authors commission a hand-painted cover from an artist. For a new author, this is a luxury — a lot of the time, a novel's total income won't even cover the price of one commissioned cover.

These days, if you need a cover, your editor will either ask you to use AI to make one yourself, or they'll make one for you. Of course, if you really object to this, or you've got money to spare, you can also hire an artist to draw one.

4. New-book launch activities.

For some well-known authors, when they release a new book, the platform will set up a dedicated activity page to promote it, usually with extra fan interactions, giveaways, and so on. Qidian's Platinum Authors, Zongheng's Master Authors, and Grandmaster Authors typically get this kind of treatment. For more on author rankings, see my other post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/1piqro3/an_overview_of_chinas_webnovel_author_rankings/

III. The Operations Stage

Once the work is successfully launched, you and your editor need to think about how to make it stand out in the platform's enormous library. Of course, if you don't have an editor, you're on your own.

1. The work's data. Without a doubt, the most important metric is the work's revenue. But for the vast majority of works, the new-book window doesn't make any money. Chinese editors and operations teams rely on a work's other data to assess its potential. This data is also a key basis for how many promotion resources a work can get in its early days.

Paid platforms like Qidian primarily look at library adds and follow-read data. This refers to how many readers, during the new-book window, have added the work to their bookshelves, and how many readers with recent paying behavior actually read the latest chapter within 24 hours of it being updated.

Follow-read data from non-paying users has limited reference value, because once the work starts charging, those users probably aren't going to pay either.

Free platforms like Fanqie and Qimao care more about user retention — at a given word-count milestone, how many users are still actively reading. Free platforms push works to readers actively, rather than relying on readers to search for works themselves. A work with high retention means more efficient promotion, longer reading time, and therefore more ad impressions. These platforms make money primarily by serving ads inside works, with advertisers as their source of income.

To get accurate data on a work, free platforms run several rounds of tests. When a work hits a certain word count, the platform pushes it to a set number of users to observe how it performs. If the work passes all these test rounds, it gets added to a high-quality work pool, which means more exposure and promotion opportunities going forward. If the data doesn't make the cut — most likely, the work is eliminated. Works under MGS contracts will be asked to wrap up early; works under revenue share can keep going — but they won't get much exposure either.

2. Rankings. This is a public ranking system, open to any work that hits the data thresholds. The common rankings include:

(a) New-book ranking. Only shows new books, usually those published in the last month and under 300,000 characters. This is also the most accessible ranking for new authors. That said, if a wave of veteran authors releases books in the same period, the competition gets fierce.

(b) Recommendation vote ranking. Reflects how much support readers are giving a work. Since all registered users get a certain number of recommendation votes for free, this ranking's prestige isn't particularly high.

(c) Monthly ticket ranking. Reflects support from paying users. Users get a number of monthly tickets after spending a certain amount on the platform each month. Sometimes they can also get extra monthly tickets by tipping a work.

(d) Sales ranking. Reflects a work's actual earnings. Qidian's sales ranking updates in real time, showing how a work has sold in the last 24 hours, so it shifts very quickly. If a work consistently sits in the top spots on the sales ranking, its status is unquestionable.

Some platforms also have other types of rankings, many of which I don't actually know the underlying data algorithm for. Some of them might be curated manually by editors and operations — they look like rankings but really function as promotion slots.

It's worth noting that ranking data doesn't fully reflect a work's true quality, because authors can manipulate rankings, or organize their readers to do so. In the early years, watching two top-tier authors fight for first place on the monthly ticket ranking was a great spectacle for readers. Of course, on a big platform like Qidian, manipulating rankings does require some financial muscle. In other words, ranking manipulation is itself part of how the ranking game works.

If you're interested in how rankings work in detail, take a look at Webnovel. That platform's rankings are basically a copy-paste of Qidian's system.

3. Promotion slots.

On a platform's website and app, you can see all sorts of works displayed at various positions. These positions are the promotion slots — where works get shown to readers.

On paid platforms like Qidian, Zongheng, and 17K, the works displayed in promotion slots are fixed, curated by editors and operations. Qidian has a lot of books and a fixed number of promotion slots, so there's fierce competition between works. Of course, every editor has a certain amount of resources at their disposal, and if your work is good enough, your editor will fight for you.

Free platforms like Fanqie and Qimao rely much more on algorithm-driven personalized recommendations. The platform analyzes a reader's preferences and pushes a curated batch of works to their app. Works with high retention are, naturally, more likely to be pushed.

Qidian used to have a fairly well-developed "PK" mechanism: new books would be displayed in fixed slots, then go through multiple rounds of PK based on follow-read and library-add data. Winners advanced. The process was relatively transparent. Last year, to fend off the impact of free platforms, they tried changing the recommendation mechanism — they removed the fixed display slots and switched to algorithm-driven personalized recommendations based on user preferences, the same logic free platforms use. It didn't work out. Earlier this year, tensions between authors and the platform finally erupted, with several well-known authors leading the charge and publicly criticizing the new mechanism for its opacity and data manipulation. In the end, Qidian rolled back to the original mechanism.

IV. Money Time!

After round after round of competition, your work has finally made it. That means it's time to make money.

1. Electronic subscriptions.

On paid platforms, works typically start charging at around the 200,000-character mark (some earlier, some later). The standard subscription price is 5 cents RMB per thousand characters. This price hasn't changed in many years. Currently, the highest-subscribed work on Qidian is Lord of the Mysteries, with an average of over 300,000 subscriptions per chapter. That means for every thousand characters he writes, his works will generate more than RMB 15,000 in revenue for the platform. 

The more you update, the more you earn. Chinese authors typically update over 4,000 characters a day, and some go past 10,000. The most famous "king of updates" is Eagle Eats Chicken, author of Tribulation of Myriad Races, who in the pre-AI era could write 17,000 characters a day.

These days, if a work updates particularly fast, it's hard not to suspect AI is involved. Not long ago on Qidian there was a book pulling more than 30,000 characters a day in updates, climbing up the rankings on update count alone. It got caught using AI pretty quickly and was disciplined.

Free platforms calculate royalties based on a work's reading volume and reading time. The unit rate fluctuates with ad pricing and other factors. The "more updates equals more earnings" logic applies to free platforms too.

The above all refers to revenue share works. For MGS works, the author first receives word-count royalties at the guaranteed rate; if the work's earnings hit the threshold, additional income is calculated as revenue share.

In addition, third-party channel income is also an important part of an author's royalties. Fanqie, as the largest-traffic platform, integrates a large number of CP works (content from other content providers), such as 17K. So you can see works from many different platforms on Fanqie. The channel side splits revenue proportionally with the work's home platform, and the platform then settles royalties with the author.

Some channels deliver remarkable traffic. While I Have a Sword was serializing on Fanqie's channels, on Azure Phoenix Peak's monthly royalties at one point exceeded 2 million RMB, most of it coming from channel income.

Around 2014–2015, with the widespread adoption of smartphones, mobile reading took off rapidly. Riding on Android's pre-installed apps ecosystem, a large number of novel apps appeared on the market. These platforms didn't really produce much content themselves; they imported content from other sources and acted as distributors. The mobile reading market in that period was thriving but lawless — such as developed more than a dozen platforms and kept sublicensing the imported content among its own sub-platforms, taking a cut at each handoff. By the time the original content provider got paid, they might be getting less than 10% of revenue. And what reached the author was even less. These days, channels are generally required to provide detailed sales data, so this kind of thing is much harder to pull off.

By the way, most Chinese web novel platforms have a tipping or donation system. Readers can directly spend money to support a novel, and the amount donated is split between the author and the platform according to a predetermined revenue-sharing ratio—yes, the platform takes a cut.

These platforms also typically feature a ranking page that displays how much users have spent on a particular title. The users at the top of these rankings are often the biggest supporters, having spent substantial amounts of money backing the work.

2. IP monetization.

Besides electronic reading, the author and platform can also sell IP rights. Sometimes IP sales can be very lucrative. The main types are as follows:

(a) Game adaptations. Around 2015, the Chinese gaming market entered a "money for the taking" era. Massive amounts of capital flowed into the gaming industry, and game companies, flush with investor money, went on a rights-buying spree. A well-known novel's game adaptation rights could go for over 10 million RMB. At the time, a lot of platforms were willing to offer top-tier authors high rates — there was no way to recoup that purely through electronic subscriptions, but if the IP could be sold, that meant several times the profit. And this stuff isn't a one-time sale either — it can be resold.

Later, the gaming industry started contracting, and client-side MMOs basically died. Regulation also tightened, and shoddy cash-grab games could no longer easily secure publishing licenses.

There are some works that sold their game adaptation rights for high prices back then, but the games still haven't started development to this day. Those rights are probably going to die on the shelf.

If they drag on any longer, the rights will expire.

(b) Live-action film&drama/ donghua / manhua adaptations.

I'm grouping these together mainly because I'm equally unfamiliar with all three of these industries. Among them, live-action adaptation rights are the most expensive, but not many subjects can actually be adapted into live action — China's regulation on this is strict. Donghua was very active a few years ago, and a number of excellent works came out of it, like A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality. Donghua can adapt works from all kinds of genres, and the review process isn't as strict as for live action. Of course, plenty of donghua adaptations have flopped too, getting torn apart by fans of the original. Manhua is probably the most common, because there are no genre restrictions, it's easy to adapt, and many manhua adaptations have been translated and exported overseas. Platforms like Tapas have brought in a lot of manhua adaptations of Chinese web novels.

As for licensing fees, a lot of that information isn't public, and I don't know that much about it. I once signed a work that successfully got a donghua adaptation. The amount paid out to the author was equivalent to several years of my salary as an editor.

(c) Short drama / AI-animated drama adaptations.

These two are products of the short-video platform era, and they don't really count as traditional film and TV. In fact, short dramas and AI-animated dramas are spinoffs of the web novel industry — their early content was heavily dependent on existing web novels. Licensing fees usually aren't very high, but many of these are non-exclusive licenses, meaning a single work can be adapted into several different short dramas or AI-animated dramas.

In the past two years, a large number of Chinese web novel companies have pivoted toward short dramas and AI-animated dramas. The domestic market is approaching saturation, so they've started moving into overseas markets. If you're interested, feel free to check it out yourself — I'll skip the details here.

(d) Audiobooks.

This is the most common source of IP income. Some users prefer listening to a book over reading it on their phone, and audiobooks have always had a substantial market in China. The licensing fees for audiobook adaptations aren't high, but the bar is low, and a lot of upper-mid-tier works have a shot at getting picked up for an audiobook.

(e) Overseas translation.

Thanks to cultural proximity, Chinese web novels have always performed well in Southeast Asia. Works get translated into Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and so on. In the English market, more of what's being translated right now is female-oriented work. There aren't many companies actively translating male-oriented work into English.

That said, if your work is good enough to catch the eye of a guy named Lucas from Wuxiaworld, then if all goes well, your work will end up on this platform, with multiple translators, editors, and project managers pouring their hearts into it. Your editor will tell you that your work has successfully sold its English translation rights, and on your next royalty payment, you'll see an extra sum of money.

(f) Print publication.

Alright, I have to admit, getting a web novel published in print is hard, especially male-oriented works. They tend to be very long, which means high cost and a long publishing cycle. Plus, web novels often contain content that publishers consider "inappropriate for the times." Even a great work like Lord of the Mysteries couldn't escape being edited down during publication.

Even if a work does get published, the author and the platform probably won't make much money from it. It's more about prestige and recognition. And if you want to join one of the various writers' associations, having a print-published work helps a lot.

V. Success, or Failure?

In the end, the dust settles. Your work has been completed. You may have made money, or you may not have. As an author, please welcome your ending.

1. Entering the palace and becoming a eunuch.

This is a slang term commonly used in the Chinese web novel industry, meaning that the author has stopped writing and abandoned the work. The expression comes from a joke.
“下面呢？”“没有了。”(What’s next? nothing .)

It’s a pun in Chinese. The phrase “下面” (xiàmian) can mean “below” or “underneath,” it can also mean “what comes next,” and, in certain contexts, it can even refer euphemistically to a man's private parts.

For new authors, becoming a eunuch is a pretty common choice. A lot of the time, the work isn't performing well, and it just can't deliver the kind of income that satisfies the author. As an editor, I've seen this happen plenty of times. And it's hard for me to really push the author to keep going — because their book genuinely isn't making money.

In fact, before I became an editor, I was once a eunuch too. In 2015, I wrote a Western fantasy novel. After it started charging, it had only ten paying readers. That meant if I wrote 6,000 characters a day, I'd only earn the price of a bowl of instant noodles. I realized writing books wasn't going to feed me — but at least I'd read a lot of books, so I went and became an editor instead.

Some well-known authors also turn eunuch. Not because they can't make money, but because their creativity has hit a wall, or simply because they don't feel like writing anymore. The most famous eunuch is Feng Huo Xi Zhu Hou, the author of Unsheathed. He's written many books in the past, each one ending abruptly halfway, and then after a while readers find that he's released a brand new one. Lots of readers have waved cash at him begging him to finish the story, but he doesn't budge. Readers gave him a nickname: "Chief of the Imperial Eunuchs" — i.e., the head of all the eunuchs. These days, when Chinese readers refer to him, they call him "the Chief" instead of his actual pen name.

Becoming a eunuch isn't anything shameful. You fall down, you get back up, change the genre, change the story, start over.

2. Staying mortal, but going one step further.

In my experience, less than a third of new authors successfully finish a complete work.

If you stick it out and finish an entire work — then, regardless of whether or not it made you a lot of money, you have already succeeded. Congratulations, you now have a complete work of your own, and you've gained experience throughout the creative process. This is going to be a good foundation for your writing journey.

Keep going. Finish one book, then start another. You'll get better and better. Many top-tier authors were once unknown, but after a few books of accumulated experience, they found the path that belonged to them.

In the end, they made their mark.

3. Attaining the Dao, becoming immortal.

For a new author, climbing to the top with your debut work is extremely difficult.

First, you have to stand out from a crowd of newcomers. The fact is, your competition isn't just other newcomers — there are also plenty of "reincarnated old monsters" disguised as newcomers (veteran authors writing under a new pen name) and "heavenly demons from beyond" (well-known authors from other platforms, especially from Feilu).

Then, you need to claw your way up to the front of the rankings, and face off against the "Nascent Soul elders" who've been sitting there for years, proving with your own strength that you have a right to be here.

And finally, the most important thing: you need recognition and support from tens of thousands of readers.

It is indeed difficult, but difficult doesn't mean impossible. Because someone has actually done it. For example, Ji Yueren, the author of The Mirror Legacy.

A final note: The content of this article comes from my years of editing experience and reflections. I hope it's been helpful to you. Due to length constraints, there's a lot I couldn't really go into in detail. If there's any content you'd like to discuss further, or any topic you'd like me to cover, feel free to comment below.