u/goodmore233

Hi everyone, this is Lucas. Today let's talk about the different transmigration modes protagonists use in Chinese web novels. There are three common ones: Physical Transmigration (身穿), Soul Transmigration (魂穿), and Fetal Transmigration (胎穿). Most Chinese readers are familiar with these. But this time, I want to talk about them from a craft perspective — the characteristics, the strengths, the weaknesses of each mode.

1. Physical Transmigration (身穿): the protagonist's physical body is transported to another world.

• The protagonist retains the physical strength he had before transmigrating (which is why so many of these novels give the protagonist a special forces background)
• He can bring his clothes and personal items with him — phone, watch, lighter, and sometimes much more powerful gear. Some works have protagonists arrive with modern weapons in hand.
• No strange memories are implanted in his head. He's still, through and through, a person from Earth (which also means he knows nothing about the new world, and may even face a language barrier)
• He has no identity in the new world. He's a total outsider with no papers. He needs some way to fit in.

The advantage of this mode is that it keeps the transmigrator "pure" — he arrives at a genuinely new world, free to do whatever he wants, without being tangled in the karma of anyone or anything from the moment he lands.

But it also has its flaws. The biggest problem is pacing. After transmigrating, the protagonist first has to confirm that he's actually transmigrated, then spend some time figuring out what kind of world this is, then spend more time working out how to fit into this society — and getting the locals to accept a person who literally appeared out of thin air is not easy. Only after all that is dealt with does the story really begin.

This is the earliest mode and was popular for a while, appearing more often in historical and early fantasy novels. But because of the inherent pacing problems, it's become relatively rare today.

2. Soul Transmigration (魂穿): the protagonist's soul arrives in another world and enters the body of a local, taking over that person's body and identity to continue living as him.

• The protagonist gains a set of memories, enough to give him a basic understanding of the world
• He gains a ready-made, legitimate identity
• He inherits the "original owner's" assets (usually none, sometimes negative) and social relationships

This is the most common mode, and the most convenient, to the point where it has formed a fixed opening template. The protagonist wakes up, realizes he's transmigrated. A wave of headache, memories fuse, and he discovers that "he" was subjected to some kind of unfair treatment just a few days ago... Next chapter: golden finger activated, protagonist rapidly gets stronger, and sets out to take revenge...

As an editor, I've received a massive volume of submissions using this mode. The advantage is obvious — it solves the identity problem and gets straight into the main storyline. As for weaknesses, aside from being too formulaic, you might think there's nothing else wrong with it —

But think about it more carefully. That's not quite true.

Imagine: you've transmigrated. You now have a set of parents, a group of friends, maybe a few enemies. You've seen how the "previous you" got along with them. There was joy, and there was pain. But those emotions are not yours. And now, you have to pretend to be him, to maintain those relationships.

On the surface, the protagonist has already fit into this world. But in reality, he needs much more time before he can truly understand and settle into it. Most works ignore this.

Dealing with the new parents in particular can be especially complicated. So authors often take a shortcut to sidestep this — they make the protagonist an orphan.

But orphans have parents too — or at least, they used to. Once the protagonist transmigrates into an orphan, he usually has to find out who his parents in this life were, who killed them, and take revenge for them. Even though he never met them, once he inherits this body, he inherits the duty of revenge along with it.

There's another standard opening pattern for this mode: the "original owner" is in the middle of some kind of crisis when the protagonist arrives, and the protagonist inherits his mess. Imagine: you've transmigrated, and you find yourself lying in a Jade Beauty’s bed. The deed is already done, none of the fun was yours, all the consequences are yours to bear, and a group of furious men are about to beat you to death...

This does provide a strong early conflict. But personally, I don't like this kind of writing. Putting myself in the protagonist's shoes, it's just too unpleasant.

3. Fetal Transmigration (胎穿): the protagonist's soul enters the body of a fetus, is then born and raised by a mother in this world. He experiences the same childhood and adolescence as any native. Then one day, he awakens the memories of his past life and realizes he was originally a transmigrator.

• The protagonist has two sets of memories: one from his past life, and one from his own growing up in this world
• A body that is native to this world. A completely legitimate identity.
• A set of social relationships he was born into or built himself.

Compared to Soul Transmigration, the protagonist in this mode is more like "a local who has gained access to Earth's knowledge base" than "a transmigrator granted a new life in another world." His personality and way of thinking are much closer to the locals'. Because before his past-life memories awakened, his personality and worldview had already taken shape — he had already completely thought of himself as a person of this world.

Works using this mode have appeared more often in recent years, and the number is trending upward. It strikes a balance between the "native protagonist" and "Soul Transmigration" modes: it preserves reader immersion, without letting the protagonist feel too disconnected from the world.

Hi everyone, this is Lucas. Today let's talk about the different transmigration modes protagonists use in Chinese web novels. There are three common ones: Physical Transmigration (身穿), Soul Transmigration (魂穿), and Fetal Transmigration (胎穿). Most Chinese readers are familiar with these. But this time, I want to talk about them from a craft perspective — the characteristics, the strengths, the weaknesses of each mode.

1. Physical Transmigration (身穿): the protagonist's physical body is transported to another world.

• The protagonist retains the physical strength he had before transmigrating (which is why so many of these novels give the protagonist a special forces background)
• He can bring his clothes and personal items with him — phone, watch, lighter, and sometimes much more powerful gear. Some works have protagonists arrive with modern weapons in hand.
• No strange memories are implanted in his head. He's still, through and through, a person from Earth (which also means he knows nothing about the new world, and may even face a language barrier)
• He has no identity in the new world. He's a total outsider with no papers. He needs some way to fit in.

The advantage of this mode is that it keeps the transmigrator "pure" — he arrives at a genuinely new world, free to do whatever he wants, without being tangled in the karma of anyone or anything from the moment he lands.

But it also has its flaws. The biggest problem is pacing. After transmigrating, the protagonist first has to confirm that he's actually transmigrated, then spend some time figuring out what kind of world this is, then spend more time working out how to fit into this society — and getting the locals to accept a person who literally appeared out of thin air is not easy. Only after all that is dealt with does the story really begin.

This is the earliest mode and was popular for a while, appearing more often in historical and early fantasy novels. But because of the inherent pacing problems, it's become relatively rare today.

2. Soul Transmigration (魂穿): the protagonist's soul arrives in another world and enters the body of a local, taking over that person's body and identity to continue living as him.

• The protagonist gains a set of memories, enough to give him a basic understanding of the world
• He gains a ready-made, legitimate identity
• He inherits the "original owner's" assets (usually none, sometimes negative) and social relationships

This is the most common mode, and the most convenient, to the point where it has formed a fixed opening template. The protagonist wakes up, realizes he's transmigrated. A wave of headache, memories fuse, and he discovers that "he" was subjected to some kind of unfair treatment just a few days ago... Next chapter: golden finger activated, protagonist rapidly gets stronger, and sets out to take revenge...

As an editor, I've received a massive volume of submissions using this mode. The advantage is obvious — it solves the identity problem and gets straight into the main storyline. As for weaknesses, aside from being too formulaic, you might think there's nothing else wrong with it —

But think about it more carefully. That's not quite true.

Imagine: you've transmigrated. You now have a set of parents, a group of friends, maybe a few enemies. You've seen how the "previous you" got along with them. There was joy, and there was pain. But those emotions are not yours. And now, you have to pretend to be him, to maintain those relationships.

On the surface, the protagonist has already fit into this world. But in reality, he needs much more time before he can truly understand and settle into it. Most works ignore this.

Dealing with the new parents in particular can be especially complicated. So authors often take a shortcut to sidestep this — they make the protagonist an orphan.

But orphans have parents too — or at least, they used to. Once the protagonist transmigrates into an orphan, he usually has to find out who his parents in this life were, who killed them, and take revenge for them. Even though he never met them, once he inherits this body, he inherits the duty of revenge along with it.

There's another standard opening pattern for this mode: the "original owner" is in the middle of some kind of crisis when the protagonist arrives, and the protagonist inherits his mess. Imagine: you've transmigrated, and you find yourself lying in a Jade Beauty’s bed. The deed is already done, none of the fun was yours, all the consequences are yours to bear, and a group of furious men are about to beat you to death...

This does provide a strong early conflict. But personally, I don't like this kind of writing. Putting myself in the protagonist's shoes, it's just too unpleasant.

3. Fetal Transmigration (胎穿): the protagonist's soul enters the body of a fetus, is then born and raised by a mother in this world. He experiences the same childhood and adolescence as any native. Then one day, he awakens the memories of his past life and realizes he was originally a transmigrator.

• The protagonist has two sets of memories: one from his past life, and one from his own growing up in this world
• A body that is native to this world. A completely legitimate identity.
• A set of social relationships he was born into or built himself.

Compared to Soul Transmigration, the protagonist in this mode is more like "a local who has gained access to Earth's knowledge base" than "a transmigrator granted a new life in another world." His personality and way of thinking are much closer to the locals'. Because before his past-life memories awakened, his personality and worldview had already taken shape — he had already completely thought of himself as a person of this world.

Works using this mode have appeared more often in recent years, and the number is trending upward. It strikes a balance between the "native protagonist" and "Soul Transmigration" modes: it preserves reader immersion, without letting the protagonist feel too disconnected from the world.

Just now, Qidian, China’s largest paid web novel platform. took action against a large number of novels that were found to have used AI-assisted writing. Among them were quite a few titles that ranked near the top of the sales charts.

Qidian has not taken these works offline entirely.Instead,works suspected of using AI will no longer appear on charts such as the monthly ticket ranking and sales ranking, and their exposure and recommendation slots will inevitably be reduced significantly going forward. And after their use of AI is officially confirmed, they may also see a rapid loss of existing readers. These novels may end up being wrapped up very quickly in the short term.

According to my statistics, 13 of the top 100 works on Qidian’s sales ranking yesterday have already disappeared from the chart.Several works ranked in the top 20 of the sales chart, with average subscriptions exceeding 30,000, were also affected.

Chinese readers and authors have responded very positively to this action.

Just now, Qidian, China’s largest paid web novel platform. took action against a large number of novels that were found to have used AI-assisted writing. Among them were quite a few titles that ranked near the top of the sales charts.

Qidian has not taken these works offline entirely.Instead,works suspected of using AI will no longer appear on charts such as the monthly ticket ranking and sales ranking, and their exposure and recommendation slots will inevitably be reduced significantly going forward. And after their use of AI is officially confirmed, they may also see a rapid loss of existing readers. These novels may end up being wrapped up very quickly in the short term.

According to my statistics, 13 of the top 100 works on Qidian’s sales ranking yesterday have already disappeared from the chart.Several works ranked in the top 20 of the sales chart, with average subscriptions exceeding 30,000, were also affected.

Chinese readers and authors have responded very positively to this action.

In Chinese fantasy novels, yaoguai (妖怪) generally refers to intelligent supernatural beings that originate from animals, plants, or even inanimate objects that have gained consciousness or cultivated over time. However, when these works are translated into English, translators almost always render yaoguai as "demon." It has become such a common convention that most readers barely question it anymore.

As a non-native English speaker, though, I've always felt that this translation drifts somewhat from the original meaning. In modern English, demon usually carries a strong implication of evil or malevolence. By contrast, yaoguai in Chinese fiction don't have a fixed moral alignment. Some are kind and benevolent, some are cruel, and many are morally neutral. They're simply a category of supernatural beings rather than inherently evil creatures.

I'm curious how this translation became so widespread and why English readers have come to accept it so naturally. I'd love to hear from translators, long-time readers, or anyone familiar with the history of Chinese fantasy translations.

One possibility I've been considering is that the convention may date back to early English translations of Journey to the West. In Timothy Richard's 1913 adaptation, A Mission to Heaven, yaoguai was translated as "demon," and the work incorporated a significant amount of Christian interpretation. Perhaps this was one of the origins of the convention.

Interestingly, an even earlier translation of another Zhiguai tale , Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880), used a much wider variety of English terms for different kinds of supernatural beings and rarely relied on the word demon.

I'd be interested to know whether there are other historical reasons behind this convention, or whether it simply became the industry standard over time.

The China Writers Association has released the 2025 China Online Literature Blue Book today. The report provides an overview of the Chinese online literature industry and its performance over the past year.

The original Chinese report can be found here:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2niY3sBwDU1Ea5crYohLGA

This post contains a full English translation of the report, produced with the assistance of AI.

Overview

Indicator	Figure	Notes
Total number of works	33 million+	Creative standards have risen broadly across realist, science-fiction, historical and fantasy categories; literary self-awareness continues to strengthen; new departures such as screen-oriented writing, short-form fiction and game-theoretic narrative are energizing innovation
Readership	525 million	The most representative literary form of the internet era, achieving the largest scale of literary participation in history
Industry revenue	Approx. RMB 49 billion	AI technologies have entered every link of the value chain, profoundly reshaping business operations and content forms
Overseas communication	RMB 8 billion+	Entering a new phase of global diffusion and intensified competition; written into the 15th Five-Year Plan recommendations as one of the "new big three" of cultural export

Six sections: 01 Literary Works / 02 Online Literature and the New Mass Public Arts / 03 Sector Development / 04 Going Global / 05 Literary Theory / 06 Writers & Associations

01  Literary Works — Marked Gains in Quality, Deepening Narrative Innovation

Realist Fiction Shows Markedly Better Craft

Cumulative total 2 million works; annual additions 140,000 works/year

Grounded in genuine experience, the writing has become fuller and weightier, while the utilitarian tendency toward sloganeering and thesis-first composition has been visibly curbed

More authors no longer shirk the difficulty of reality: while retaining online literature's strong plotting and sharp conflict, they have begun restoring life's complexity with a calmer touch

Representative works:

《春秋里》— uses a residential compound as the medium binding family destinies, sketching a group portrait of five generations across two cities over a century

《浓情绮梦坊》— takes the everyday warmth of a few households in a Shanghai shikumen lane as its cross-section

《甜蜜一生》— focuses on the lived experience of diabetes patients, confronting the fragility of individual life

《暂住》— projects intergenerational value conflict within the family onto the identity anxieties of urbanization

《独木》— probes the trauma of the family of origin in a cool, restrained register

《国民法医》（National Forensic Doctor）— sustains the standard of professional-procedural fiction

Marking the 80th anniversary of victory in the War of Resistance:《记忆狙击》,《野草生西南》,《邮路1933》and others retell historical experience in the idiom of online literature, giving revolutionary-historical subject matter fresh narrative vitality

Science Fiction Writes with a Broader Civilizational Vision

Cumulative 2.3 million works; annual additions 190,000 works/year

Moving beyond the mere spectacle of technology toward civilizational concern and humanistic spirit

Representative works: 《神明调查报告》（Investigation Report of the Gods）(joins rational scientific inquiry to transcendent experience, staging a civilizational contest inside a time loop),《异度旅社》(a travelogue-form narrative threading through variously shaped alien civilizations),《我信仰的神明来自华夏》（Starting from the Chinese Mythology, Crushing the Interstellar）(fuses interstellar epic with Eastern mythological symbolism),《电子哪吒》（Electronic Nezha）(embeds a high-concept AI premise in vernacular street life)

Historical and Fantasy Fiction Break Through Genre Boundaries

Historical fiction: the texture of an era, rendered with humanistic color — greater attention to restoring period texture, building a more credible social world through fine-grained institutional description and depiction of daily life. Representative works: 《冒姓琅琊》（Borrowed Name of Langya）(rigorous research into Southern Dynasties society),《黜龙》(raises equality and justice as its banner),《大唐还不还》(a road narrative strung along the Silk Road)

Fantasy fiction: narrative innovation and depth of expression — highly mature; while the genre foundation holds firm, notable innovation appears in narrative perspective and world-building. Representative works: 《剑来》（Unsheathed）(completed after eight years, weaving Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist thought into an expansive world),《这个地下城长蘑菇了》（This Dungeon Grew Mushrooms）(reverse-engineers the dungeon narrative through the singular viewpoint of fungal life),《没钱修什么仙？》（No Money to Cultivate Immortality?）(a "cyber-cultivation" premise that transplants the logic of financial capital into the traditional cultivation system),《蓄意逐风》(builds narrative momentum on pure language through highly interactive meme-play)

Characteristics and Trends of the Year

Rising literary self-awareness — breaking out of genre thinking toward stronger engagement with reality; balancing the personal and the public. Representative works: 《迷狂》,《旧域怪诞》（Grotesqueries of the Old Domain）

Screen adaptation and the short-form wave reshape creative logic — adaptation potential is now factored in from the drafting stage (scene-and-shot language, character architecture); short-form online literature opens new possibilities, its "one-shot" mode of publication yielding closure and completeness that push back against the open, interactive textual form of serialized fiction. Representative works: 《听银》（From Sacrifice to Empress）,《无暇赴死》,《四季》

Narrative shifts further toward the game-theoretic — systems or system-like forces intervene; within high-stakes environments bounded by rules and scarce resources, the emphasis falls on intellectual contest, rule exploitation and the weighing of costs under constraint. The turn in "system fiction": from "affirmative compliance" to "negating doubt / resistance." Representative works: 《诸神愚戏》（Foolish Game of the Gods）,《神的模仿犯》（God's Imitator）,《游戏入侵》

Problems in Creative Work

Weak "whole-work narrative" command in some titles — overemphasis on local climaxes and instant feedback leaves long-form structure under-planned, producing late-stage pacing failures, loose logic, or abrupt endings

Language quality still needs strengthening — amid the anxiety over speed created by AI competition, some writing chases rapid updates at the cost of a hasty, restless prose that lacks proper aesthetic texture

The literary potential of short forms remains only partly released — under traffic-driven mechanics, the prevailing style has drifted toward "micro-drama": high density, heavy reversal, outwardly vented emotion

Insufficient inventiveness in shared premises — some works simply transplant existing settings and existing combinations, fueling ongoing debate over trope-lifting and plagiarism

02  Online Literature and the New Mass Public Arts — the Paradigmatic Form under Internet Conditions

35 million+ registered authors; readership of 525 million

Democratized authorship: the internet has thoroughly reconstituted the relations of literary production — changing not only how literary content is produced but how literary experience itself is generated

A "people's literature" under internet conditions: the writing subject has expanded (ordinary people are no longer the passive object of literary representation but participants, creators and narrators); shared experience is transmitted directly

An open, shared literary community: joint participation (in-line reader commentary, derivative works, character discussions shape the work in real time); emotional connection through affinity-based communities and fandom strata formed around a work

Rebuilding literary publicness in the age of digital media: online platforms are markedly fragmented and stratified, and artistic expression, while abundant, is thin on publicness. Online literature, through a vast body of frontline creation and mass recognition, surfaces the works that genuinely touch the mood of the times and the public psyche — a new mechanism for discovering publicness, and a window onto the emotional temper of the era

03  Sector Development — Technological Change Drives Industrial Innovation

Stronger Sector Guidance

2025 industry revenue of RMB 49 billion; steady growth in overall scale

The National Online Literature Work Conference; the Joint Conference of Key National Online Literature Websites (building consensus on AI-related responses, with attention to data copyright in AI training and ownership of AI-generated content)

Platforms exercising social responsibility (serious-illness assistance, professional-title review); organized thematic creation (80th anniversary of the War of Resistance)

Online Literature Remains the Most Important Content Source for the Cultural Industries

Format	New licenses per year	Notes
Full-length screen drama	100/year	About 200 fewer than the prior year's increment.《六姊妹》,《暗河传》（Tales of Dark River）,《大奉打更人》（Nightwatcher）,《水龙吟》,《国色芳华》（Guo Se Fang Hua）,《四喜》,《书卷一梦》,《折腰》（The Marquis Is Innocent）and others
Micro-drama	9,000/year	Up 463% year on year; the new engine of market growth
Animation	90/year	《凡人修仙传》（A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality）,《诡秘之主》（Lord of the Mysteries）,《紫川》（Purple River）and others
Comics	450/year	Provides the visual foundation and fan base for animation and games

Micro-Drama Has Become One of the Principal Adaptation Formats

As the screen industry deepens its cost-cutting and long-form development turns cautious, micro-drama has sustained rapid growth

It delivers a defined, immediate experience of emotional consumption, placing greater weight on distilling and converting premise, core conflict and emotional peaks

The logic of IP operation has changed: multiple platforms have opened up micro-drama licensing (waiving license fees, opening licensing pools), and repeat licensing and multi-version development of a single IP have become common

IP development is tilting toward "short-screen" formats; polished micro-dramas such as《一品布衣》,《冒姓琅琊》（Borrowed Name of Langya）and《盛夏芬德拉》have achieved nationwide breakout success

Print Publishing Booms; Merchandise and Immersive Cultural Tourism Grow

Print performance remains strong, with quality content converting online traffic into offline sales

Phenomenal bestsellers are frequent: print editions of leading titles such as《十日终焉》（Ten Day Ultimatum）and《剑来》（Unsheathed）have surpassed RMB 100 million in retail value, confirming the commercial power of online-literature IP and the value of the fan economy

The "goods economy": badges, standees, shikishi and other merchandise have become a new growth point for IP value, driven by Gen Z collecting and buying enthusiasm

Immersive cultural-tourism crossovers: Hangzhou's Yue Fei Temple ×《绍宋》（Shao Song）, Beijing Happy Valley ×《十日终焉》（Ten Day Ultimatum）, Taizhou Prefecture City ×《剑来》（Unsheathed）and other cases have landed, with themed parks established and costumed role-play tours staged at real sites

AI Is Fully Integrated into the Value Chain

Creation: AI-assisted writing, intelligent proofreading and content analysis tools raise efficiency in both writing and operations

IP development: AI has vastly expanded the range of filmable material, bringing high-fantasy subject matter — long constrained by technical difficulty and cost — into visual realization. New formats such as AI animated drama and simulated live-action are converting online-literature IP quickly and cheaply, already exerting pressure on live-action drama and directly affecting micro-drama platforms' self-production, minimum-guarantee and operating strategies

The "digital Hengdian": an industrial model built on reusable, retrievable standardized digital asset libraries, moving screen production into a new industrial stage that is highly modular and database-driven

Growth Slows; Platform Competition Intensifies

User growth has plateaued and entertainment spending is being diverted; the rapid rise of micro-drama has further eroded the online-literature market. Overall growth has slowed, platforms are under pressure, and competition has intensified

Free-reading platforms have changed reading habits and production mechanics, adding substantial absolute growth but creating a more urgent demand for premium content; paid-reading platforms are adjusting recommendation mechanisms and traffic allocation, though balancing long-standing readers against new operating models remains unresolved

Content boundaries are interpenetrating: Zhihu's Yanyan Stories has launched a long-form program to extend into mid- and long-form content; Tomato Novel continues to press into short fiction and micro-drama. Vertical and general platforms now compete on the same stage, and competition has shifted from a single track to the whole content ecosystem

New Challenges Facing the Sector

The substantive impact of micro-drama — sustained diversion of user time and authorial talent, directly squeezing traditional online literature's attention share and creative talent pipeline

AI competition and related issues — AI-generated content is growing fast; how recommendation systems should avoid pitting AI against human authors on production efficiency remains unsolved. No unified standard yet exists for certifying the human-machine ratio in co-created work, for the use of AI training data, or for copyright ownership, and the corresponding institutional framework is still to be built

Contraction in long-form drama affects premium creation and content depth — fewer adaptation opportunities for leading titles dampens author incentives and indirectly reduces platform investment in premium long-form work

Ecosystem maintenance under competitive pressure — as platforms escalate their contest for content, authors and traffic, sustaining a healthy ecosystem and genuine originality remains a critical concern

04  Going Global — Chinese Online Literature Spreads Worldwide as Competition Intensifies

Scale of Overseas Expansion

Indicator	Figure
Cumulative works exported overseas	130,000+
Print books exported	5,000+
E-books exported	120,000+
Existing overseas registered users	250 million
New overseas registered users in 2025	40 million
Overseas revenue surpassing	RMB 8 billion (including platforms' micro-drama business)

Strategic upgrade: as one of the "new big three" of cultural export, online literature is written into the CPC Central Committee's Recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development, embedding it deeply in the national agenda

Flagship activities: China International Online Literature Week and Shanghai International Online Literature Week; the "Gen Z" international communication program for online literature

Multipolar Growth in Overseas Markets

Latin America: the new engine of explosive growth — Latin American countries hold nine of the top ten places in WebNovel's global monthly-active growth ranking, with Brazil outstanding at 779% user growth, the fastest-growing region

North America: continued leaps in installed base — as a mature market, WebNovel's US user base grew 91% year on year, with paid-reading habits firmly established

Europe and Asia: diversified markets developing together — Russia, France and other European markets are actively importing leading Chinese titles; India and the UK maintain rapid growth. The map of overseas expansion has shifted from a single hot region to depth across diversified global markets

Four Paths for Text Export

Print export: female-oriented platforms, led by Jinjiang Literature City, remain the mainstay; print editions such as《天官赐福》（Heaven Official's Blessing）circulate widely abroad and have long held places on bestseller lists, producing a long-cycle, high-intensity cultural reach

Multilingual translation: breaking out of the English core, translations have been completed in roughly 20 smaller languages including Thai, Vietnamese and Ukrainian, covering users in more emerging language markets

E-book export: through translated distribution on self-operated overseas sites, or by licensing to foreign platforms such as Korea's Kakao. AIGC has made AI-assisted translation the dominant mode, raising translation efficiency nearly a hundredfold and cutting costs by more than 90%

Toward canonization: 12 Chinese online-literature works including《国色芳华》（Guo Se Fang Hua）have entered the British Library's collection, bringing the total to 38. Works of sustained cultural quality and textual value are winning broad recognition within mainstream overseas cultural institutions

IP Export Integrates into the Global Cultural Industry; Narrative Export Leads Popular-Culture Innovation

A global wave of IP screen and animation adaptation: C-Drama has become a term of art overseas, with《庆余年2》（Joy of Life Season 2）and《折腰》（The Marquis Is Innocent）near the top of overseas popularity charts. Overseas micro-dramas are drawing on domestic online literature's plotting and pacing and are gaining strong momentum.《斗破苍穹》（Battle Through the Heavens）has 1.18 billion YouTube views;《诡秘之主》（Lord of the Mysteries）opened at 9.3 on IMDb. From screen drama to animation, Chinese online-literature IP is breaking cultural barriers across formats and building a stable global fan base and word of mouth

Chinese online-literature IP + overseas tourism: China Literature has entered deep partnerships with Disney, Netflix, Sony Pictures and other international media majors, landing Chinese IP content within the global mainstream screen industry and extending the value chain worldwide. Cross-border real-site tie-ins:《道诡异仙》（Dao of the Bizarre Immortal）partnered with Universal Studios Singapore on a themed adventure house, turning virtual narrative into physical tourism consumption. Destination co-branding:《全职高手》（The King's Avatar）and Switzerland Tourism launched the "2025 Rendezvous in Zurich" campaign, drawing more than ten thousand travelers to check in across Switzerland

A new stage of narrative export: the Chinese production mechanism for online literature has been successfully replicated abroad, with WebNovel and other overseas platforms signing local authors in large numbers. Chinese online literature has entered a stage of narrative export, driving innovation in world popular-fiction narrative through the cross-border transmission of creative form and narrative technique. Chinese narrative modes are now widely borrowed: the "leveling-up" pattern has fueled the rise of an overseas "progression fantasy" wave, while "system," "infinite flow" and "survival instance" structures are widely adopted. Civilizational markers — Confucian and Daoist thought, chivalric spirit, devotion to family and country — are being converted through online literature into emotional symbols that global audiences can perceive and share

New Conditions and Challenges in Going Global

Lack of coordinated support — expansion has largely been a dispersed corporate activity, mostly a spillover of domestic business, with little initiative in developing overseas operations proper. Platforms act alone and resources are badly wasted. Now that online literature is written into the 15th Five-Year Plan and top-level national design, more actionable supporting policy is needed to unlock the initiative and creativity of market participants

Intensifying international cultural competition — China's successful playbook has been absorbed by overseas domestic platforms; Korea's Kakao and others have wholesale imported Chinese online-literature operating mechanisms, sharpening international competition. Europe, the US, Japan and Korea already possess mature popular-culture industry chains and digital reading systems, leaving Chinese online literature facing considerable resistance in those markets

Regional reach remains uneven — despite the short-term explosion in Latin America, effective coverage and cross-cultural transposition in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Africa still need work

Mounting pressure on copyright protection — overseas piracy and infringement remain severe. Large numbers of overseas sites reproduce and translate Chinese content without authorization; cross-border enforcement is difficult and costly, and platforms struggle to respond

05  Literary Theory — Diversifying Research, Agenda-Setting That Shapes the Field

Agenda-Setting, Promotion and Recognition

The China Online Literature Forum and China International Online Literature Week were successfully held, systematically reviewing the year's development and overseas communication, assessing trends and setting the leading agenda. The field convened around frontier topics including "new mass public arts," "the greater literary view," "AI: empowerment and challenge," "the new big three of cultural export," and "the canonization of online literature"

Consensus has gradually formed around several positions: that the mainstreaming and quality-first development of online literature is accelerating; that online literature is the paradigmatic form of the new mass public arts under internet conditions; and that it constitutes the essential content base of the "new big three" of cultural export

The China Writers Association released the 2024 Online Literature Influence List, featuring 30 outstanding works including《下一站，彭城广场》and《十日终焉》（Ten Day Ultimatum）, along with 10 newcomers including Ji Yueren and Herongl; the Chinese Fiction Society's "Best Chinese Fiction of 2024" selected 10 online novels including《宿命之环》（Circle of Inevitability）and《剑来》（Unsheathed）

Through authoritative recognition, works of broad influence are brought to the fore, guiding creative direction and raising overall social recognition of online literature

Research Directions and Platforms Diversify; Output Climbs

CNKI indexed more than 850 journal articles, dissertations and newspaper pieces on online literature this year — a marked rise in volume

Core papers in CSSCI-indexed journals surpassed 200, indicating sustained growth in research intensity

National research funding and a cross-disciplinary landscape: multiple online-literature projects have been approved under the National Social Science Fund and the Ministry of Education's Humanities and Social Sciences Fund. Researchers increasingly come from Chinese literature, journalism and communication, literary theory, cultural publishing, computer software and applications, and automation technology, making the cross-disciplinary character ever more pronounced. Creative writing has been established as a second-level disciplinary direction within contemporary Chinese literature, with online-literature composition set as an important objective of creative-writing pedagogy

Frontier topics: new mass public arts, artificial intelligence, female-oriented writing, cross-cultural narrative, micro-drama adaptation, platform mechanics, genre and post-genre, construction of a critical framework, overseas communication, production mechanics of short-form online fiction — research directions are proliferating, while recovery, excavation and organization of online-literature source materials and the construction of a history of development and of criticism advance steadily

Academic platforms: publication of the Yearbook of Chinese Online Literature and the Annual Selection of Chinese Online Literature Theory and Criticism; the China Writers Association's support program for online-literature theory and criticism backed 9 projects; Literary Review, Literary Theory and Criticism and other scholarly journals opened new columns on the new mass public arts and online-literature research; public accounts including China Writer Net opened online-literature criticism columns; the online-literature reading program continues, and the Online Literature Center has now convened 16 symposia on individual works

Persistent Weaknesses in Research

Research capacity does not match the sector's influence — relative to online literature's current scale and impact, the research community, the number and tier of journals, and the field's standing within the research landscape all remain weak. Its disciplinary home is unclear, and foundational study, paradigm construction and critical method have yet to be firmly established or widely recognized within existing disciplinary frameworks

Severe shortage of professional publishing venues — the field lacks a dedicated journal for online-literature research and criticism, constraining outlets for high-quality scholarship. Researchers struggle to secure a stable platform, which dampens enthusiasm, impedes dissemination, restricts the exchange and collision of scholarly views, and holds back the discipline's influence

Inadequate systems of recognition and incentive — existing mainstream literary awards cover online literature only sparsely and unspecifically, and there is no core authoritative national award dedicated to it. This gap limits the guiding effect such mechanisms could have on both creation and research

Together, these problems leave research and criticism with limited practical effect in guiding the sector, advancing disciplinary construction, and strengthening cultural discourse power.

06  Writers & Associations — Faster Organizational Development, Surging Grassroots Creative Energy

Indicator	Figure
Newly registered authors in 2025	2.85 million+
Newly contracted authors in 2025	220,000+
Online writers holding China Writers Association membership	727 (112 newly admitted in 2025)
Membership of provincial-level and above online-literature bodies	20,000+

Every trade, every walk of life: chronicling the era from the grassroots — online writers come from every industry and the frontline of ordinary work; the convenient conditions of internet writing have drawn wide participation in internet and new-media literary practice, vividly reflecting change and the full range of human circumstance, producing a scene in which "every trade produces its champions, and every trade has its stories"

Gen Z ascendant; the post-2000 cohort drives content innovation — online literature fits the Gen Z ideal of flexible, autonomous, creative work, and has become a significant career direction for them. Post-2000 writers are not only growing rapidly in number but distinguishing themselves in premium work, becoming the main force behind innovation in subject matter and content

Silver-haired writing — writing has become a new trend among older people, offering a fresh path to participate in social life flexibly and realize personal worth

Talent development — in 2025 the Online Literature Center combined online and offline formats to run specialized programs for heads of key national online-literature sites, and on international communication and screen adaptation, making guidance for writers and practitioners more precise and more substantive

A Coordinated National Framework Takes Shape; Regional Collaboration Deepens

Accelerated provincial organizational development: in 2025 the China Writers Association supported the establishment of online writers' associations and branches in Fujian, Beijing, Liaoning, Guangxi, Henan and Shanxi — six provinces — bringing the total number of provincial-level online writers' bodies to 27

Municipal and county-level bodies proliferate: Shijiazhuang, Zhangjiakou, Jining, Xuancheng and Xi'an's Beilin district, among others, have set up online-literature organizations, extending the national framework to the grassroots and connecting provincial, municipal, district and county levels

Continued organizational work for young and women writers: the national online-literature industry Communist Youth League work guidance and advancement committee was established in Beijing, strengthening ideological guidance, recognition, promotion and talent development for young online writers; the All-China Women's Federation and the China Writers Association have actively expanded organizational and work coverage, running themed calls for submissions, online salons and "Thoughts Shared" activities to strengthen League leadership services for women writers

Regional collaboration: Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei jointly ran the "Youth Association Academy" backbone training program for young online-literature writers, advancing industrial linkage and talent-sharing across the three localities; a symposium on collaborative development in the Northeast was convened, with the three northeastern provinces and one autonomous region jointly signing an Action Plan for Collaborative Development of Online Literature in the Northeast; the Yangtze River Delta, anchored in Shanghai and radiating to Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui, has formed a collaborative effect in micro-drama co-production and IP development, smoothing coordination up and down the value chain; the Tibet Writers Association and the online writers' associations of Sichuan, Chongqing, Guizhou and Yunnan jointly issued an Initiative for Collaborative Development of Online Literature in the Southwest, building a shared platform for exchange and cooperation

Organizational Vitality Still Needs Strengthening; Talent Development Awaits Transformation

Insufficient vitality in some organizations — although provincial online writers' associations now provide full coverage, some are limited by staffing and funding, with few activities and weak services, and have yet to establish routine working mechanisms; work lacks an effective handle

The writing population is hard to gauge precisely — mid-tier and grassroots authors are highly mobile, their numbers unclear and their profiles indistinct, their protections weak, with no stable channel of contact or effective means of bringing them together

Training systems urgently need upgrading — the shock of technological change is enormous, and new questions such as human-machine collaborative creation and copyright-risk prevention have arisen. Existing training is structurally misaligned with the actual needs of online writers and practitioners, and supply is insufficient in both frontier content and practical skills

Conclusion

In 2025, online literature maintained steady development amid technological change: creative quality continued to rise, the industrial ecosystem kept improving, overseas influence grew markedly, theory and criticism pursued innovation, and organizational development advanced. The sector moved forward together, meeting new opportunities and facing new challenges.

The 15th Five-Year Plan outline has incorporated online literature into the national cultural development strategy and the overall arrangement for economic and social development, and its development is entering a new stage driven by national strategy. The online-literature community will keep the nation's highest priorities in mind, further sharpen its understanding of its own mission and value, accelerate the drive toward the mainstream and toward quality, respond actively to the profound changes wrought by the technological revolution, continually unleash cultural innovation and creativity, exercise its leading role as the paradigmatic form of the new mass public arts, release the powerful energy of literature in the internet age, and strive to contribute still more to building a strong nation and to national rejuvenation.

Hello everyone, this is Lucas.

Chinese web novelists love giving themselves cool-sounding pen names. If you've read any of these novels, you've probably noticed this. Have you ever wondered why they chose the names they did? Whether there's some deeper meaning to them?

Today I'll go through some well-known authors and where their pen names came from. Some of these come directly from the authors themselves — in interviews or in their own novels. Others are longstanding fan theories from the Chinese internet.

1. Cuttlefish That Loves Diving (爱潜水的乌贼) — author of Lord of the Mysteries.

In an interview, he mentioned that when he was writing his 2011 debut novel, he originally wanted to use "Cuttlefish" as his pen name. But it was already taken. So he added "That Loves Diving". He never explained why he chose those particular words — but my guess is that he was probably diving at the time.

2. Tang Jia San Shao (唐家三少) — author of the Soul Land series.

The most widely circulated story about his pen name is "sugar plus three spoons" (糖加三勺, táng jiā sān sháo). On a TV variety show in 2013, he said that as a kid he liked drinking soy milk, and he'd always add three spoons of sugar. "Sugar plus three spoons" sounds similar to "Tang Jia San Shao," so he took the homophone as his pen name.

He later clarified that this was just a joke. The real origin is a screen name he'd been using since 1998. Back then he was active in chat rooms and used four different screen names at the same time — from Tang Jia Da Shao (Tang Family Eldest Young Master) all the way to Tang Jia Si Shao (Tang Family Fourth Young Master). When he eventually started writing seriously, he picked "Tang Jia San Shao" (Tang Family Third Young Master) as his official pen name.

3. Li Hu, also known as Heavenly Silkworm Potato (天蚕土豆)— author of Battle Through the Heavens.

He confirmed in an interview that his pen name really is a food. Heavenly Silkworm Potato is a street snack from his hometown (Deyang, Sichuan), also known as "wolf-fang potato." It's made by cutting potatoes into wavy strips with a special tool — shaped a bit like McDonald's crinkle-cut fries, only thicker — and then dressed with a heavy mix of spices and seasonings. He just really likes eating them.
His real name is Li Hu(李虎,which means “tiger”) — he wanted Western readers to remember it.

4. I Eat Tomatoes (我吃西红柿) — author of Coiling Dragon.

He said in an interview: "It's hard to come up with a name online. I thought of 'Tomato' — taken. 'I Am Tomato' — also taken. So out of frustration, I went with 'I Eat Tomatoes'!"

As for why "tomato" in the first place, fans have speculated it might be because his real name is Zhu Hongzhi, which sounds similar to xihongshi (tomato). Or maybe he just really does like eating tomatoes.

5. Chen Dong (辰东) — author of Perfect World.

His pen name comes from his real Chinese name, Yang Zhendong (杨振东). "Chen" (辰) is one half of the character "Zhen" (振).

6. Dreamwalker (梦入神机) — author of Sage Monarch and Eternal Life.

He used to be a professional Chinese chess player. His pen name is the title of a classic ancient Chinese chess manual. Clearly, his accomplishments as a writer far outweigh his accomplishments as a chess player.

7. Er Gen (耳根) — author of Renegade Immortal, Beyond the Timescape

The word literally means "the base of the ear."

In an interview, he explained where the name came from:

"There's this expression in Chinese — when someone gets really excited, we say their ear-roots are turning red. I thought, well, if I'm going to write books, I'd like to get red (i.e., popular) too. So I named myself Er Gen. Maybe I'll get red."

8. I Can Fix Air Conditioners (我会修空调) — author of My House of Horrors.

He mentioned in an interview that before he became a full-time writer, he worked as a quality control technician at an air conditioner factory. In other words, he really can fix air conditioners.

He also chose this pen name because he hoped his stories would feel like an air conditioner — giving readers that chill-down-the-spine feeling.

9. Angry Squid (愤怒的乌贼) — author of Immortality Simulator.

Fans generally believe this pen name is a mashup of two Platinum authors' names: Angry Banana (愤怒的香蕉) and Cuttlefish That Loves Diving (爱潜水的乌贼).

10. Feng Huo Xi Zhu Hou (烽火戏诸侯) — author of Unsheathed.

His pen name comes from a famous Chinese historical story. It's about a foolish king who, in order to amuse his favorite consort, kept tricking his own noble lords into rushing to his aid — until one day the real invaders came, no one showed up, and his kingdom fell. It's not too far from Aesop's "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

11. Salagus (沙拉古斯) — author of The Overlord of Puluo.

Recently he did a livestream on Douyin with his Qidian editor, sharing some of his writing experience. During the stream, he explained where his pen name came from.

His first novel was in the Western fantasy genre, and at the time he was completely absorbed in knightly imagery. He wanted a pen name with a Western-fantasy feel. He went to a Western restaurant, ordered a salad, and was still hungry. The waiter recommended " pork bone stew with glass noodles " — he didn't expect a Western restaurant to serve a traditional Chinese dish like that. Salad, bone, glass noodles — the combination struck him as interesting. So he made up a name: 沙拉(salad)古(bone)斯(glass noodles).

The current English translation "Salagus" happens to line up perfectly with the Western-fantasy vibe he was going for.

 

If there's anything else about Chinese web novels you're curious about, drop a comment — happy to answer.

 

Hello everyone, this is Lucas.

Chinese web novelists love giving themselves cool-sounding pen names. If you've read any of these novels, you've probably noticed this. Have you ever wondered why they chose the names they did? Whether there's some deeper meaning to them?

Today I'll go through some well-known authors and where their pen names came from. Some of these come directly from the authors themselves — in interviews or in their own novels. Others are longstanding fan theories from the Chinese internet.

1. Cuttlefish That Loves Diving (爱潜水的乌贼) — author of Lord of the Mysteries.

In an interview, he mentioned that when he was writing his 2011 debut novel, he originally wanted to use "Cuttlefish" as his pen name. But it was already taken. So he added "That Loves Diving". He never explained why he chose those particular words — but my guess is that he was probably diving at the time.

2. Tang Jia San Shao (唐家三少) — author of the Soul Land series.

The most widely circulated story about his pen name is "sugar plus three spoons" (糖加三勺, táng jiā sān sháo). On a TV variety show in 2013, he said that as a kid he liked drinking soy milk, and he'd always add three spoons of sugar. "Sugar plus three spoons" sounds similar to "Tang Jia San Shao," so he took the homophone as his pen name.

He later clarified that this was just a joke. The real origin is a screen name he'd been using since 1998. Back then he was active in chat rooms and used four different screen names at the same time — from Tang Jia Da Shao (Tang Family Eldest Young Master) all the way to Tang Jia Si Shao (Tang Family Fourth Young Master). When he eventually started writing seriously, he picked "Tang Jia San Shao" (Tang Family Third Young Master) as his official pen name.

3. Li Hu, also known as Heavenly Silkworm Potato (天蚕土豆)— author of Battle Through the Heavens.

He confirmed in an interview that his pen name really is a food. Heavenly Silkworm Potato is a street snack from his hometown (Deyang, Sichuan), also known as "wolf-fang potato." It's made by cutting potatoes into wavy strips with a special tool — shaped a bit like McDonald's crinkle-cut fries, only thicker — and then dressed with a heavy mix of spices and seasonings. He just really likes eating them.
His real name is Li Hu(李虎,which means “tiger”) — he wanted Western readers to remember it.

4. I Eat Tomatoes (我吃西红柿) — author of Coiling Dragon.

He said in an interview: "It's hard to come up with a name online. I thought of 'Tomato' — taken. 'I Am Tomato' — also taken. So out of frustration, I went with 'I Eat Tomatoes'!"

As for why "tomato" in the first place, fans have speculated it might be because his real name is Zhu Hongzhi, which sounds similar to xihongshi (tomato). Or maybe he just really does like eating tomatoes.

5. Chen Dong (辰东) — author of Perfect World.

His pen name comes from his real Chinese name, Yang Zhendong (杨振东). "Chen" (辰) is one half of the character "Zhen" (振).

6. Dreamwalker (梦入神机) — author of Sage Monarch and Eternal Life.

He used to be a professional Chinese chess player. His pen name is the title of a classic ancient Chinese chess manual. Clearly, his accomplishments as a writer far outweigh his accomplishments as a chess player.

7. Er Gen (耳根) — author of Renegade Immortal, Beyond the Timescape

The word literally means "the base of the ear."

In an interview, he explained where the name came from:

"There's this expression in Chinese — when someone gets really excited, we say their ear-roots are turning red. I thought, well, if I'm going to write books, I'd like to get red (i.e., popular) too. So I named myself Er Gen. Maybe I'll get red."

8. I Can Fix Air Conditioners (我会修空调) — author of My House of Horrors.

He mentioned in an interview that before he became a full-time writer, he worked as a quality control technician at an air conditioner factory. In other words, he really can fix air conditioners.

He also chose this pen name because he hoped his stories would feel like an air conditioner — giving readers that chill-down-the-spine feeling.

9. Angry Squid (愤怒的乌贼) — author of Immortality Simulator.

Fans generally believe this pen name is a mashup of two Platinum authors' names: Angry Banana (愤怒的香蕉) and Cuttlefish That Loves Diving (爱潜水的乌贼).

10. Feng Huo Xi Zhu Hou (烽火戏诸侯) — author of Unsheathed.

His pen name comes from a famous Chinese historical story. It's about a foolish king who, in order to amuse his favorite consort, kept tricking his own noble lords into rushing to his aid — until one day the real invaders came, no one showed up, and his kingdom fell. It's not too far from Aesop's "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

11. Salagus (沙拉古斯) — author of The Overlord of Puluo.

Recently he did a livestream on Douyin with his Qidian editor, sharing some of his writing experience. During the stream, he explained where his pen name came from.

His first novel was in the Western fantasy genre, and at the time he was completely absorbed in knightly imagery. He wanted a pen name with a Western-fantasy feel. He went to a Western restaurant, ordered a salad, and was still hungry. The waiter recommended " pork bone stew with glass noodles " — he didn't expect a Western restaurant to serve a traditional Chinese dish like that. Salad, bone, glass noodles — the combination struck him as interesting. So he made up a name: 沙拉(salad)古(bone)斯(glass noodles).

The current English translation "Salagus" happens to line up perfectly with the Western-fantasy vibe he was going for.

 

If there's anything else about Chinese web novels you're curious about, drop a comment — happy to answer.

 

Hi everyone, I'm Lucas, a Chinese web novel editor.

I've been reading some original works by Western authors lately — especially xianxia-style cultivation novels written by Western authors,such as Cradle and Sky Pride.

I've noticed some real differences in how Western authors approach these stories, compared to how we write web novels in China.

1. Chinese novels care less about a character's personality and inner growth than Western works do.

In most current Chinese novels, the protagonist's personality is locked in from the first chapter. No matter what he goes through afterwards, it doesn't really change.

"Growth"of personality usually means mistakes, setbacks, and admitting to them. Sometimes it also means being molded into shape by discipline. By Chinese web novel standards, that's simply not satisfying to read. A lot of readers already went through that in their own teenage years. They don't want to relive it in a novel.

For transmigrator MCs, this kind of "growth" is even less necessary. Transmigrators represent people whose identity and social class are similar to the reader's. Almost nobody wants to admit that their own personality needs to change — and nobody wants to watch a transmigrator MC change either.

There were some earlier works that put a lot of weight on personality change — Jade Dynasty, Reverend Insanity, Renegade Immortal. But you rarely see this kind of writing now.

Western progression fantasy authors, by contrast, seem to spend a lot of pages designing plot arcs specifically to reflect changes in the protagonist's inner life.

2. Chinese novels care more about pacing than Western novels do.

For most Chinese novels, the protagonist has to show what sets him apart very early on. If he has a special ability or a system, the sooner it shows up, the better. Then he has to use that ability quickly and succeed at something with it.

For certain subgenres — some xuanhuan, for example — the opening can even follow a template. Chapter 1: the MC transmigrates, and the setting plus the main conflict is established. Chapter 2: his special ability is revealed, he starts cultivating. Chapter 3: he reaches a small breakthrough, a fight breaks out, and he face-slaps a villain hard.

This template was huge for a while. Personally I don't like it, but I have to admit it's a market-tested opening you can drop straight into a book.

Western works seem to put more weight on worldbuilding and setup. Before the MC starts showing his power, they may spend a dozen chapters on setup, sometimes longer. At least all the ones I've read work this way .This approach makes the pacing slower, but it also has its own kind of charm.

One more thing: Western readers might not be that into works that move too fast, that push the plot forward too eagerly. I've seen some Chinese translated novels get criticized for exactly this.

I haven't read a lot of Western works, and I haven't read them very deeply. But I don't think these two differences are just my personal impression. I'm curious about where these Western writing choices come from, and how readers here feel about them. I'm also happy to share more about how Chinese web novels actually get written. Looking forward to the discussion — and if I've gotten anything wrong in this post, please tell me.

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.