http://www.wsj.com/articles/online-f...rce-1469035251
excerpt:
Quote:
Some 43% of China’s online population, or 297 million people, read novels online in 2015, according to a government report. The best-known authors have millions of followers. Their works are made into films, TV series, animations and games.
In March 2015, game and social-media company Tencent Holdings formed the biggest online literature company in the country, China Reading, after combining its own literature division with Shanda Cloudary, which it had reportedly acquired for five billion yuan ($747 million). China Reading has eight websites, with categories including fantasy, romance, kung fu and business. It has altogether four million writers and 10 million book titles.
Like fiction offered on Wattpad, Chinese online novels are serialized. Authors usually post two chapters a day, or over 3,000 Chinese characters that take less than 10 minutes to read, and end with a cliffhanger.
Unlike Wattpad, which is free for its users to upload and read, the Chinese online fiction site Qidian, now part of China Reading, decided in 2003 that it would charge readers so it could pay authors.
Income for some authors has skyrocketed as a result of the increased interest in online fiction. Zhang Wei, pen-named Tang Jia San Shao, was the top-earning author in China from 2008 to 2012, during which time his royalty income rose to 110 million yuan from 26.5 million. It would have put him behind romance novelist Nora Roberts as No. 10 on Forbes’s 2015 list of highest-earning authors in the world.
The online lit business faces big challenges, chiefly copyright piracy and censorship. Pirated versions of novels such as “Fifty Shades of Grey” (in translation) are easily accessible. Only a fraction of the 297 million readers pay to read. China Reading says that in the first half of 2016 the company sent about 110,000 complaints to websites that violated its copyrights and filed hundreds of civil lawsuits against websites that infringed its rights.
|
It's too bad that piracy is HUGE in China. Otherwise, earnings from web novels would be a lot bigger.
Qidian is charging about $0.01 - $0.02 per chapter (about 2000 words).
That doesn't seem a lot in term of royalties but it add up really quick when you have tens of millions of readers. The top earning web author is making 110 million yuan a year (about $16.7 million USD in royalties).