Wired Magazine looks at the popularity of online novels in China, and the ways it is helping spur the print publishing industry as well:
“Novel,” the top search term on China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, yields thousands of Chinese literature websites. More than 100,000 amateurs shirk mundane duties to publish their tales of fantasy and love in installments on these platforms. A handful of anonymous web authors have seen their pageviews soar into the upper seven digits. When that happens, print publishers come knocking.
And it’s not just print. Companies from almost every entertainment field, including films and video games, are joining forces, heralding the next generation of Chinese entertainment empires. The creative content of one internet novel can be sold to various national entertainment companies up to five times. A film version of Ghost Blows Out the Light is in pre-production and many popular internet novels have spawned TV series and online games. [Full text]
[Image: Magic Sword’s CEO, Kong Yi, stands behind an unreleased batch of internet novels, by Aventurina King for Wired]
