Want good books? Reward the writers, says head of China’s biggest online publisher
At China Reading, about 70 per cent of our revenue is from e-reading via mobile apps and websites. The company owns nine e-reading platforms with a combined 600 million registered readers. They pay for VIP chapters after reading some parts free of charge. We share the income with authors. We had 4 million contract authors last year and more than 10,000 writers are joining the ranks annually. We pay around 80 million yuan (HK$90 million) a month in copyright fees to the authors. Popular writers could earn as much as 500,000 yuan a month.
Comments
Many of China's biggest web sites are simply copies -- with a heavy dose of censorship -- of popular ones launched earlier in the West.
But these online literary platforms are a distinctly Chinese phenomenon, and one that both writers and readers benefit from.
Doubtless only a tiny portion of authors earn money from their writing on these sites, but then again, how many aspiring authors in the West make much $ from their fiction?
A good number of video games and movie scripts have resulted. Most importantly, it is the Chinese digital reading public -- not gatekeepers within the publishing industry -- that determine which writers are rewarded.
Bruce Humes, November 26, 2016, 10:26p.m.