Online literature spearheads China's cultural industry
- By staff reporter Verena Menzel
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E-mail China Today, December 14, 2016
Mature Production Chain
Perhaps most important, this formal adjustment to the target medium at the same time creates an ideal link for commercial remarketing of literary content through other media channels. It is this potential for remarketing that could account for the great success of Chinese online literature. It might also explain why this particular segment of the cultural industry segment does so well in China.
Whichever author achieves a breakthrough on the Internet in China stands a good chance of finding their way into the traditional print market. A typical success story starts with Internet-hype, transforms into a re-publishing of the story in book form, and ends in adaptation of the content into a script for a movie or TV series, or as a basis for manga, comics, or computer games.
Thus, over the past years, a mature production chain has been spun into China's web literature, and the cycle from online breakthrough to remarketing in other media has become shorter.
Here China differs somewhat from industrialized nations like Europe and the United States, as well as its Asian neighbors Japan and South Korea, where specific pop culture production mechanisms for all types of media were fully developed well in advance of the Internet era.
In these countries, genre novels have for many years been successfully remarketed as movie or television adaptations, and remodeled into cartoon or manga books. But in China these economical mechanisms did not emerge until much later.
Whereas most marketing structures remained stable in the Western industrialized nations after the Internet arrived on the scene, albeit with certain small adaptations, in China these mechanisms were relatively underdeveloped upon the advent of the World Wide Web. They therefore seemed more amenable to adaptation.
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China’s first web literature portal. |
In China, the success of the Internet suddenly opened up a whole new space, which young amateur and professional writers put to maximum use. As a consequence, new emerging Chinese writing portals could absorb many resources formerly controlled by the traditional literary industry. In the fully developed literature markets of many Western countries, however, these resources stayed in the hands of big, long-established publishing houses.
Over the last years, new cultural players in the literature market have managed not only to build a huge fan base but also to attract cash from the anime, cartoon, and games sector (ACG sector). According to sootoo.com statistics, the vast majority of Chinese web literature fans are male (76 percent). Furthermore, most share a taste for ACG culture as well as Anglo-American or Japanese-Korean TV series. This also plays into the hands of web portals and authors of online literature as regards further marketing of successful online works.
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