Society

Full-time online writers mushroom to over 1m

By Zhang Jiawei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-05-13 17:36

China has more than 1 million full-time online writers, with many of them earning tens of thousands of yuan a year and some earning over 100,000 yuan ($14,600), or even 1 million yuan a year, the Chongqing Evening News reported Thursday.

"When I first saw the 1,400 yuan payment for the story I wrote for the website, I couldn't help but laugh," said an online writer named "Sparkle", who never imagined that he could so easily earn the amount of money to support himself for two months.

"Sparkle", who went to work for a foreign trade company in Zhejiang province after graduating from college, was not satisfied with that life. He tried writing some short novels online six years ago, and now he is a full-time writer of military-themed novels for qidian.com, an online publisher.

"For professional writers like us, it is a basic requirement of writing more than 10,000 Chinese characters per day," "Sparkle" said. "I usually write five to six hours a day and then upload the contents online, and I can still have time to take care of my child."

He said it was normal for writers to make 100,000 yuan a year, and some can even make 100,000 yuan a month.

A girl with the Net name "Flowers Laugh To Me", who has been studying in the US since high school, said she began writing novels herself because she thought the novels she was reading were not so good.

Her first novel failed to capture readers' interest, but one of her friends read the novel and encouraged her to continue writing. Half a year later, she wrote her second novel, which achieved an unexpected success, with readers' messages and page views increasing rapidly, and the book was eventually published.

Now she writes three to five hours a day and earns 3,000 to 4,000 yuan a month from the online novels. Taking into account the earnings from publishing her books and stories for magazines, she now earns nearly 100,000 yuan a year, even though she is still a student.

It is relatively easy to become an online writer. People just have to create an account with a literature website, and then upload a certain number of characters, according to the Chongqing Evening News.

Writers can write whatever they like except for pornographic and retroactive content, and whatever they wrote won't be edited by the website administrators.

Readers usually have to pay the website for reading the novels, and the website then gives 50 to 70 percent of the money to writers. If a writer produces more than a certain number of characters each day, the proportion they get will be even higher. Some readers who are eager to read more will give the writer extra awards for posting more content. And some websites give writers 500 to 1,000 yuan per month if they post a certain number of characters.

Many readers choose to read novels online because they are cheap and convenient. Compared with buying a book at 30 to 40 yuan, an online novel costs only 4 to 5 yuan, said Liu Dan, a department manager in a Chongqing-based machinery company.

However, full-time online writers who earn money represent only part of the industry. For most people, to be a good full-time online writer is not easy and their life as a writer can be very difficult and boring.

Some writers even have to write more than 10 hours a day, with their entire life dedicated to writing, besides eating and sleeping, the Chongqing Evening News said.

And when they write some good novels, they also have to worry about being pirated, which happens frequently, according to a survey by Shanda Literature Ltd, the online publishing arm of Nasdaq-listed Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd, which shows that 90 percent of China's Internet users have read or often read pirated online publications.