Is Chinese fantasy popular enough among English readers to garner the $10 mil translation spending?

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I saw this recently on kboards.

Do you think Chinese fantasy will become popular or will this be an epic failure?


In 2016, China Readings shared over hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties with our writers. We are looking forward to the rapid growth that the webnovel translation market will be able to achieve just as the original webnovel market achieved.

As Qidian International, incubating and developing the market will be always our first priority rather than profit gaining. We plan to invest over 10 million dollars in next few years to build a better ecosystem for all webnovel translators and editors.


They have several genre

Xuanhuan
Xianxia
Fantasy
Sci-Fi
Modern
Sports
Horror
Romance
Gaming
Others


https://www.webnovel.com/category/list?category=Xuanhuan
Xuanhuan
These stories are set in imaginary worlds, and have elements from ancient Asian culture. Clear cultivation level systems are present within these stories. These mystical stories about the esoteric will mainly be about personal mystical power levels, as well as the love and revenge between the characters.

https://www.webnovel.com/category/list?category=20014
Xianxia

Xianxia or immortal cultivation novels are a type of story fully immersed with ancient Chinese lore. The characters in these stories are striving to obtain immortality and must face many obstacles as well as each other.

https://www.webnovel.com/category/list?category=20005
Fantasy
These stories are set in imaginary worlds that have elements from ancient or medieval western culture. They will utilize settings that include magic and other fictional phenomena.
 

SeattleSounders

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From what I can see, all these novels are free to read. I don't know if they will be able to recoup the cost.

Or maybe they know they will lose money and they don't care since they are backed by Tencent. $10 million is like a rounding error to Tencent.

Japan media export is anime/manga. Korea has kpop and Kdrama. China does not really have anything. So even if this lose money, it might be worth it.

They are taking the most popular fantasy novels in China and translating them so there should be a decent audience.....especially since these novels are free.
 

jjdebenedictis

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I would think all the money would be made going in the opposite direction, from English to Chinese, given the respective size of the audiences. There are roughly twice as many Mandarin speakers in the world as English speakers. I couldn't find numbers on how many people speak other dialects, but I believe most dialects of Chinese use the same written language.

If you're already selling (although it's not clear they are?) fantasy to Chinese speakers, then it seems as if trying to break into the English speaking market won't be very lucrative in comparison.
 

JDlugosz

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I would think all the money would be made going in the opposite direction, from English to Chinese, given the respective size of the audiences. There are roughly twice as many Mandarin speakers in the world as English speakers. I couldn't find numbers on how many people speak other dialects, but I believe most dialects of Chinese use the same written language.

If you're already selling (although it's not clear they are?) fantasy to Chinese speakers, then it seems as if trying to break into the English speaking market won't be very lucrative in comparison.

Consider that Westerners will pay more for one copy, by one or two orders of magnitude. As I recall, there is a scaling difference in the economy of 13×. I determined this, in 2008, by comparing the average income of middle class earners in Yunnan vs Texas, and obtained the figures from skimming Wikipedia and finding values that were gotten from CIA World Fact Book. At the time, one USD was right at 7 RMB. DVDs were generally sold for 10元, which came to under $1.50, but that might be a more special case if they’re not paying the IP owners.
 
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themindstream

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So I forwarded this to a friend who is a fast and avid reader and is forever complaining that he's run out of material. Inside 20 minutes he had figured out their business model, some of which is covered by these guys (who I guess publish with Qidan). The novels are serialized and delivered through their reader app. Everything starts out free, popular works may get bumped up to subscription. There's also a lot of gamification features to get people promoting/sharing/discussing stuff.
 

Laer Carroll

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Wikipedia has a useful overview of the Chinese language. Basically, there are several dialects as different from each other as the several Romance languages. The dialect with the largest number of speakers we call Mandarin, the one I learned in the '60s. It has several subdialects.

Chinese governments (yeah, plural, as China has several millennia of history!) have long introduced simplifications and an official language. An aid to this was the written language. It is ideographic and widely used. The governments introduced a simplified version of it. Later they introduced an alphabetic version: pinyin.

You can type pinyin on a standard European keyboard. More often a special version of the keyboard is used. Chinese is a tonal language, four in Mandarin (five if you count the neutral tone). Provisions have to be made for this. Some of those are in whatever word processor is used, so if there's a possible ambiguity the typist can be shown the alternatives and s/he can select one. A skilled typist in Mandarin is just about as fast as one in a European language.

The internet grew explosively in China and it has led to a lot of standardization of the languages, especially the official language. So there's definitely a huge market for fiction of various types. As far as the stories crossing over to English and other languages, there are obvious problems. But crossover is already beginning to happen, and is inevitably going to grow. China Reading is only one such service? Publisher?

We live in exciting times.
 
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From this article 2 years ago, the top web authors make really good money

http://publishingperspectives.com/2015/06/is-this-the-golden-age-for-chinese-web-authors/
Is This The Golden Age for Chinese Web Authors

On the lowest level is the ordinary writer, also “known as poor guy (or poor guy writer).” They have a limited number of fans, and their work is seldom recommended to others. Their annual income is around 1,000 yuan.
.
.

At the very top of the tier are the 20-30 web writers known as platinum authors or zhigaoshen (the Supreme God) class of writers. The 2014 Chinese web-writers list ranks Tangjiasanshao first, with earnings of 50 million yuan (around $8.06 million) per year from royalties, while second and third on the list both raked in more than 25 million yuan ($4.03 million) each.



The webnovel site recently IPO in the Hong Kong stock market and the stock is now worth over $11 billion USD.

http://www.cetusnews.com/business/S...re-leap-80%-in-Hong-Kong-debut.rk9i4xlkf.html

Although China is famed for inventing the printed book, the digital version has quickly become more profitable in a country whose citizens are glued to their smartphones.

China’s top 10 online writers earn twice as much as the country’s top 10 offline writers, according to consultancy Frost & Sullivan, in research commissioned by China Literature. Chinese adults spend roughly one-third of their leisure time on the mobile internet, according to research by state media.



So the English market expansion with webnovel.com is just a feeler for them....to test the market.
 

Cobalt Jade

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I took a sneak peek of a few fantasy stories on that site, and wasn't impressed -- that writing was comparable to below average fanfic. Not terrible in a structural or grammatic sense, but I couldn't help feeling there was something better out there.
 

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I took a sneak peek of a few fantasy stories on that site, and wasn't impressed -- that writing was comparable to below average fanfic. Not terrible in a structural or grammatic sense, but I couldn't help feeling there was something better out there.

I am reading a few novels on there. The writing is not going to win any Nobel Prize for Literature but it is not bad as you described. And I read novels on there for the storyline, the plot, the action, the world building etc...not for literacy prose.

Think of it as the Chinese Wattpad and they are translating only the most popular novels into English.

Unlike Wattpad however, Qidian in China is like Kindle where readers have to pay to purchase and authors get 70% of the sales. That is why the top web authors in China can make millions of USD in royalties each year.
 

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I check the web ranking and it is doing pretty good
https://www.similarweb.com/website/webnovel.com

November 2017 Stats:

Total Visits 28.56M
Avg. Visit Duration 00:22:53
Pages per Visit 8.74

So that is 249.6 million pageviews for November.


On Android app, it has been installed

Installs
100,000 - 500,000


Right now, all translated novels on there are free to read. They might implement a $0.02-0.04 per chapter paywall like they do in China. Or they might go with Freemium strategy similar to Spotify, Pandora Radio, New York Times, Wattpad, Crunchyroll etc.... Using free service to attract users and convert some of them into paid users.

There is an unofficial survey about paywall vs freemium for the site

https://www.strawpoll.me/14527896

$0.04 per chapter paywall (first 100 chapters are free)

Free with ads; $5.99 a month to skip ads, read several chapters ahead of free users, extra power stones for voting

It looks like their readers prefer freemium over paywall.
 

Alexys

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Chinese fiction (fantasy and otherwise) already is very popular in some quarters, but Qidian has picked up a bad reputation among enthusiasts, for hiring incompetent translators and negotiating in bad faith. However, there are other sites that have licensed Chinese novels for translation and do a much better job (Wuxiaworld comes to mind, and it's actually the more popular site).

Currently, Qidian has a certain amount of readership that they didn't really earn—it's carried over from older, unlicensed fan-translations of some of their novels. We'll see what happens when those end and the curiosity factor runs out.
 

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Look like their latest business model is that the latest 10-20-30 chapters or so are behind a paywall. As more premium chapters are for sale, more free chapters will be unlocked.

Ads isn't generating enough money for them. They wrote that they are operating at a loss.
 

Cobalt Jade

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Heh, Chinese Wattpad. That's a good analogy.

Love your name SeattleSounders!