Exclusive article by China's well-off network
Text: "Xiaokang", China's Xiaokang Network, Yuan Kai
In recent years, more and more young people have embarked on a career path of online writing, increasing their experience and income by writing novels part-time. These young people entered the world of online literature with different original intentions, working hard in front of the computer and building their "dream factory".
"From 'waste wood' to the contracted mother, when she squatted in the toilet in the hospital, she used her mobile phone to write the story of the contract. At first, she felt that writing was just a catharsis of emotions, and the content of the writing was unorganized, and after taking the course, she knew how to write novels. Since I signed up in July 2022, I will deliberately set up suspense and hooks at the beginning. By the end of the year, the technology had improved, and there was no need to think about creative skills, and so far many stories had been signed up to generate revenue. This is the group chat of "Zhihu Short Story Training Camp", and the writing assistant is recommending Zhihu's official "Novel Supernova Project" course.
The "Novel Supernova Project" course consists of two months of systematic courses and two months of practical training, and the price is 3980 yuan. Although there were very few people who replied to the course purchase, everyone was also happy with the writing materials such as "novel writing skills" sent by the "White Prostitution" group.
According to the Blue Book of Chinese Online Literature released by the Chinese Writers Association, young writers have become the backbone of online literary creation. Writing online articles part-time seems to have become another trend for contemporary young people.
Photo by Ning Ying
"Hitting the street": A monthly salary of 3,000 is better than writing a novel
At the beginning of this year, Ji Yueren and his "Xuanjian Immortal Clan" occupied the limelight in the online novel circle for nearly a month. "Another big guy is born." Piao Feng (pen name) typed this sentence in the chat box. In fact, in the group that focuses on 10,000-word short stories, there are generally few long-form online articles that often discuss two or three million words. There is no other reason, Ji Yueren and "Xuanjian Immortal Clan" have made too much. The post-00s seniors earn millions of yuan a year by writing online articles, which has brought too much shock to this circle.
But after all, after a few jokes, Piao Feng buried his head in the computer screen again. Unlike long-form online articles, he has always written short stories of one to twenty thousand words. "Write a long story, I don't have that heart." In fact, when I started to write an article, Piaofeng also thought about starting directly with the long story. However, in various posts, such complaints as "I couldn't sign the contract", "I wrote it for half a year", and "I didn't pay the electricity bill" shattered his spirit of bravely going into the long story.
When I first wrote the short story, Piaofeng also failed to sign a contract. After writing two articles, a third-party platform finally accepted his manuscript. The price is K20, 20 yuan per thousand words, and the novel with more than 11,000 words sold for 220 yuan. It took him a week, and if you count the first two articles that didn't sell, it's half a month. "I didn't know the rules at the time, and I should have written 12,000 words if I knew it, otherwise I could have earned 20 yuan more." Piaofeng writes now, and he usually rounds up the number of words, otherwise he always feels that he has lost a lot. Today, his manuscript fee is basically maintained at about K50, and he can pass about 10 manuscripts a month, and he can earn about six or seven thousand yuan if he calculates the share. This will allow him to make a good life in a small county town.
There are two ways to sell a novel to a third party, one is to buy out, and the other is to guarantee + share. Once the former's novel is sold, the subsequent income has nothing to do with the author; In the latter, authors can get the traffic revenue of third parties publishing their manuscripts on other platforms. "Authors like to choose the model of guaranteed + shared, maybe the manuscript will explode." Piaofeng revealed that someone's manuscript was changed into a short drama and received a share of tens of thousands of yuan, "but many third parties only provide buyout contracts, otherwise they can't sign them." ”
In fact, being able to sell novels has surpassed many writers. The first step is to sign a contract, and only 10% can pass the test. This is the data for the starting feature. According to Piaofeng's experience on major social platforms, "the proportion of short contracts should not be high, and it would be good to have 30%".
492 million people, which is the scale of mainland online literature users as of 2023. At the writer level, the number of online literary writers in China exceeds 22.78 million, with post-90s writers being the backbone of creation, and post-00s becoming the main force. Dudu (pen name) is a post-00s student, who has just come into contact with short story writing, and has written two manuscripts that have not yet been sold. "I'm staring at the mailbox all day now, and a few days ago, I submitted the manuscript to more than 40 third parties in one go, and it has been 'killed' almost, but there are still a few that have not responded." Writers of short stories refer to third-party rejections as "killing", which is a conventional term. Where is the source? No one can say clearly.
The seniors in the group told Dudu that he couldn't write as he wanted, and that short stories were not literary creations, but commodities in the market. If you want to sell it, you have to go to the major platforms to sweep the list and see what kind of articles users like. Dudu was a little surprised by this, he felt that many of the head short stories were too bloody, and they exaggerated emotions with all their might, and they were cool for the sake of being cool, and they were abused for the sake of abuse, which was not of much value. Piao Feng said: "If you want to sell literature, you have to take off the 'long shirt', otherwise you can only become 'hitting the street'." ”
At the beginning, "hitting the street" was a self-deprecating term for the author of the long contract, which meant that the income was only a meager signing fee and a daily attendance bonus. Nowadays, there are more and more people writing online articles, and "hitting the street" is used in the short story circle, which refers to writers who can't sell their articles and don't have any income. Even so, more and more people have joined the creation of short stories, and every issue of Zhihu's "Short Story Writing Training Camp" is full. Xiaohongshu has more than 50,000 posts under the topic of "short story submission", and the number is still increasing day by day.
Big Guy: "Enlightenment-Zhihu" is the true God
There are many novel websites, the old ones are Feilu novels and Jinjiang literature, and the new ones are tomato novels and seven cat novels, but there has always been a saying in the circle - the starting point is the place where the Tao becomes a god. Like the long story, although there are many three-party platforms for the short story, signing a contract with Zhihu is the ultimate goal of the short story author.
As a rapidly rising young track of online literature, short stories have continued to grow in the past five years, impressing a large number of young readers with their refined, lightweight, and super sense of substitution. In January this year, Fan Junmei, vice president of Zhihu and head of paid reading business, said in a speech at the 4th "New Content Explorer Conference" that short stories are based on the accumulation of online literature, the trend of film and television, and the application of AI large models, and are expected to enter the era of 10 billion market size in the next three years. And Zhihu is almost the largest production and consumption base of short stories on the whole network.
For authors, the benefits brought by signing a contract with Zhihu are also incomparable to many third-party platforms. After the work is put on the shelves of Zhihu, the revenue generated will be divided between the author and the platform. Part of the revenue comes from multi-channel advertising, and the other part comes from member clicks. According to Zhang Rongle, vice president of Zhihu and head of education membership business, the income mechanism of Zhihu's short story creators is similar to that of Kindle. The platform distributes the creator's income according to the effective number of times members read different articles.
Piaofeng's manuscript has also been on Zhihu, but it was not voted by himself. After selling the manuscript to a third party, the third party delivered the manuscript to Zhihu, and after it was put on the shelf, he got a share of several hundred yuan. "I will definitely make more money by investing in Zhihu, but I don't know if I can pass the trial. Selling to a third party is a guarantee. He plans to polish his writing skills again, "When I have the confidence to sign a contract with Zhihu one day, I won't invest in a third party." The name of the group chat where Piaofeng is located is "Brave Son", and some of the old authors in the group have signed successful contracts and some have failed. But even if the contract is successful, it's hard to say how much money you can get. Some authors only rely on a novel of more than 10,000 words, and accumulate tens of thousands of yuan in a few months, but some authors only share tens of thousands of yuan in manuscript fees.
"The manuscript fee is almost proportional to the number of likes and reads. The manuscript fee for female frequency is generally higher than that of male frequency. The unit price of likes for abusive texts is greater than that of sweet texts. Suspense folklore and brain holes and other articles are relatively niche, and they can occasionally explode, but most of them are low-priced. This is the pattern found by the contracted authors of Zhihu. In fact, this matches the tonality of the Zhihu platform. Zhihu's research report shows that young female users in first- and second-tier cities will consume more content stories after becoming members. And this user base is growing gradually, and some users who are not even in the Zhihu community will be attracted to it because of the content of the story. In January this year, Zhihu released the "2023 Short Story Influence List", and almost all of the selected works are female frequency works. Among these authors, the post-90s and even post-95s have become the mainstream, and most of them have their own jobs.
According to Zhang Rongle, the income of Zhihu's popular short articles can reach more than 100,000 yuan. The creators with a cumulative income of more than 10 million on the platform have reached double digits, and the average median monthly income of creators has also exceeded 10,000 yuan. From the perspective of absolute value of revenue, both of these data far exceed those of the long-term online platform. Therefore, the stable signing of a contract with Zhihu is the goal of a group of short story writers.
"I hope that one day I can live on my son's share." In the group, many people joked like this.
Industry: Confusing third-party websites
"If you haven't been 'killed' by 300 three parties, you still have a chance to sign a contract." Below the post about the short story submission, such a comment will pop up.
It may be an exaggeration, but it is an indisputable fact that the short story industry is becoming more and more chaotic, and there are more and more entrants. In addition to Zhihu, Tomato, Seven Cats, and Starting Point, various small and medium-sized platforms have emerged in an endless stream. The Chinese online network alone has divided into six platforms: Blue Whale Story Club, Whale Sea Story Club, Gray Whale Story Club, Hive Story Club, 17K, and Dawn Book City. In the group, some old authors have made a third-party submission reference Excel sheet, and there are more than 200 well-known or unknown third parties in the table, not including the new platform where everyone has not submitted manuscripts.
The frenzied gathering of third parties has directly led to the mixing of the entire industry. On the one hand, the emergence of new platforms provides more choices and opportunities for authors, but at the same time, it also brings challenges in quality control. In order to quickly attract authors and works, some platforms may lower their review standards, resulting in a large number of low-quality works entering the market. These works may lack creativity, drag on plots, and be poorly written, giving readers a bad reading experience and affecting the image of the entire short story industry. On the other hand, some bad platforms even have fraud. They attract authors to submit with false promises such as high remuneration and high exposure, but in fact they do not fulfill their promises, and even directly steal the author's work. These behaviors not only infringe on the rights and interests of authors, but also disrupt the market order and have a negative impact on the entire industry.
The author's most obvious feeling is that the manuscript fee has become less. "In the past, manuscripts that could be sold for K100 and K150 can only be sold on many platforms, but now many platforms can only give the price of K50 and K80. There are also some platforms that are not transparent, do not report, underreport, and falsely report. "Quite a few old authors complained.
Recently, the issue of fee sharing on a veteran third-party platform has once again become the focus of heated discussions among authors. This incident not only exposed the loopholes in the platform's management of manuscript fees, but also triggered a deep reflection on industry norms by the majority of authors. The author revealed that he signed a contract with a three-party platform for a guaranteed minimum plus share. However, when his novel hit the shelves on Zhihu and gained a certain amount of attention, the share of the manuscript fee he received was much lower than expected. The more than 40 likes in the column and the more than 2,800 likes in the distributed answers, according to common sense, should bring thousands of yuan in manuscript fees, but the actual amount received is only more than 550 yuan. What shocked the author even more was that after careful review, he found that there were obvious traces of P pictures on the screenshots of the manuscript fee sheets provided by the third-party platform. In the end, the third-party platform admitted the mistake and recalculated the manuscript fee and distributed it to the authors. As soon as this matter was exposed, it immediately caused an uproar among the author community. Many authors have said that they have encountered similar problems, such as opaque calculation of manuscript fees and non-payment of manuscript fees.
In this regard, industry insiders said that authors need to be vigilant and avoid being blinded by bad platforms. It is crucial for authors to choose a suitable platform. They need to have an in-depth understanding and evaluation of the platform, including the platform's reputation, review standards, and remuneration system. For the platform, internal management should be strengthened to ensure the fairness and transparency of the calculation of manuscript fees. Any form of fraud and misleading behavior can damage the image and reputation of the platform, ultimately affecting its competitiveness in the market. For the industry, it is more necessary to strengthen supervision and regulation. Relevant departments should strengthen the extent of regulation of online literary platforms, formulating stricter review standards and provisions, to ensure the quality and safety of works. At the same time, it is also necessary to strengthen the crackdown on unscrupulous platforms to maintain market order and fair competition. This is a phased issue in the development of the online literature market. Only by strengthening supervision and regulation and improving the quality of works can we promote the healthy development of the entire industry.
("Xiaokang", exclusive article of China's well-off network)
This article was published in the late April 2024 issue of Xiaokang