Web Novels and Colorful Snakes

The arrival of the Year of the Snake coincides with an upturn in sales impact from Web novels in China’s fiction lists.

The Year of the Snake arrived on January 20 in pre-new-year celebrations at Shanghai. Spring Festival continues through the first week of February. Image – Getty: Yanjf

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

The Year of the Snake

Although we’re looking today (January 29) at last month’s China Bestsellers for December 2024, the greeting to give your Chinese friends and colleagues is “Happy New Year.”

‘End on the Tenth Day: The Prison Cage’ is a Web novel serialization entry charting in December at No. 17 on OpenBoo’s fiction list

While many connotations about snakes in the West are perhaps not so fortuitous, people born in years of the snake are considered to be intelligent, determined, thoughtful, eloquent, wise, and at times mysterious.

Renewal and regeneration are part of the expectations at the national, social, and policy level in a Year of the Snake, meaning that this year’s Spring Festival in China, as well as in Korea and Vietnam, is about upbeat changes and controlling negative energy.

And in that regard, our associates at Beijing OpenBook tell us that the impact of Web novels is being felt even more than before in the Chinese market, a newly influential dynamic tracked in December’s charts.

There’s a surprising range to these books—fantasy, campus fiction, modern romance, historical romance, and mystery finding specific favor among a younger subset of the consumer base.

The two series Aurora Daily and End on the Tenth Day are finding what OpenBook calls ultra-high popularity, drawing “a massive fan base during their online serialization phase.”

Once launched as physical books, these two quickly translated that following and became sales hits.

‘End on the Tenth Day: the Unceasing’ is another charting entry in the popular series adapted from a Web novel by Sha Chong Dui Dui Yuan

Aurora Daily won the Best Sci-Fi Web Literature Award at the first China Macau International Science Fiction Award in December, which of course helped boost it , further proving its literary value and market recognition. And watch for entries in the End on the Tenth Day series by Sha Chong Dui Dui Yuan at Nos. 17, 22, and 23 in the fiction chart, the publisher of these books being  Jiangsu Literature & Art Press.

Television adaptation helped drive Love Game in Eastern Fantasy’s sales of the original (No. 26), indicating that in so many cases in China and in the West, the books-to-screen development direction continues to influence sales.

And in next month’s bestsellers, we’ll look at whether the Snake is having the expected fortuitous impact on book sales in January.

Below, then, are OpenBook’s overall lists from December 2024 of bestsellers in fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books, followed by its lists of bestselling fiction and nonfiction in China by authors from outside the country.

At the end of our article, as always, you’ll find notes on how the lists are constructed.

OpenBook’s Fiction Bestsellers, December 2024

OpenBook’s Nonfiction Bestsellers, December 2024

OpenBook’s Children’s Bestsellers, December 2024

Foreign Author Fiction Bestsellers, December 2024 Ranking

Foreign Author Nonfiction Bestsellers,  December 2024

Notes on the Charts

OpenBook is a privately owned industry-data research firm based in Beijing. It functions somewhat as Nielsen and NDP do from the West, and Nielsen Book Research International has worked with OpenBook in Asian operations. With authoritative data and information resources, OpenBook is able to deliver consulting service to partners who would like to explore the Chinese book market and identify suitable partners.

At last report, OpenBook monitored more than 18,000 online and offline bookstores.

The online channel includes digital retailers such as large self-operated online stores, platform stores, and small- and medium-sized stores. The offline channels include more than 4,800 bookstores. Coverage includes most of the state-owned and influential privately owned bookstores in 30 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet are not included in OpenBook’s system.

In 2022, OpenBook tracked around 76.21 billion RMB in sales (US$10.62 billion).

Retail outlets include:

• Traditional bookstores
• Supermarkets
• Campus bookstores
• “Professional” stores, said to be small stores with a specific industrial or trade focus
• Airport stores

In addition, OpenBook is drawing data from online bookstores of three main types:

• The “Tmall” stores of Alibaba (Tmall is described as a marketplace of companies that create storefronts online to sell products including books)
• The “JingDong” Stores of JD.com (similar to Tmall as a marketplace of both individual companies and bookstores operated by JD.com)
• Ten independent online bookselling retailers

China has 500 or more publishers in operation today. Most of them are government-owned. Private publishers are required to generate ISBNs for their titles from a publishing company that is government-owned—which, in other words, creates a system in which all ISBNs are registered through government channels. The government approves each book published in China.

More China bestseller reports from Publishing Perspectives are here, more on the Chinese book publishing market is here, and more on book publishing in Asia is here.