Word: hou
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...rakes in an estimated revenue of 100 million yuan ($15 million) per year. Running three popular online-novel websites, Shanda boasts a total readership of 25 million and is growing at 10 million per year, according the company. "The Chinese people need a platform to express their creativity," said Hou Xiaoqiang, founding CEO of Shanda Literature. "I think our online-literature sites can partly cater to that need." (See pictures of China's electronic waste village...
...soft-spoken 34-year-old, Hou studied Chinese literature while at university in Beijing and worked as an editor at Sina.com, a major Chinese Web portal, for seven years before starting Shanda in 2005. He describes the company - in which budding writers self-publish their work without having to be vetted by editors - as not only a profitable business, but also an extension of his own literary aspirations. "I believe everyone can be a writer," he says. "Especially now, when the Internet really has become part of our lives...
...tradition of online literature in China, Hou and other writers say, goes back to the mid-'90s, when the bulletin-board system, or BBS, first appeared on the Chinese Internet as a platform to share opinions and in many cases literary creations. "I still recall my astonishment when I read my first online novel some 15 years ago on a BBS," says Zhang Kangkang, a renowned novelist and vice chairwoman of the Chinese Writers Association. "It was then that I realized how serious and creative the so-called online literature can be." Although largely substituted now by social-networking sites...
...seemingly negligible amount paid by readers still takes up a major part of the company's revenue, Hou says a growing trend in the business is to convert online postings into hard copies of books, plays, movies or even computer games. Ghost Blows Out the Light, whose book and online game versions both became best sellers, already has a movie and a play in the making. More recently, a Shanda fantasy novel called The Star Games just sold its online game rights for 1 million yuan in January. "A major part of our job now is to forage those online...
...Shanda also expects to tap into China's increasing trend of cell-phone reading and has a social-networking site in the pipeline to try to build a steady user base. Still, Hou realizes that to expand readership further in the long term, it may not be enough to rely solely on amateur writers and their largely similar tomb-raider or martial-arts novels. "We have been in talks with big-name writers like Yu Hua as well," says the CEO. "We will be much more comprehensive than...