Publishing sees start of novel chapter

"For book buyers in China, it's natural to expect high discounts, not only on the special days of shopping carnivals, but almost every day as online platforms often need to create new reasons to attract consumers, like school season at the start of September. The prices are so low that publishers can only see very small profits, and as a result publishers are forced to improve book prices," Shen says.

On average, a book's price in the mainland has grown from 15.9 yuan ($2.46) in 2000 to 48 yuan in 2020, according to Beijing Openbook.

In the last two decades, sales in China's publishing industry have been growing by more than 10 percent, according to Beijing Openbook. The sales of the first half year grew by more than 11 percent compared to that of 2020, however, compared with the first six months in 2019, the figure only rose by a little over 1 percent.

"It means that the demand in the market has changed. It is not high growth anymore," said Yang Lei, vice-president of Beijing Openbook, at the book fair.

"The growth is driven by the rising book price, rather than copies sold," he said.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the general reading atmosphere has changed, says Gu.

"It's hard to promote new writers, especially in the category of fiction. It takes time to learn about new writers, so readers are reluctant to do that," he says.

Statistics verified the change. Despite the stable growth of books sold every year, the number of new books has been declining in recent years, Yang said.

In 2020, there were a little over 170,000 new book titles sold in the market, accounting for about 7.9 percent of the total 2.14 million. In the first eight months in 2021, the proportion of new book titles dropped to 6.3 percent, according to Beijing Openbook.

"Every publisher has a similar structure of products, the best, the worst and the middle. It's impossible for us to give every book the first print run of five to six thousand copies and an overprint of three thousand copies like before, because the books in the middle are more susceptible to the market change," he said.

Publishers like STPH and Social Sciences Academic Press set up readers' clubs on WeChat. When there are new books coming out, they issue forecasts in the WeChat groups as well as other online platforms such as WeChat official accounts and Weibo, the Chinese counterpart of Twitter, especially for the special binding editions, so that they will know how many copies they need to make, Shen says.

The marketing of Moby Dick adopted such a creative approach to create exquisitely decorated editions, Gu says, that it was sold at a higher price together with cultural creative products.

"But it's a marketing approach that has been copied by many other publishers," he says.

Taking a look at the bestsellers in the first half of the year in the mainland, one can find that they are often publicized on short-video platforms by key opinion leaders (KOLs) or are books by established writers like Yu Hua, the author of To Live and The Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, or Mai Jia, the writer of Decode and The Message.

One of the bestsellers for this year is the Chinese translation of Counseling for Toads: A Psychological Adventure, with more than 2 million sold, mainly through TikTok, Gu says.

Wang Fang, one of the KOLs in the section of education and books, registered her TikTok account in 2020 and in six months she sold 15 million copies. At the Beijing Book Fair in April, the revenues gained from her livestreaming on TikTok surpassed 8 million yuan.

According to the research report on the development of China's internet audio and video industry released in June, the number of internet audio and video users in China hit 944 million as of December last year, a yearly increase of 43.21 million, covering 95.4 percent of all internet users in the country.

The numbers of users on short video and livestreaming reached 873 million and 617 million, accounting for 88.3 percent and 62.4 percent of all internet users.

As a result, publishers are working hard on publicizing products on online platforms that usually combine the functions of livestreaming and short-video posting.

On April 22, the day before World Reading Day, jd.com, a traditional online shopping platform, officially launched the livestreaming section for books to compete with the similarly traditional tmall.com and dangdang.com, and the rising Tik-Tok and Kuaishou.