Writers swarm to internet, with an entrepreneurial spirit

Years ago, I heard some media guru commenting that the internet would make some writers very rich. I remember thinking aloud, "Yeah, right. Easy for you to say so."

That was a time when people in the media were still trying to understand the impact of Web technology. As a blessing, the internet had made news-gathering much easier while driving down the costs of getting information to people who want it. As a curse, it espoused the belief that information on the internet should be free, which hurt both media and its practitioners.

The prospects of a scribe becoming rich looked as dim as getting readers to pay for the content by the piece.

But I was wrong. Last year, Zhang Wei, 35, who published exclusively online, earned a staggering 101 million yuan ($15.42 million) in royalties, the highest annual earnings for a Chinese writer ever known. Fantasy writer Jiang Nan, who led the rich list of traditional writers, paled with 32 million yuan.

So how did Zhang, who went by the pen name Tang Jia San Shao or the third young member of the Tang family, do it?

Obviously, the internet has provided a huge and cheap platform for young writers like Zhang to test and hone their skills with the help of almost instant feedback and comments from readers.

But besides trying new things, successful online writers also demonstrated other entrepreneurial qualities like tenacity and keen sense of market opportunities. Zhang writes about 8,000 words a day in action, adventure and fantasy genres popular with young internet users. Much of his incomes come from print publications, games, comics, television and films that revolve around his online best-sellers.

The entrepreneurship can also be found in millions of writers who have launched their blogs on social messaging services.

Sina Weibo, which boasts active users totaling 100 million, claimed 200,000 authors of blogs were tipped by readers in 2015, with various amounts of cash. Authors with regular subscribers were paid 29.3 million yuan from January to November last year, or averaging nearly 130,000 yuan per person.

Many more bloggers are nurturing subscription accounts on WeChat and hope subscribers will snowball until they reach a critical mass to be monetized.

For such accounts to be commercially viable, they must have a following of at least 100,000 users who are targeted by advertisers or marketers, according to people on the social media circuit.

And there is no more efficient way to accumulate eyeballs than original, compelling content.

Some blogger friends, including several former journalists, told me that for the first time, they had to think hard about what their readers wanted before they wrote. But never the other way around.

To grab attention, a scarce commodity on the internet, bloggers would have to rack their brains to write interesting and smart headlines that are critical to their posts.

The most-circulated post on WeChat last year was titled: "After I read this pay-slip, I decided to forward it!!!" It was followed by "Millions laughed themselves to death when they saw the video", and "Wishing for a friend to forward this. Would there be one?"

Stories of small businesses taking off on the back of popular public accounts have abounded on the web. Some journalists have quit jobs after they realize the commercial value in readers' loyalty to their brand.

But not all writers have joined the party just for money. A journalism don in southern Guangdong province with a following of more than 20,000 acknowledged he had used his subscription account for book sales, conference events and online tuition. But some of his posts were aiming for decision-makers, who added up to fewer than 100 among his fans.

However people's purposes of writing vary, it's heart-warming to see new technologies unleash many possibilities, rather than destroy or steal jobs from people like me who make a living from the craft.

Contact the writer at dr.baiping@hotmail.com