Hook, line and sinker

Readers of some bestsellers feel duped by hype whose quality far exceeds that of the book they have paid for

"This seems to have been on the bestselling list forever, so I bought it, but I just don't get why it's so popular."

The exasperation of Charlotte Qiu, 33, Suzhou is palpable as she tackles me to find out what I think of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, a bestseller in China for more than 10 years.

"I gave up after reading a couple of pages," Qiu says.

Fu Sihong, 31, of Beijing is among those who beg to differ with Qiu, saying: "It is a great book".

Many people buy a book simply because it is a bestseller, and sometimes some fall under the spell of a publishers' slick advertising. However, as Qiu's view attests, sales figures and publicity do not necessarily equate to an enjoyable read.

On douban.com, China's version of Goodreads, advertising for The Ferryman, by the British writer Claire McFall, bills it as a work that "has won five international literary awards, and has been sold in 33 countries, touching qianwan (thousands or millions) with its healing power".

The novel tells of a 15-year-old named Dylan who dies in a train accident and meets her "ferryman", who leads her soul "home", but not before passing through a dangerous wasteland where demons lie in wait.

Chinese readers have criticized the advertisement. One of the most popular comments on Douban, which received 674 comments of support, says: "The advertisement is way too overblown ... I should be more careful and avoid buying such books. I'm not going to be taken in by advertising like this on the website again."

As China's publishing industry has matured over the past 10 years or so, marketing has become critical in turning books into bestsellers, often despite, rather than because of, the quality of the book in question.

"Over the past decade books have ceased being first and foremost cultural products and are now treated just like any other goods for sale, so the popularity of a book depends not only on its quality, but also on marketing, just like anything else," says Zuo Jing, author of Investigation into Bestselling Books from the Perspective of Mass Culture Study.

In recent years, book marketing in China has by and large stuck to a predictable path that takes in public debate, popular TV programs or films, famous people, pop culture, or "chicken soup".

The Chinese version of The Ferryman has sold 2 million copies in China, says Han Shasha, deputy general manager of Beijing White Horse Time Culture Development Co, which brought the book to China in 2015.

Han says that the popularity of the book is due in part to the movie directed by the Chinese writer Zhang Jiajia See You Tomorrow, which in Chinese is baiduren, the same name as the Chinese version of The Ferryman.

"Baiduren has become a hot word online, and that influenced the book's sales," she says.

Han says the target audience of the books by White Horse is teenagers and university students.

"If you can whet their appetite you catch the market," she says.

Young people have time and money for books, she says. After graduating from university, Chinese people in general spend little time and money on books, the exception being a few people in some cultural industries like publishing, whose number will not surpass 100,000, she says.

As a result, after The Ferryman became popular, some higher-brow readers also bought the book but thought it was childish, Han says.

"It's absolutely normal that some people love the book while others dislike it."

Loneliness

Lately, "lonely" has become a buzzword, just like baiduren more than a year ago, she says.

In advertising on Douban for the Chinese version of M Train by Patti Smith, published recently, the focus is on "How Smith face loneliness, independence and aging".

That may also be one reason why One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the Nobel laureate Garcia Marquez, was on the bestselling list in recent years. Last year it was among the top 10 bestselling works of fiction by OpenBook, a company that provides information services to the book market in China.

The novel was first translated into Chinese in 1984 but until 2011 nobody in China had the copyright to publish it.

More than 2.6 million copies sold from 2011 until April 2014, when Marquez died, after which sales of the book soared.

"Although the book has sold well, I doubt that many people really like it," Han says. "I know many people who bought it and just put it aside. The title is really important."

One of the most eye-catching bestsellers in China in the past decade was The Kite Runner. Since it was first published in the country in 2006 it has been on the bestselling list, and over the past three years it has been the bestseller on dangdang.com, the largest online bookstore in China.

The novel, which tells of two Afghanistan boys, has sold about 32 million copies worldwide over the last decade, 5 million of those in China.

The Kite Runner was better received in China than The Ferryman, scoring 8.8 points out of 10 on douban.com, compared with 6.9 for The Ferryman.

The publisher, Wenjing Books, has recommended the book to students of different ages. In Dongguan, Guangdong province, even teachers at kindergartens suggested parents to tell children the story, Southern Metropolis Daily reported.

The sales peak came in 2014, a year in which 880,000 copies were sold - a number that was no doubt partly attributable to the celebrity-endorsement effect of the US President Barack Obama getting his daughters to choose 20 good books on Thanksgiving Day the previous year, The Kite Runner being among them. The Chinese actress Gao Yuanyuan also recommended the book in a popular TV program.

With these kinds of endorsements, sales in the last three years of the decade surpassed those in the previous seven years.

Last year the first volume of the Chinese version of Fall of Giants by Ken Follett sold 350,000 copies in China. The 1,168-page novel was divided into three volumes. The marketing company DookBook included attractive advertising on the cover of the book, and the book flew off the shelves.

Kitsch

Zuo Jing says that bestselling books are usually kitsch because they are part of mass culture, and kitsch is one of the characteristics of that.

For example, in the original manuscript of The Kite Runner, the wife of Amir, the main character, is an unpleasant American woman and the son of another character, Hassan, kills himself at the end of the novel. But at the suggestion of Hosseini's agent and an editor, Amir's wife was changed into a kind Afghanistan woman and Hassan's son is saved and ends up living in the United States with Amir's family. The adult Amir atones for a wrong he committed as a teenager, betraying his friend Hassan.

A touching plot, exotic settings and a happy ending give this book the basic elements of a bestseller. Among more than 260,000 readers on Douban, 10 percent have awarded it 6 points out of 10 or lower. A reader using the pseudonym Panda writes that the book's success underlines "the poor taste of a generation that grew up feeding on the kind of writing you see in Reader's Digest".

However, both Han Shashan of White Horse Time and Min Wei, editor of Fall of Giants, say that if a book is to be a bestseller in needs to be a good work.

"Only books that are well written have what it takes to be well received and to become bestsellers," Min says. "The most important thing is the content.

"We are also very confident about the Chinese market, and there is no need to worry that young people do not love reading in this digital age, when reading is fragmented because, for example, Fall of Giants is a heavy book."

Zuo says that kitsch works are selling well at the moment, but the market is going through a growing process.

"Bestsellers will spur readers' interest in reading and then good books will come out. It's hard for readers to immediately tap into highbrow reading."

The quality of bestsellers also reflects the educational level of a market, Zuo says.

"Predominantly young Chinese read to prepare for examinations, so people haven't formed a mature habit and taste for reading. That will take more time."

yangyangs@chinadaily.com.cn

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From left: The Kite Runner by AfghanAmerican author Khaled Hosseini; Fall of Giants by Welshborn author Ken Follett;M Train by Patti Smith; One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Nobel laureate Garcia Marquez; The Ferryman by Claire McFall. Photos Provided To China Daily