Hook, line and sinker

The Kite Runner by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini. [Photo provided to China Daily]

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.