China Literature Sees France, UK as Key Rights Buyers

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From Publishing Perspectives:

Like the very tip of an iceberg, 20 or so slim, plain-covered English-language samples of books lie on the shelves at the China Literature stand. What you’re not seeing is the roughly 10 million works ready to take their places as soon as a publisher buys the rights to these.

Aaron Huang, China Literature‘s international licensing director, and Sandra Chen, senior manager with the online service Qidian, are avid reps for such works as The King’s Avatar by an author known as Butterfly Blue. That one has been adapted into an animated film series that drew 8.19 ratings (out of 10) on MyAnimeList, a leading online anime and manga community website.

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Fantasy, science-fiction, and romance are the leading genres they sell in China and on Qidian’s English-language site, WebNovel.com, with “city life” close behind, a genre specific to Chinese urban readership.

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China Literature is a combination both of traditional publishing for paperback editions and “online writing,” as the company’s massive Internet platform is called in China. About 1 percent of China Literature’s online books are released in print. As modest as that sounds, that small percentage totals 100,000 print books.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives