A lucky combination

In Jiang's eyes, Zhang's success is a combination of talent and good fortune because he started writing at a time when China's cultural industry began growing quickly, and becoming more lucrative, aided by strong government support.

Jiang is one of thousands of online writers inspired by Zhang's success and the growing importance of the cultural industry.

Last year, China's animation industry generated revenues of about 120 billion yuan, a steep rise from 47 billion yuan in 2010. Similarly, movie box-office revenues rocketed from 10 billion yuan in 2010 to more than 40 billion yuan last year, and the revenues of the video game industry have grown at about 30 percent every year since 2011. Last year, it was expected to reach more than 100 billion yuan.

The per-episode production costs of prime-time TV series also rose from about 300,000 yuan in 2011 to more than 3 million yuan last year.

Li Manzheng, Jiang's roommate, who is also an online writer, expects the good times to continue. "The boom in China's entertainment and cultural industries will bring more opportunities. There will always be a place for us because China is such a big market, and readers and audiences are always hungry for good stories," he said.

Jiang and Li have a large number of competitors, many of whom opt to sign contracts with companies that produce TV series, movies, online videos and games. They write scripts strictly according to their employers' needs.

"The group president invested hundreds of millions of yuan in the company. We have no shortage of money, and have signed contracts with first-class directors, actors and actresses, but we are in dire need of good stories," said the general manager of a television and movie production company owned by one of China's largest real estate development groups. He only gave his surname as Sun and preferred not to disclose the name of his employer.

"Many online novelists copy from each other. More important, even if a novel is good, a novel is different from a script. It is faster to hire screenwriters to write for us according to the taste of the audience," he added. "Many screenwriters are online writers as well."

Sun said his company has a group of "backup" scriptwriters, who work on location when movies or TV plays are being shot.

Xie Xiaohu, a movie and television planner in Beijing, said the rapid development of the market has spurred many companies to jump the gun. "More than 40 percent of current TV plays are shot before the script is finished. They shoot the show and write the script in a hurry at the same time, simply to cater to the audiences' tastes at that particular moment," he said in an interview with China Youth Daily.

"Some famous scriptwriters don't engage with the crew. They have assistants or they use the company's ghost scriptwriters to do the work instead. Once, we had the script before everything else, now we have everything before the finished script," he added.

Wang Chaoyang, a ghost scriptwriter in Beijing, warned newcomers of the tricks of the trade during a discussion on Zhihu, an online Chinese-language forum: "New people are always cheated with 'beautiful lies'. The companies claim the writers' talents will finally be recognized, so they agree to work as 'backup' scriptwriters, which usually means they provide cheap labor as part of the crew."