Making a mint online

This is the year in which a fictional protagonist of the esport-themed online Chinese novel The King's Avatar, Ye Xiu, was named a Swiss Tourism Pathfinder of 2025 by the Swiss National Tourism Board as part of a promotion in conjunction with the Yuewen Group's strategy to boost its global intellectual property.

Online literature is nothing new in China where audiences are used to TV series, films and cartoons being adapted from online serial novels. It has been more than 20 years since the literary form, an industry worth 38.3 billion yuan ($5.25 billion) last year, according to a report released by the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association on Dec 16, took root in the country in 1998.

Although the final chapter of the esport novel wrapped up in 2014, it has attracted 135 million readers outside China since an English version appeared in 2017 on WebNovel, a Chinese platform run by Yuewen Group, for international online literature and translations.

In addition to translations of Chinese novels, a group of online writers of multiple nationalities have been contributing to the flourishing online literature scene, which netizens describe as one of four cultural phenomena along with Hollywood movies, Japanese cartoons and comics, and South Korean TV series.

Kawin Jack Sherwin tasted sweet success four years ago and is now enjoying the extension of that success through adaptations into other forms, including audiobooks and comics.

The 28-year-old author of one of Web-Novel's top English-language titles, My Vampire System, which he wrote under the pen name JKSManga, comes from Slough in the United Kingdom.

In 2020, he won the $10,000 Gold Prize in the WebNovel Spirity Awards. Now, audio versions in English, Hindi and German have received 243 million hits so far, according to Qin Lei, vice-president of the Yuewen Group.

"I thought the popularity of my stories would stop growing at some point, that things would slow down. After all, how could things get better than being ranked No 1?" Sherwin says. "Yet the story has done better than ever. Now, because of the audio, people I've never met are hearing and enjoying my work, including friends who didn't even know I wrote it.

"What I'm seeing is a focus on bigger IPs that are recognized worldwide," he says, adding this second boost to his writing shows the momentum gaining among foreign online writers.

"Because we follow the Chinese way of operating IPs, we avoid making mistakes," Sherwin says.

With no professional training as a writer, Sherwin quit his job as a music teacher in a Hangzhou school in Zhejiang province to devote himself to online writing in 2020. He said in a previous interview with China Daily that his decision to combine the techniques employed for Harry Potter and Sun Wukong (the Monkey King) provided the answer to how he could impress someone with his story in 30 seconds.

Able to quickly learn and analyze other popular online novels, which he reads a lot, he was even thinking about how to apply storytelling techniques to his work when he was dragged by his Chinese wife to a costume drama. The couple met in the Hangzhou school and live in Qingdao in Shandong province.