| Abstract: | On the "Top Ten Ideal Professions of 2011" list released by China’s Internet giant Baidu, network novelist ranked the second. It is very different from the once painstaking and poorly paid job. Why does it become the dream of young people? It’s not because it’s free or it makes fast money, as it still needs hard working. One important reason might be that a pop cultural system with network novelists as the core has established, which means network writers and their works have dominated China’s popular culture market. Some top network writer’s annual incomes are said to have reached RMB11 million (USD1.7 million). Though hard to distinguish whether the figure is true or not, these top network novelists gained both fame and fortune in the pop cultural industry whose core is copyright exchange. Their incomes mainly come from books, movies and network games, etc. If you take a close look at the history of the pop culture in mainland, you will find that China lacks a relatively effective pop culture industrial mechanism. For a long time, pop cultures from Hong Kong and Taiwan were major spiritual resources on the market. The network culture starting from a decade ago has now developed a mature industrial mechanism: network writers and readers created together on literature websites. They interact on the website, exchange ideas, changing the individual working process of writing into a social,interactive working mechanism. Some popular network novels attracted many publishers, movie or game companies, thus copyright exchange is inevitable and an industrial chain is formed. This cover story will unveil stories of some top network novelists, analyze the whole industrial chain and explore potentials of this new pop culture industry. |
