Non-Fiction

Webnovels: Reading-On-Demand and Reader-Centered Fiction

How webnovels influence the future of fiction writing. This article is published in two installments.

Part 1: The Author’s Pursuit of Readerly Attention

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Webnovels have been quietly developing for several decades, at an internet corner where creators of various popular culture content reside, and had primarily developed in East Asia, although the model promulgated in East Asia has been adapted by publishers in Europe and the US. After all, webnovels had East Asian literature to a global readership more readily than conventionally published books, thus serving as conduits of culture. During the 75th Frankfurt Book Fair in 2023, on webnovels were unleashed when numbered among the Chinese publishers who participated, was the country’s largest webnovel publishing house, China Literature Group.

Depending on how far you want to go back into literary history, one could consider webnovels as having begun with the serialization practices of long novels in eighteenth-century Europe (because most webnovels are serialized). Or, if it is more relevant to situate webnovels within the continuum of content production on social media, one…