Werewolf novels become the latest global gig job trend

Georgina Boyce-McIntosh, a mother of four from New Zealand, has a deep love of reading. Lately, she has been obsessed with a series of twisty romance novels set in werewolf territory in the pine forests of the American West, dealing with themes of love and betrayal. However, she won't be able to discover what happened to the secret child between the protagonist and her unfaithful werewolf ex-husband by simply stepping into the local bookstore chain Whitcoulls. Instead, she can only rely on coins accumulated on the Asian social reading app Dreame to unlock the next work, with new chapters updated every week. “I read to escape reality,” Boyce-McIntosh admitted in an interview with The Rest of the World.

Many of Dreame 's popular werewolf novels feature central characters in Americanized environments, but the authors do not live in the United States. Instead, they come from all over the world, including Mexico, the Philippines, Nigeria, and China, and often write these novels in a second or third language. One of the students from Bangladesh, whose pseudonym is Anamika, devotes five hours a day, seven days a week, to writing romance novels. She cleverly sets up suspense at the end of each chapter to keep readers hooked. She earns up to $300 per book and receives enthusiastic messages from Western fans. “They were so kind,” she shared, “and their comments were what inspired me to create.”

The emerging global online fiction industry is maturing, adopting Asian business models that bring together global authors from low-income countries and pay them to produce thousands of words of work per day for Western English-speaking readers. Restofworld spoke to four current and former employees of these platforms, who revealed how novel writing can be distilled into a precise formula to follow:

Incorporate popular themes (such as werewolves) and combine them with specific plots to continuously create new chapters. Many novels have hundreds of chapters, each ending with a cliffhanger to keep the reader interested and motivated to read.

Platforms backed by Tencent and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, have grown rapidly during the pandemic to meet surging demand for online content — work that can be done from home. Dreame, GoodNovel, Webnovel, and Fizzo continue to maintain leading positions in reading apps in countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Philippines, and Indonesia, and together generate millions of dollars in revenue every month . The success of this model prompted Amazon to launch similar episodic titles and episodic Kindle Vella in 2021. Kindle Vella even borrows core mechanics from other platforms: readers need to spend tokens to unlock more chapters.

The profitability of these platforms sets them apart from Wattpad, an earlier English-language online novel platform. Wattpad originated in Canada. Its user base is larger than Dreame, GoodNovel or Webnovel, but it is slightly inferior in terms of revenue. In 2021, South Korean Internet giant Naver acquired Wattpad.

The profit-focused model has been remarkably successful in mainland China, where the online novel industry is worth $37 billion. Editors at Chinese platforms serving global markets told Restofworld that they sometimes copy the most popular story outlines and then hire overseas writers to churn out similar variations. A former manager of a top online novel company revealed that Chinese apps are better at capturing comedic elements that attract readers and bring in higher revenue. He added that profit margins on these platforms can be very high, sometimes making more than ten times more from a book than what is paid to the author.

To help writers develop this winning formula, many apps offer workshops, contests, and writing guides. For example, GoodNovel offers a course on writing best-selling werewolf books, recommending that authors create a single male alpha character who rules over and enslaves ordinary humans, and surround him with a queen. The guide also notes that a werewolf plot is an excellent base upon which to layer other popular themes, such as "Werewolves and CEOs," "Werewolves and the Mafia," and "Werewolves and Dragons or Other Supernatural Creatures."

However, over-reliance on past successful templates leaves writers with few opportunities to showcase their unique cultural charm. According to several writers, in order to get the contract approved, they had to set the story in a Western world. Samarra Blair, an erotic romance novelist in Batangas, Philippines, started writing on an online novel app in 2020, when her publishing house stopped accepting new manuscripts due to the pandemic. In the past, her stories were set in the Philippines, but now she has set them in the West to appeal to an international audience. Blair said frankly: "I like to depict our culture, but unfortunately, it is difficult for me to do so now." She hopes that these platforms will accept more works that show local culture in the future.

Chibuzor Victor Obih, a Nigerian mechanical engineering student, once took up writing as a hobby and found peers in Facebook writing groups. He had never published any work before receiving a Facebook message from the editor of GoodNovel in May 2020, inviting him to write a novel and receive royalties. His debut, "Shading Black," a 106-chapter thriller set in a 19th-century African village, earned him $800. He has since written several novels involving werewolves and billionaires, and hopes to write more stories about Nigerian history and culture. However, these themes are not always favored by the platform. Although royalties are substantial for a young writer — Obi made $4,900 on Fizzo’s latest billionaire-themed novel, “The Pleasure Trap” — he still laments not being able to write about local culture and history. . He admitted to Restofworld: "There is a lack of diversity [in the industry], almost all Nigerian writers are writing works set in the Western world... It's really frustrating."

Although many platforms are based in China, they often downplay elements of Chinese culture. Alicee, a Chinese freelance translator who participated in ByteDance’s online novel project, revealed that she was asked to “de-orientalize” the translation process by naming Chinese characters with Western names and removing references to traditional Chinese medicine and folk religion. citation. For example, "jade pendant" was eventually changed to "gold necklace". Alisi, who gave only her English name without authorization, said she was disappointed that her work ultimately failed to promote Chinese culture, even though she had heard such claims before from Chinese media. “It’s purely commercial,” she said.

Several readers have expressed concerns to Restofworld that writers are paid a fraction of the coins they spend on their books - for example, on the Dreame platform, writers only get paid for the coins readers spend on their books. 8%. GoodNovel, Webnovel’s parent company China Literature, and Dreame’s parent company Stary did not respond to requests for comment. Fizzo's parent company ByteDance also declined to comment.

Despite this, several writers told Restofworld that these platforms provided a valuable starting point for their writing careers. Dorcas Joseph, a computer science student in Ime, Nigeria, became a reader of Dreame after seeing an ad on Facebook. A few months later, she started getting paid to write adult novels. “I decided to change my career path,” Joseph said. Her original plan was to become a data analyst, “but now, I hope to become a professional writer.”

Not only do these platforms blur the lines between readers and writers, they actively advertise both. In this community, writers and readers can communicate freely: new writers will seek the exchange of chapter comments in the app forum, while readers will comment below the latest published chapters, providing timely feedback on every new turn in character development. “The great thing about Dreame and similar platforms is that they allow us to read while the work is being created,” said Cassandra, a reader in Louisiana.

In a Facebook fan group with 1.5 million members, New Zealand reader Boyce-McIntosh joins people from Manila, Fiji and Sao Paulo to discuss her favorite works. "You can imagine your favorite cover model or actor playing the lead role," says Jennifer, an avid reader from Idaho. She prefers Dreame because it offers a wealth of paranormal romance plot options.

Although many of the writers, editors, and translators who write these popular English-language novels are not native English speakers—some of the works are even machine-translated—the occasional grammatical error does not diminish readers' interest in the compelling plot. Cassandra admits that she loves stories that depict strong female protagonists overcoming traumatic experiences. “If the story is great and free, grammatical and spelling errors are more likely to go unnoticed.”

Author: Viola Zhou / Meaghan Tobin

Translation: Yunah Fan

Original link: Werewolf erotica is the latest global gig work trend