Werewolf novels become the latest global gig economy trend

Georgina Boyce-McIntosh, a mother of four from New Zealand, has a deep love for reading. Lately, she’s been obsessed with a series of twisty romance novels set in the werewolf territory of the pinewoods of the American West, dealing with themes of love and betrayal. However, she can’t simply step into her local bookstore chain Whitcoulls to discover what happened to the protagonist’s secret child with her unfaithful werewolf ex-husband. Instead, she relies on coins accumulated on the Asian social reading app Dreame to unlock the next work, with new chapters added every week. “I read to escape reality,” Boyce-McIntosh confessed in an interview with The Rest of the World.

The popular werewolf novels center on characters in Americanized settings, but the authors don’t live in the U.S. Instead, they come from all over the world, from Mexico, the Philippines, Nigeria, and China, and often write these novels in a second or third language. One student, who goes by the pseudonym Anamika, from Bangladesh, 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 are very friendly,” she shares. “Their comments are what motivate me to write.”

The emerging global online fiction industry is maturing, adopting an Asian business model that brings together global authors from low-income countries and pays them to produce thousands of words a day for Western English-speaking readers. Restofworld spoke to four current and former employees of these platforms, who revealed how fiction writing has been distilled into a precise, followable formula:

Incorporate popular themes (like werewolves), combine specific plots, and continually create new chapters. Many novels have hundreds of chapters, each ending with a cliffhanger to keep readers interested and wanting to read.

During the pandemic, platforms backed by Tencent and Bytedance (TikTok's parent company) have grown rapidly to meet the surging demand for online content - work that can be done from home. Dreame, GoodNovel, Webnovel and Fizzo continue to lead the reading app market in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, the Philippines and Indonesia, collectively generating millions of dollars in revenue each month . The success of this model prompted Amazon to launch Kindle Vella, a similar series of episodic titles and episodes, in 2021. Kindle Vella even borrows the core mechanism of other platforms: readers need to consume tokens to unlock more chapters.

The profitability of these platforms distinguishes them from the earlier English-language online novel platform Wattpad, which originated in Canada and has a larger user base than Dreame, GoodNovel or Webnovel, but is slightly inferior in terms of revenue. In 2021, Wattpad was acquired by South Korean internet giant Naver.

The profit-centric model has been remarkably successful in mainland China, where the online fiction industry is worth as much as $37 billion. Editors at Chinese platforms serving the global market told Restofworld that they sometimes copy the most popular story outlines and then hire overseas writers to churn out similar variations. A former manager at a top online fiction company revealed that Chinese apps are better at capturing comedic elements that attract readers and bring in higher revenues. He added that the profit margins for these platforms can be so high that they can sometimes earn more than ten times what they pay the author for a book.

To help writers develop this winning formula, many apps offer workshops, contests, and writing guides. GoodNovel, for example, offers a course on writing a werewolf bestseller, advising authors to create a single male alpha character who rules and enslaves the average person, with a queen at his side. The guide also notes that the werewolf plot is an excellent foundation on 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 successful templates from the past has resulted in writers having few opportunities to showcase their unique cultural charm. According to several writers, in order to obtain contract approval, they had to set their stories in the Western world. Samarra Blair, an erotic romance writer from Batangas, Philippines, began writing on online novel apps in 2020, when her publishing house stopped accepting new manuscripts due to the pandemic. In the past, her stories took place in the Philippines, but now she has moved the story setting to the West to attract international readers. Blair admitted: "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 showcase local culture in the future.

Chibuzor Victor Obih, a mechanical engineering student from Nigeria, once considered writing as a hobby and looked for like-minded people in Facebook writing groups. He had never published any work before receiving a Facebook message from a GoodNovel editor in May 2020, inviting him to write a novel and get paid for it. His first work, Shading Black, a 106-chapter thriller set in a 19th-century African village, brought him $800. Since then, he has 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 the royalties are considerable for a young writer - Obih earned $4,900 on Fizzo's latest billionaire-themed novel, The Pleasure Trap - he still regrets not being able to write stories about local culture and history. He confessed to Restofworld: "There is a lack of diversity (in the industry), and almost all Nigerian writers are writing works set in the Western world... It's really frustrating."

Although many of the platforms are headquartered in China, they tend to downplay elements of Chinese culture. Alicee, a Chinese freelance translator who worked on a web novel project for ByteDance, revealed that she was asked to "de-Orientalize" during the translation process, naming Chinese characters with Western names and removing references to traditional Chinese medicine and folk religion. For example, a "jade pendant" was eventually changed to a "gold necklace." Alicee, who was given only her English name because she was not authorized to do so, said she was disappointed that her work ultimately failed to promote Chinese culture, even though she had heard such claims from Chinese media before. "It was purely commercial," she said.

Several readers have expressed concerns to Restofworld that writers are paid a fraction of the coins they spend on reading—for example, on the Dreame platform, writers only receive 8% of the purchase coins readers spend on their books. 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.

Still, several writers told Restofworld that these platforms have provided a valuable start to their writing careers. Dorcas Joseph, a computer science student in Yimu, Nigeria, became a reader of the platform after seeing an ad for Dreame on Facebook. A few months later, she began 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.”

These platforms not only blur the line between readers and writers, they actively advertise both. In this community, writers and readers can freely communicate: new writers will seek to exchange chapter reviews in the app forum, and readers will comment under the latest published chapters, providing timely feedback on every new turn of character development. "The benefit of Dreame and similar platforms is that they allow us to read the work while it is being created," said Cassandra, a reader in Louisiana.

In a Facebook fan group with 1.5 million members, Boyce-McIntosh, a reader from New Zealand, discusses her favorites with people from Manila, Fiji and Sao Paulo. “You can imagine your favorite cover model or actor playing the lead,” said Jennifer, an avid reader from Idaho. She prefers Dreame for its rich selection of paranormal romance plots.

Although many of these popular English-language novels are written by non-native English speakers, editors and translators – and some are even translated by machine – the occasional grammatical error does not detract from the reader’s interest in the compelling plot. Cassandra admits that she loves stories that feature strong female protagonists overcoming traumatic experiences. “If the story is good and free, then grammar and spelling errors are easier to overlook.”

Author: Viola Zhou / Meaghan Tobin

Translation: Yunah Fan

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