This way or that

[Photo by Wang Xiaoying/China Daily]

As more Chinese get online, traditional publishers design strategies to retain readers, Yang Yang reports.

With Chinese increasingly taking to the online world－from shopping to reading－book publishers are faced with the challenge of finding and keeping readers of printed materials.

The situation is pushing traditional publishers to turn to the Web to promote their offline books.

Shanghai-based Horizon Media, for example, has lately been using Chinese social media platforms such as Sina Weibo, WeChat and Douban, to advertise the Chinese edition of Stoner, a popular 1965 novel by American author John Williams. The Chinese version of the book, which is also named after its lead character, William Stoner, a college professor, was published by Horizon in xx (month?).

The publisher's social media posts include reader comments, newspaper reviews and excerpts from the Chinese edition.

The release of Hollywood movie The Martian in China this month comes after the publishing of a Chinese edition of the 2011 sci-fi novel by the same title. Written by American author Andy Weir, the book is about a US astronaut's struggle for survival on Mars, and the movie is an adaptation.

Yilin Press, a major translation publishing house in China, published The Martian in Chinese last month, and has since followed up with promotional activities on social media, including posting address links to its physical stores and online retailers such as Amazon, Dangdang, Jingdong, and Tmall.

"We are running our official online store on Tmall to serve our readers directly. What is more, it is a good way for branding. We can directly communicate with readers to see what kind of books they want," says Li Ruihua, the vice-president of Yilin Press.

Dong Yanle, the operations editor for Shanghai-based 99 Readers, gives the example of reader comments on their Tmall store that triggered the publication of prequels of urban fantasy series, The Mortal Instruments. The series, written by American writer Cassandra Clare, has been published in various languages.

"We published the two prequels (in Chinese) in July and September. If we follow the usual publishing procedure, it couldn't have been so fast," Dong says of their decision to heed reader's advice.