Hardly Anyone Reads Anymore. So How Do You Sell a Million Print Books?

CITIC Press found Peter Thiel through a lecture posted on YouTube; Zhongnan Boji Tianjuan found Zhang Jiajia on Weibo. Here is how these miracles were made.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is widely seen as a publishing phenomenon. Three months after it came out on February 9, it had sold more than 1 million copies.

Its publisher credits the "spirit of the Two Sessions," which is a little deflating, though it may well be true. Ordinary people need instructions, and Peter Thiel happened to turn up at just that moment. So a loose collection of musings on startups (or, put another way, a set of class notes) became a huge success within a few months, and everyone in publishing seemed to glimpse hope.

Everyone says the book business is in decline, yet a few books always pull off "the coolest move against the traffic." At the Shanghai Book Fair, QDaily interviewed Lu Jun and Mao Minfeng. Lu, head of the business books division at CITIC Press, discovered Peter Thiel and produced a million-copy seller. Mao works at Zhongnan Boji Tianjuan, whose Passing Through Your World sold 2 million copies in six months.

Zhang Jiajia and Passing Through Your World

Each has worked out a set of reasons for their success. Before we get to these trade secrets, some background: in publishing, a first print run of 50,000 already means the publisher is "very confident" in a book. So 1 million is no small trick. In industry parlance it is a phenomenon, and it needs the right time, the right place and the right people, all three.

All right, back to the point. Let's see how the miracles were made.

"Newborn shark fry, carp fry and crucian carp fry look almost exactly alike and are very hard to tell apart. A publisher's first job is to pick out the shark fry from tens of thousands of fry."

Lu Jun of CITIC compares book proposals to fish fry: "Newborn shark fry, carp fry and crucian carp fry look almost exactly alike and are very hard to tell apart. A publisher's first job is to pick out the shark fry from tens of thousands of fry."

When CITIC signed Zero to One in May 2013, the book did not look especially promising, and its author was not famous. "The royalty advance was five figures. In CITIC's business category that's about a C+. It didn't even make B," Lu Jun said.

At the time, few people in China outside his own industry knew who Peter Thiel was. His greatest achievement was founding PayPal in 1998 and serving as its CEO; in 2002 he sold PayPal to eBay for US$1.5 billion. He also co-founded Founders Fund, which provided early money to more than a dozen tech startups, including LinkedIn, SpaceX and Yelp.

In May 2013, Peter Thiel gave a guest lecture on startups at Stanford University titled "Competition Is for Losers." Blake Masters, the book's second author, was a student in that class. He uploaded the lecture videos to YouTube and other sites, where they drew 2.4 million views in total.

"When we saw these course notes, we made three predictions. First, the content fit the trend. Plenty of people were starting companies in 2013, though it wasn't as hot as it is today, and we sensed that within a year or two, entrepreneurship and innovation would take off. That was a big trend. Second, the book spoke in a very friendly way: it was spoken, colloquial, vivid and easy to understand. Third, the author had information readers didn't have — a strong information asymmetry. For example, what a loser Mark Zuckerberg was back then, how hopeless he was, and how Facebook got through its angel round and its Series A, B and C. All these stories were fresh."

Zero to One

Lu Jun, who publishes business books, calls buying rights "picking fry." Mao Minfeng, an editor at Zhongnan Boji Tianjuan, calls hunting for book projects "digging for jade." Zhang Jiajia, the author he dug up, sold 2 million copies, and Lu Sihao's three books together sold 3 million. Zhang Jiajia's Passing Through Your World ranked No. 1 on JD.com's annual bestseller list for youth fiction. No. 2 and No. 3 were Silent Separation and The Journey of Flower, both carried back to big sales by hit TV adaptations. Zhang Jiajia's climb to that level looks more like the story of how a star author is made.

Mao Minfeng stresses how much finding the author matters: "I was very lucky to meet Zhang Jiajia two or three years ago." "What I'm proudest of with this book is finding this person."

Zhang Jiajia started out as a TV director and screenwriter, and first built a following as a writer on the Xici Hutong forum. As early as 2005 he published novels such as Almost a Hero with New Star Press, but they sold poorly.

On April 17, 2013, his 32nd birthday, he began serializing "bedtime stories" on Weibo. Each ran to more than 3,000 characters, and most were comforting stories about confused young city dwellers. As Zhang Jiajia himself put it: "It's actually written the standard way you write a screenplay outline."

Reposts climbed from hundreds to thousands. In July, a story called Can You Speak Properly? (retitled Old Love Letters in the book) became what is seen as his breakout work. It is about Hu Yan, a socially clumsy young man who cannot speak without swearing and so cannot manage a proper romance, and about his mother, a woman in her seventies who also cannot speak without swearing, and who uses her own love story to teach her son and his friends a lesson. It drew nearly 150,000 reposts.

"How many book signings can he do himself? Will his friends step up and support him? The better and more numerous the people vouching for him, the better the chance of a hit."

Lu Jun told QDaily that when choosing a book project, besides judging the content, a key factor in whether it sells is how much the author can do to help market it: "How many book signings can he do himself? Will his friends step up and support him? The better and more numerous the people vouching for him, the better the chance of a hit."

The simplified Chinese edition of Zero to One came out on February 9, 2015, one week before the Spring Festival.

The first print run was 60,000 copies, roughly standard for CITIC's business books; only a hot title by a star author reaches about 100,000. Before the Spring Festival, Zero to One sold well but not spectacularly, hovering near the top of the nonfiction bestseller lists without reaching No. 1.

On the morning of Lunar New Year's Day, Xu Xiaoping posted on Weibo that he had got up before dawn three days running to read the book: "Every entrepreneur should read it three times and keep it on their desk as a startup guide." Xu Xiaoping had written the preface to the Chinese edition. Over the next few days, Zero to One sold about 500 copies a day on each of Dangdang, JD.com and Amazon, and with no other hot books out over the holiday, it took the top spot on the bestseller lists.

The book really took off after the author visited China. On February 27 and 28, the seventh and eighth days of the lunar new year, Peter Thiel spent two days in China promoting it. CITIC staged an event for him at the China National Convention Center called the "China Makers Forum," with guests including Zhou Hongyi, Xu Xiaoping and Richard Liu.

The event drew plenty of coverage in the Chinese media. Peter Thiel recorded an episode of Youku's video show Old Friends, which was watched more than 420,000 times. Youku also cut the speeches by Xu Xiaoping and others into separate clips, and titles promising "big shots" and "startups" drew more than a million views. The book and its author became a hot topic on Weibo and in WeChat Moments.

Peter Thiel recording Youku's Old Friends

"Opinion leaders spoke up, and that created the buzz online," Lu Jun said. "At the end of February 2015, we pulled off a miracle: for a whole week, we dominated everyone's social media feeds."

After this burst of publicity, Zero to One's bestseller run began in earnest. It sold two or three thousand copies a day on a single e-commerce site, about 10,000 a day in all, and three months later, in May, it passed 1 million copies.

Crowds gathered around Peter Thiel in Beijing. He was struck by the Chinese enthusiasm for starting businesses, and remarked that "Beijing is closer to Silicon Valley than Washington is." More than 1,500 people attended the forums CITIC organized for him. Every session was ticketed, and not cheaply: 4,880, 6,880 or 8,880 yuan.

And, of course, don't forget that Premier Li Keqiang endorsed entrepreneurship at the Two Sessions press conference, and that the mysterious phrase "Internet Plus" kept coming from the highest levels of government. All of this put Peter Thiel and his book right where the wind was blowing hardest.

So the author, who had planned to come for only two days, made another trip to China in May for a lecture tour, bringing along a group of Silicon Valley "brothers," including Reid Hoffman, author of The Alliance in CITIC's Singularity series, and Sam Altman, head of the incubator Y Combinator. In Chengdu, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing and other cities, CITIC put on six "business shows" called the "2015 China Venture Capital Gala," with more than 30 Chinese guests.

CITIC has already made a profit on these road shows from ticket sales and the fees Youku paid for video rights. Lu Jun says the book's marketing could be called "IP-style operation," treating the book as intellectual property to be exploited across formats: "Selling books, selling conferences, selling videos — every piece of publicity pays back. Isn't that managing IP?" Peter Thiel is due back in China in September, and CITIC hopes to stage another event for 10,000 people.

Let's hope the wind that blew them so high keeps blowing, because they have no control over it. And at least in Mao Minfeng's view, books have already become fast-moving consumer goods.

"What becomes of it in the future is for readers to judge. Readers pay for books, and they will choose things of value. We publishers can't control that, but we have to serve the writers and put the books in front of readers."

Mao Minfeng's editorial department at Zhongnan Boji covers a wide range, from literature to entrepreneurs' biographies and even fitness, and its goal is bestsellers. "We just want to turn a book into a phenomenon, to grab the center of public attention in a short time. What becomes of it in the future is for readers to judge."

Mao has worked in publishing for more than ten years and has watched bestseller trends keep shifting: "Many of the genres I worked on at Motie have almost vanished from the market — office novels, business-war novels, like Du Lala's Promotion. It's like a tide. When it comes in, it's dazzling; when it goes out, there's nothing left."

This publishing direction also reflects the taste of Mao Minfeng, or of Zhongnan Boji. Many publishers still rely on the standing of the works themselves: classics such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Haruki Murakami's novels can also sell more than a million copies. For those books, of course, the headaches are securing the author's rights and paying the steep royalty advances.

Mao is after a younger, more fickle readership: "Our approach to making books is completely different from that of a house like New Classics. New Classics chooses works that are ten or twenty years old, because they've already won prizes and have international recognition. Classic reading will always have a market. But the young, restless reading market in mainland China is more of a challenge. We need to find authors young people will want to emulate, people they can model themselves on."

"Young and restless," put another way, means reading that is more practical and more goal-driven. Young people wanting feel-good "chicken soup for the soul" is one kind; professionals wanting startup books is another.

Hong Yonggang, editor-in-chief of CITIC Press, told QDaily: "A book needs a highlight, a selling point. Turning money into paper is easy; turning paper into money is very hard. In business books, the most important thing is to keep up with the big trends and hot topics." On promotion, his summary is: "Either pick an author who is already famous, or turn the author into a star."

"At that moment I knew some magical chemistry had already happened. When a book moves people, if you trace it back, it must be that its emotions and other things have reacted with readers."

This sounds mysterious, but put another way it is easier to grasp. You have to find the right person, one who happens to strike a chord with other people who have more influence or more fans. Those people likely have more fans because they tap into some popular mood, and their fans then come over as a package and become your readers.

A colleague of Mao Minfeng's had been at Nanjing University with Zhang Jiajia, and one day they ran into him at a bar. Mao noticed that Zhang had written some beautiful, poem-like lines, copied them out on sheets of paper and pasted them up inside the little bar.

Back home, Mao searched for these lines online and found that some young people had made cards with pictures of Korean stars and pasted the lines underneath. "At that moment I knew some magical chemistry had already happened. When a book moves people, if you trace it back, it must be that its emotions and other things have reacted with readers."

Passing Through Your World came out in November 2013 with a first print run of 50,000 copies. It quickly sold out at the major e-commerce sites and bookstores, went back to press again and again, and sold 2 million copies in six months.

Zhongnan Boji's other author, Lu Sihao, became famous on Renren. He went to high school in Australia and wrote on Renren about his struggles with the language and with daily life, and his posts were widely shared. A young editor at Zhongnan Boji got in touch, and his first book, Believe There Is No Tomorrow You Cannot Reach, came out in June 2013. It was among the first wave of books to use a "chicken soup" slogan as a title. He went on to publish May Someone Wander the World With You and Wake Me Before You Leave, and the three books together sold 3 million copies.

Lu Sihao

He writes differently from Zhang Jiajia, and for different readers. "Lu Sihao's readers are younger — the youngest of the young." At an earlier signing, many teenage girls turned up. Mao asked whether they bought other authors' books. "We hardly ever buy books," they said. "Lu Sihao's are the only ones we understand."

Zhang Jiajia has also done signing tours, drawing crowds of several thousand to ten thousand, on a par with Guo Jingming and Yi Zhongtian (a history lecturer on the TV show Lecture Room). One stop in Nanjing drew 40,000 people. Zhang's Weibo account was the main platform for building buzz before the signings, and his friends even paid for two weeks of outdoor billboards to promote him. Zhang himself gave interviews to all sorts of magazines and posed for photos that matched the mood of the book.

"It's not that we package these young writers. These young writers package themselves," Mao Minfeng said.

"Through search, I find the keywords people are paying close attention to, and from them I track a number of writers with brand value. Then I study their work, and use its keywords to find the potential readership."

For all the talk of "some chemistry happening," behind every successful million lies some science and reason. And at this point, as you may have guessed, big data enters the story.

Mao Minfeng says that when judging a book's "highlight," he consults the Baidu Index and the Taobao Index and looks at a great many search tools: "Through search, I find the keywords people are paying close attention to, and from them I track a number of writers with brand value. Then I study their work, and use its keywords to find the potential readership. For example, I could never make a star book about pets, because there's no readership for it."

Back to that rather mystical formula, "the right time, the right place, the right people." What it really points to is the unpredictability of the people who buy a book as a product.

As Mao Minfeng puts it, "Publishers have to respond to changes in the whole market." What strikes a chord with readers changes, and so does what counts as a "highlight." Books are hard to sell, but there are always people who need to read: some want guidance from a "godfather of startups," others comfort from "the best storyteller on Weibo." Publishers are turning to video sites, Weibo and the like to find new subjects, and the people on those sites are in fact today's young readers. Meanwhile, marketing a book now works much like so-called "IP operation," because a phenomenon-level bestselling author is no different from a celebrity, and the readers are the fans.

Look back at Lu Jun's fish-fry theory and you can draw a lesson about big data from it too. Spotting shark fry is a skill, of course, but the key is knowing whether the world wants sharks at all. To have a gift for spotting shark fry and find that nobody wants sharks — that would be truly miserable.

Big data. In theory, CITIC, where Lu Jun works, should be more at home with the term "big data," yet he used a very old-fashioned phrase: "a feel for public sentiment."

Compared with literary books, demand for business books is more time-sensitive — more practical, a targeted hunger for particular knowledge. Lu Jun said: "In early 2015, the Two Sessions called for 'mass entrepreneurship and innovation.' But since publishing a book often takes several months to a year or two, it was already too late to start looking for subjects then. Publishers notice fresh words that keep coming up in the media — entrepreneurship and innovation, say, being discussed a lot — and they're always a bit quicker than ordinary people. What you have to do is be among the first to seize on it and build up a stock of projects. Once the water is boiling, it's too late; you have to jump while the water is just getting hot."

"It shows that a lot of people follow venture investing. Without a huge base of users, this whole set of markets wouldn't exist."

Before October 2013, CITIC had signed a series of foreign books about startups, collectively called the "Singularity series." The first batch had four books. Besides Zero to One, there were The Hard Thing About Hard Things (by Ben Horowitz, an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, Groupon and Skype), The PayPal Wars (by Eric Jackson, Peter Thiel's business partner, telling the story of PayPal), and The Alliance (by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a former senior vice president at PayPal). Every book in the series has sold more than 100,000 copies, and some have yet to be published.

"These books are like futures. We stockpiled a batch of startup books without knowing how each would do," Lu Jun said.

Every era needs chicken soup for the soul. Every era's chicken soup writing is much the same, but each era's chicken soup speaks in the language of its own time.

So it can't be replaced. And there isn't much more to explain.