The Man Behind Duku and His 13,000 "Shareholders" | 100 People With Ideas
It has never had a million-copy bestseller, and it doesn't even have a full-time accountant — so how has this literary business called Duku come this far?
It has never had a million-copy bestseller, and it doesn't even have a full-time accountant — so how has this literary business called Duku come this far?
Lao Liu's real name is Zhang Lixian. During the 2006 World Cup, with a few drinks in him in Munich, he announced a "pretty big dream" to his good friends Bai Yansong and Liu Jianhong. One day, he said, sweeping his arm wide, "your bookshelf, from one end to the other" — "all of it will be Duku."
Duku Culture Exchange Co., Ltd. was founded at the end of 2005. The company, and Zhang Lixian's dream with it, has now been going for ten years.
In those ten years they have put out several dozen issues of Duku and more than a hundred books and other products. Duku is a MOOK — a magazine-book hybrid — published every two months, 317 pages long, carrying novella-length pieces of 5,000 to 50,000 words. Length gives way to content: the longest pieces run past a hundred pages and take up more than half an issue.
Each issue of Duku now sells a steady 38,000 copies or so. But these magazine-books carry almost no expiration date, which gives them a far longer selling life than most: the first issue printed 12,000 copies, has been reprinted ever since, and has now sold 50,000 copies in all.
By the publishing industry's usual measures — gross sales value, copies sold — Duku is, however you count it, still a small business. It rarely produces a million-copy bestseller, and to this day it does not have a single full-time accountant.
Yet people call it a "miracle" of Chinese publishing, a lone rider galloping across the grassland.
13,000 Shareholders
Duku has 13,000 readers on annual subscription. That is not many.
On November 8, Zhang Lixian stood in a rumpled suit in the auditorium of the China Film Archive, facing three or four hundred of them.
Duku has held reader meetups like this since 2009. Chai Jing and Bai Yansong — CCTV anchors and old friends of Zhang's — took turns hosting them. In 2011 the meetup turned into something closer to a commercial show, a "Smartisan phone launch" of sorts, with readers buying tickets to get in.
In past years Zhang usually used the meetups to clear up a few misconceptions about Duku: that the whole thing ran on Zhang Lixian's effort alone; that this miscellaneous, grab-bag magazine-book only suited readers born in the 1960s and '70s; that once Duku started publishing standalone books on top of the magazine, the rest of the industry would feel someone had "moved their cheese."
By its tenth year, Duku no longer needed to clear anything up. It has a team of more than 30 people, and its annual subscriber base has grown twelvefold over the decade, to about 13,000. A large crowd of readers born in the 1990s turned up too, and when they shouted at Zhang Lixian like fans, it startled him. He had not realized his own popularity had reached that point.
In the early days, Zhang's friends did much of the work of drumming up attention. Zhang had once moderated the "Dinner Party Announcements" board on the Xicihutong forum, and during his years in media he built close friendships with Chai Jing, Bai Yansong, Liu Jianhong, Luo Yonghao, Chen Xiaoqing and others. Weibo had just taken off, and most people in this small circle sat in the upper reaches of the media ecosystem. They talked up Duku wherever they went, and quite a few readers found their way in through Chai Jing's blog or Liu Jianhong's Weibo. At the earliest meetups, readers had really come for Chai Jing — when they stood up to speak, what they wanted most was a photo with the anchor.
The tenth-anniversary meetup was the grandest yet, but this time Zhang invited no host. He shared the stage with his wife, bowing again and again to thank the readers. "You are our silent shareholders," Zhang said. The auditorium was several times the size of past venues; he now had many more people to report the last few years' results to.
Zhang Yun traveled from Shanghai to Beijing for her first "shareholders' meeting." She had been reading Duku's magazines and books for ten years, and a month earlier, acting like a real shareholder, she had brokered a deal for Duku.
On October 15 she carried two boxes of books to MUJI's office on Shimen Yi Road. She had heard that MUJI's new flagship store in Shanghai would bring in a MUJI Books section, and that they needed good books published in China. Eighty percent of what she brought was published by Duku. When they picked up the large-format 2012 edition of Zhang Huoding: Qingyi Performer, "their eyes lit up."
Duku's marketing department had never kept a registry of its readers and had no idea it had someone like Zhang Yun among them. When she called, they asked whether they should send MUJI some sample copies. Her answer made them laugh: "No need — I have every one of them already."
Readers like these are happy to take whatever Duku puts out. They believe what Zhang Lixian said when he founded it: that he would always pick pieces worth reading — a series on German court cases, say, or a ninety-page paper on ancient Roman architecture — even when those pieces test the limits of what a reader can take, stripping away the pleasure of flipping through a magazine and making it feel instead like chewing through a dense book.
Zhang knows this perfectly well. "Whether it's trust in me or readers just indulging me, a lot of Duku's pieces are edited in a pretty unreasonable way. What I mean by unreasonable is, I just put it there, and it can look like I'm bullying the reader."
The loyal readers who stay don't actually feel bullied; they treat it as homework. A Zhihu user named Hou Yuqi said there really are pieces he doesn't like, but each issue holds only a few articles, so it would be a waste to skip them — "so I force myself to read."
An editor at CITIC Press who asked not to be named believes Duku has built a brand, and a solid brand holds on to a stable readership. That is also what Imaginist, the imprint under Guangxi Normal University Press, is doing.
But Zhang thinks it is hard to say how much a brand really vouches for you. These "silent shareholders" could leave the moment they feel the value is gone. At a meetup two years ago, a reader stood up and said that over the past decade he had dropped first the 21st Century Business Herald and then Southern Weekly, because neither was what it used to be. If Duku ever went bad, he said, he would drop it just as fast.
Zhang ran the numbers on his readers this year. In 2006, about 1,000 people subscribed to Duku directly. Of those 1,000, 400 are still subscribers. "The 600 who left tell us this business isn't as easy as it looks," Zhang said, quite seriously. "Not everything you make, people will buy."
The ones who stayed, and the new "shareholders" who have joined, also need to know that the company has no plans for a merger, an acquisition or an IPO.
Duku has built itself a confident little "small world," a little "kingdom." Barring surprises, today's Duku will not run into the kind of cash crunch it hit in 2007, when its distributors fell behind on payments. Back then Zhang had to borrow 300,000 yuan from a friend to settle what he owed the paper mill.
"The Triumph of the System"
Surprises like that probably won't happen again.
"We're doing pretty well at Duku," Zhang said — but not because he edits better than anyone else. "It's the triumph of what you might call the system we've built."
Zhang has pulled out of the book-distribution game almost entirely and sells straight to readers. Otherwise he would still be stuck with publishing's backward consignment system: publishers ship books to bookstores and to the three big online stores — Dangdang, Amazon and JD.com — which take a hefty cut for distribution and are slow to pay, sometimes taking half a year to settle. Worse, those stores sell however much they feel like selling and return the rest. Passed through several pairs of hands, the books get knocked around and their condition suffers.
Zhang couldn't stand it. In February 2008 Duku opened a Taobao store and began shipping to readers one package at a time. In 2012 he used a slim poetry collection Duku had published as a direct-sales experiment. It was the work of an unknown young poet; two years on, it had sold 12,000 copies. Zhang says that beat comparable books sold through traditional channels.
Some people call Duku an "internet product" for this reason: it cuts distribution costs, keeps inventory under control and reaches readers directly. At the Drum Tower West Theatre and the Sculpting in Time café in Beijing, readers can scan a QR code to order.
Zhang says he learned all of it from other retail businesses. He doesn't run with the publishing crowd, has never gone to an industry conference, and "has almost no dealings with other organizations in the business." Readers can still find Duku in bookstores, but Zhang puts it in distinctive, niche ones — Fangsuo, One Way Street, MUJI Books. Duku plans to start selling through Amazon in the United States next year, though Zhang says online stores, Dangdang included, now count for little in its sales.
The whole Duku team has picked up skills a traditional publisher lacks. Through the Duku blog, the reader meetups and Zhang Lixian himself — whom colleagues call their "social butterfly" — they have turned themselves into a media outlet of sorts. The less usual skills include sorting cartons of every shape and size, knowing every detail of packing and delivery, and getting along with all kinds of courier companies.
Duku's warehouse was nearly destroyed by a rainstorm in July 2011. Now its warehouse in Beijing's Daxing district covers several thousand square meters and employs more than 20 people, over half the company's full-time staff. On the busiest shipping day, they packed 4,000 books, then drove a 6.8-meter box truck to deliver them to the courier's own warehouse.
An editor at Houlang who asked not to be named said anyone who wants to join Duku has to work in the warehouse for three months first. "Lao Liu is smart about it. That rule screens out everyone except the people who genuinely love Duku, who care about it and are willing to do hard work."
At this year's November reader meetup, Zhang Lixian said: "Downstream in the ecosystem we have tens of thousands of readers. Upstream there are the people who plan the books, the proofreaders, the paper mills, the printers, the finishing plants. I believe it really does have a healthy way of running itself, the ability to self-correct, and the chance to keep growing."
That may not hold for other publishers.
The same editor at Houlang thinks one crucial reason Duku can sell direct is that it is small, doesn't carry many product lines and has a stable readership. An editor at CITIC Cloud Technology who asked not to be named said much the same: Duku's products are extremely narrow, drawing readers with a very distinct sensibility. "So whatever an e-commerce platform can do, they can do themselves."
The Fishing Book and the Fishing Rod
How narrow are Duku's products?
Zhang has a plan built around Feng Zikai. Duku has already published Feng Zikai art books, individual prints, notebooks and calendars. As Zhang imagines it, Duku would set up a dedicated Feng Zikai section with everything in it. "I think that fits how people buy things now, and it fits today's business logic too," Zhang said. Here is how he does "you might also like": instead of putting a book about gardening next to a book about fishing, you put a fishing rod there.
Zhang hopes this will hold on to a stable readership and open up a new set of customers at the same time. Zhang Yun already makes Duku's books, calendars and notebooks her first choice for gifts. It saves her trouble, she says: there is always something suitable.
At first, "narrow" meant only that on top of the seven issues of Duku it published each year, Zhang began putting out standalone books with a similar sensibility.
By its binding, its contents and the length of its pieces, Duku itself reads more like a book than a magazine. In early 2006 the first issue came out. In it, the contributor Dongdong Qiang wrote a profile of Guo Degang, then an unknown crosstalk performer at the Tianqiao Le Teahouse. Dongdong Qiang titled the piece Guo Degang, Non-Famous Crosstalk Performer. He talked with Guo Degang one on one for more than ten hours, went through every photograph in his home and interviewed the important people around him. The story took a full six months, and by the time it ran Guo Degang was famous, his shows sold out. That first issue printed 12,000 copies; printing cost 20,000 yuan, and with contributor fees and other expenses the total came to about 40,000 yuan.
Once Duku started publishing standalone books, that same sensibility carried through almost unbroken. People used to call it humanistic, literary; but once Duku began offering more subjects to read about, esports and economics among them, a line that Duku author Xu Chen once quoted from A History of Anti-Tank Warfare may fit better: "About one very, very small thing, I know a great, great deal."
People are now more interested in the standalone books than in Duku itself. In 2009 the Peking opera book Zhang Huoding: Qingyi Performer came out, and the project to reissue old Republic-era textbooks got under way. In 2011 Republic Textbooks went on sale. In 2012 came Family Heritage, a book on the aesthetics of daily life. In 2014 came My Life, the autobiography of Israel's woman prime minister. These books are the new element, the variable, "a bit of small personal flourish added on a foundation of high specialization."
Reissuing My Memories of Old Beijing, Zhang made two versions: one split into three small volumes for children or women readers, and a larger hardcover for everyday reading or for collecting.
In making books, Zhang shows a stubbornness close to fetishism. Some cost an astonishing amount to produce — the upfront investment in Zhang Huoding: Qingyi Performer alone topped a million yuan. Every new paper stock has to be inspected in person. For a hardcover, flatness and even ink are only the baseline; what matters is how it feels in the hand and how tightly it is bound. Because e-books still cannot meet his standards, Zhang has put off the decision to release digital editions again and again.
Ren Xiang, the author of Family Heritage, said in an interview: "After the proof copy of Family Heritage was made, Lao Liu didn't dare let me see it. He destroyed it in secret, only because the printing didn't meet his standard. He checked every detail of the printing more carefully than I did myself."
Stories like these draw readers of the same temperament. Browse Duku's Taobao store and you will find that its readers hold almost punishing standards for how a book is packed; rating a book's physical condition has become a habit among them. If a corner gets dinged in shipping, a reader will leave a comment saying "the book got hurt." Customer service used to ask, out of reflex, "Would you like a replacement?" But Lao Liu later barred his staff from ending a reply with a question mark. He would not let them throw the problem back at the buyer; they had to offer a clear solution instead. After the switch to direct sales, most of the damage-in-transit trouble went away.
Under the listing for Is Paris Burning?, a buyer surnamed Chen left a comment: "The seller packed the book as carefully as if it were shipping glassware. Besides the cardboard box, they added foam padding and paper inside. I was really touched."
But at the ninth-anniversary meetup, one reader stood up and said he thought Duku was making too much of this fun, sentimental stuff.
It played out just as Zhang had reasoned it would from the start: the fun, sentimental "fishing rod" sold at a frightening pace. In December 2014 the "Two Altars, Moon Reflected" edition of Daily Lessons 2015 went on sale on the Luoji Siwei platform; it sold 50,000 sets in twenty days and 150,000 sets in all, at 96 yuan apiece.
Even so, Zhang says, he still spends most of his time on the seven issues of Duku published each year. The magazine's stock of ready manuscripts is now big enough to last almost a year.
"The Basket Is Ready"
Duku has no concept of a fiscal year. "The best seller this year might be a book from three years ago," Zhang said. Asked whether the magazine or the standalone books bring in more revenue, he said it is a muddled account; they still have no full-time accountant.
But the Duku team keeps growing.
There was a reason the tenth-anniversary meetup was held at the China Film Archive. In Nanjing they held one in a documentary studio, because Duku makes videos now. At the Film Archive, Duku's video group put together an eighty-second clip stitching together scenes about reading from 28 films.
Since August this year, Duku's WeChat official account has posted a run of videos. They run from a few minutes to no more than 15, and in them Zhang Lixian holds one of his own books and talks about it at length. The clips have polished openings, three or more camera angles and careful lighting. The most popular episode so far has drawn 780,000 views on Tencent Video; its subject was Lin Huiyin, which is indeed very "Duku."
Duku is also starting Duku Kids, an imprint for parents and children to read together. Last year Duku published I Feel, a book to help children manage their emotions, priced at 88 yuan. Reviews on its Taobao page are mixed. Some readers like it; others say things like, "This book feels a bit like it's lecturing, and it's not really suited to kids. My son actually prefers a story."
They have split children's books into four age tiers — 3, 6, 9 and 12 — and plan to spend ten years refining the system, which also gives them room to get things wrong. "The ink used in children's books abroad is already at food-grade quality. Here we're still stuck with the pungent five-yuan picture books sold outside supermarkets. We owe children a lot better than that." Still, Zhang plans to go after the 6 and 9 markets first: "The market for books for ages 0 and 3 is somewhat saturated, and it isn't easy to get in."
This man born in the 1960s, once thought to be overflowing with literary sentiment, has also signed three economics titles from The Economist and published Halo, a book unpacking the creative thinking behind the video game. Zhang believes Duku has grown more capable over the past decade, able to serve more good books without worrying about rights, royalties or staffing.
In a small office on the sixth floor of New Star Press, Zhang Lixian stood up. "We already know what we're doing for the next ten years." He put away his Smartisan phone. "The basket is ready. What's left is to place things into it, one by one, as the river of time flows on."
What the shareholders may find interesting is this: the basket built on this "winning system" has been free precisely because it was small. Just how big can it get?
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.