Who Manufactured Bestselling Author Liu Tong and His Three Books? | Stories of Six Book Editors, Part 1

Part of our Shanghai Book Fair series. You'll see how, in a market that still looks like it's booming, the smartest minds chase trends manufactured by the internet.

In 2011, Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook data scientist, told Bloomberg Businessweek: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” The same is now true of publishing — the smartest minds in the industry are all thinking about how to make their work ride the internet's trends.

Trends come in many forms, and editors chase them in different ways. We've put together the stories of six book editors, to see how sharp minds keep this old industry thriving.

In March this year, when Liu Tong — white shirt, black tie — livestreamed a signing event for his new book Toward the Bright Place 《向着光亮那方》 on the video app Miaopai, more than 1 million fans hit like. That wasn't far off the 1.3 million likes the singer Zhang Liangying drew for a livestreamed fan concert.

So many people were watching that the stream kept freezing, and Li Jingyuan heard the servers nearly crashed. For this editor of 20 years, it was fresh proof that the bestselling author her team had “built with their own hands” now fully counted as an idol. He had 22 million followers on Weibo, up by almost half from 15 million in 2014.

A month later, as Liu Tong crisscrossed nearly 100 towns and cities for in-person signings, Li Jingyuan said, “A lot of the girls were coming to get his autograph purely out of idol worship.” Thanks to them, Toward the Bright Place had shipped 800,000 copies since its April publication and stayed near the top of the bestseller charts.

Add to that Whose Youth Isn't Confused 《谁的青春不迷茫》, published in December 2012 (more than 2 million copies), and Your Loneliness, Though Defeated, Is Glorious 《你的孤独，虽败犹荣》, published 19 months later (nearly 3 million copies). Across the three books in the series, shipments came to nearly 6 million copies, and Liu Tong earned at least 25 million yuan in royalties from the first two alone.

On the 2014 China Writers Rich List, Liu Tong ranked fourth. Ahead of him were Zhang Jiajia (19.5 million yuan), Zheng Yuanjie (19 million yuan) and Yang Hongying (18.5 million yuan) — the latter two both children's authors.

1

Liu Tong did not become a bestselling author on storytelling “genius” alone.

Before he met Li Jingyuan, this graduate of a teachers' college Chinese department had already published a few books, none of which made much of a splash. He collected a few tens of thousands of yuan in royalties a year, and his loudest moment of fame came from appearing on the careers show Career In and Out 《职来职往》.

He pitched himself to the producers to get that exposure, and audiences discovered that Liu Tong talked as fast as a machine gun and was quick with a clever line — and, most important, that this small-town young man with ten years of drifting in Beijing behind him had become co-general manager of the television division at Enlight Media, a man who could now decide other people's careers.

That was when Li Jingyuan met this young man whose popularity was just starting to climb, and she saw that certain young people found the way he talked especially useful. The slightly baffling, aphorism-style reflections he posted on Weibo back then could pull in more than 1,000 replies and reposts.

Turning the Whose Youth Isn't Confused series into inspirational reading for “small-town youth” was not all Li Jingyuan's doing, but her editorial team bought into the fashionable image Liu Tong had built for himself — precisely and completely — and put it to good use in a publishing industry that otherwise looked frozen in place.

When CITIC Press signed Liu Tong in 2011, Li Jingyuan believed she could make a good book that “the most important target group — Liu Tong's fans” would take to.

To those fans, Liu Tong was the model small-town-youth idol. In media interviews he called himself “a mangy dog curled up in a corner, waiting to be found,” yet he had believed since his senior year of college that he was bound to make it.

By the time Liu Tong was a division head at a listed company, appearing constantly in public, people wanted him to show the fragile, lost side left over from his bleak past — the thing fans like the Douban user Liu Xiaozhao read as a rare “sincerity and courage.”

Following that line, Li Jingyuan and her team put out two mega-bestsellers for him back to back, each over 2 million copies, and in doing so raised his price as an author with their own hands. With a Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, CITIC Press signed a high-priced contract for Liu Tong's third book at the end of 2014.

Li Jingyuan knew perfectly well that an idol author who sells his own life story takes a real risk in changing direction, and that his creative fuel is limited. Still, she “didn't want to hand over what she had worked so hard for.”

There were always ways to keep the series popular. After a process of “coming up with a concept first, having him write toward it, and then lifting it in the final pass,” the new book, published this April, became one of CITIC's bestselling titles of the year — outselling even its business and management list.

That is probably one of the most inspiring episodes in Liu Tong's own story.

2

Before authors like Liu Tong came along, the best reading for small-town youth included magazines like Reader 《读者》 and Youth Digest 《青年文摘》. They liked novelists too, of course — Guo Jingming, Han Han, Rao Xueman — but everyday short stories were a fine option as well. Liu Tong carried on that kind of writing; his first book was more or less a collection of personal diary entries from his blog.

Unlike Zhang Jiajia and Da Bing, who grew famous around the same time, Liu Tong's stories, Li Jingyuan thought, “don't have much literary quality — no love affairs, no partings of life and death, no great sorrow or joy.” He liked to write about the unremarkable people around him: college roommates, elementary school classmates, his elementary school homeroom teacher, teachers, a junior manager fresh into the workforce, an old woman selling stinky tofu — and he was never stingy about saying how moved he was.

In Your Loneliness, Though Defeated, Is Glorious, Liu Tong wrote a story called Ten Years of Working for a Dream 《为梦想努力十年》. In it, a close college friend set his sights on Peking University's graduate program, got in after failing twice, and planned to start a doctorate at 40. Liu Tong called him “someone who could work at a dream for almost ten years, and then make it real.”

Like most veteran editors, Li Jingyuan holds a fairly cautious view of what good content is. She rejects “fast-food writing” and won't spend much time on “fragmented stuff on the internet, because the quality is so low.” She knew, of course, that Liu Tong's personal-blog style would draw a verdict from some readers of “shallow, boring, mawkish, phony inspirational fluff.”

On the Douban page for Whose Youth Isn't Confused, the most popular review — titled Admiring You as a Person Doesn't Mean I Have to Admire Your Terrible Book 《我欣赏你的人，不代表要欣赏你的烂书》 — stood for exactly that view, calling the book “mawkish cash-grabbing.”

This was the kind of book elitist readers would be “ashamed to admit to others they had read,” but that didn't mean it wouldn't sell. In a China where routes upward are scarce and urbanization is still under way, a story like Liu Tong's gave small-town youth a larger sense of what was possible, and offered them encouragement and comfort — which is a good thing in itself. Li Jingyuan and her team could see that response clearly all over the internet, and not far beyond it they could see a book market worth more than 100 million yuan.

When it came out in the winter of 2012, the cover of Whose Youth Isn't Confused read: written for the restless, confused, lost young people of the city.

Reading Liu Tong's books would not actually settle that restlessness and confusion, and neither Li Jingyuan nor Liu Tong meant to change that — the basic difference between them and figures like Jack Welch, Jack Ma, Yu Minhong, Kai-Fu Lee and Tang Jun.

Those predecessors usually took up most of the cover with their own portraits and announced, “My success can be replicated.” In fact social mobility in China was weakening, the wealth gap was widening, a society of strangers was eroding people's sense of security, and the “striving young underdog's comeback” was getting rarer and rarer.

A Liu Tong who had done modestly well and was good at comforting people found it easier to become a new idol than his bestselling predecessors did. “I'm genuinely grateful that Liu Tong's book didn't tell us that seizing opportunities and creating opportunities must lead to success — that would be a 24-hour, pyramid-scheme massacre of the spirit.” A Douban user called Big Friend Called Little Flower wrote a review to that effect, titled You Gave Me a Sheet of Paper, Filled With Words to Soothe the Soul 《你赠我一张纸，写满安魂的字》, and ended it flatly: “Thankfully the tragedy of youth mostly ends in the comedy of life.”

Li Jingyuan and her team worked hard to manufacture that sense of recognition. They went all the way to the snow-covered Changbai Mountains to shoot a cover photo of Liu Tong from behind, dragging a suitcase up a mountain road, and they replaced the titles first floated — Traveling in My Own World and Ten Years of Diaries — with Whose Youth Isn't Confused.

That came from the internet too. Liu Tong once wrote on Weibo: “It's fine to feel lost — we're all the same, whose youth isn't confused.” The post was reposted tens of thousands of times, about the most popular thing he had ever put out.

“The title was just too good,” Li Jingyuan said. “I'd say 50% of why the first book sold so well was the title.”

3

Li Jingyuan now has a new reading of what Liu Tong means. After reading his books, she says, “you keep adjusting the negative feelings in your own life, because he's an optimist — situations that are bad for him always turn into good things, through his optimism and his own effort to adjust.”

Two smart minds joined forces and set off the trend, and the vogue for “success studies” was quickly buried under this wave of “optimism” and “gratitude for life.”

Riding on it with little effort of his own, another young inspirational author, Lu Sihao, made the bestseller lists with You Have to Believe There's No Tomorrow You Can't Reach 《你要去相信，没有到不了的明天》 and I Hope Someone Goes With You Through Life's Upheavals 《愿有人陪你颠沛流离》. Liu Tong's second book, Your Loneliness, Though Defeated, Is Glorious, published in early 2014, had no catchy title, and still sold better than his first.

Another book in a similar vein, We're All the Same, Young and Adrift 《我们都一样，年轻又彷徨》, by the “Peking University twin brothers” Yuan Ziwen and Yuan Zihao, actually shipped more copies than Your Loneliness, Though Defeated, Is Glorious when it first came out in April and May 2015.

To Li Jingyuan, Liu Tong had become a sky-priced bestselling author. As with Zhang Jiajia, publishers were itching to throw millions of yuan at his next book, because it did look profitable — in 2013 Liu Tong's royalty income for the year was still 7 million yuan; by 2014 it was over 18 million yuan.

CITIC Press, where Li Jingyuan works, signed Liu Tong's third book in 2014. For a publisher, once you spend big money trying to repeat a bestseller, you take on commercial risk and brand risk at the same time.

As for breaking the sales record of the first two books, Li Jingyuan was not at all sure she could keep winning: “Anyone reasonably clear-headed holds a somewhat pessimistic view. Nobody thinks they'll always have it this easy, this lucky. That's just not possible.”

The book market changes fast. Just as people lose interest in a star, some newly arrived online writer could take their attention away at any moment. And the market was already signaling a contraction: too many books of the same type had piled onto it. Experience from successfully packaging The Delayed Gap Year 《迟到的间隔年》, Ten Years of Backpacking 《背包十年》 and I Just Want to Open a Little Coffee Shop 《就想开间小小咖啡馆》 showed that when everyone swarms in, the best selling window for that kind of book has already closed.

Li Jingyuan also worried a little about how long Liu Tong could keep creating: writing off personal experience does not have an endless supply of material. He had picked up new roles over the past few years — Enlight Media reorganized its television business, put more money into film and planned to adapt Whose Youth Isn't Confused into a movie. Liu Tong became vice president of Enlight's information division and a film producer as well. At a book awards ceremony in 2014 he said the film and TV rights to Zhang Jiajia's See You Tomorrow 《从你的全世界路过》 now belonged to Enlight, and that it would be one of the company's major film projects for 2015.

4

The way the new book, Toward the Bright Place, was made was unexpected.

The publisher took part in creating it to the fullest extent possible. An author mailing in a finished manuscript was never going to happen here; piling together existing essays the way the first two books had done would, Li Jingyuan thought, also be “doomed to fail.” Instead they had Liu Tong write fresh material, and every time he finished a piece the whole editorial team sat down to read it together.

Every night between midnight and 2 a.m., his daytime work done, Liu Tong turned back into a writer. Following the direction his editors set, he would finish a story, send it to CITIC Press's editorial mailbox, and tell the editors to “hurry up and look at it.”

“Every single piece was a difficult birth,” Li Jingyuan said. Whenever even one person on the team felt a piece “wasn't moving enough” or “hadn't landed yet,” they replied: write it again.

Picking 17 readable essays and editing them into a published book took the team more than a year, from signing the contract in 2014 to publication in 2016. That included choosing the cover's colors: Pantone's 2016 Colors of the Year, Serenity (15-3919) and Rose Quartz (13-1520), which the team called the “healing colors of the year” and “stress-relief colors.”

Everything was aimed at a bestseller.

Li Jingyuan planned one last push on Liu Tong's pull with his fans. This was the final book in the Whose Youth Isn't Confused series, and she thought it should have a “happy ending” — telling “the restless, confused, lost young people of the city” “a little bit of a fairy tale.” That had always been what made Liu Tong's books land, but until now it had taken readers themselves to connect the book to Liu Tong's own life.

The new book was called Toward the Bright Place, direct enough. The editorial design team laid out Liu Tong's personal struggle from age 21 on the back cover and put a photo of him in profile on the front. At the time Liu Tong was on location in Xiamen with the crew of the film Whose Youth Isn't Confused, in his role as producer, and the photographer took the shot on a Xiamen beach, his head tilted up at 45 degrees. Li Jingyuan said they wanted a feeling of “ten thousand rays of dawn light,” where “every dark cloud has a golden edge.”

Liu Tong also started the heaviest signing tour of his life, visiting nearly 100 towns and cities. The team picked them deliberately: not “too first-tier, more the smaller cities that celebrities don't usually bother with.”

In Nanning, a Zhihu user called Sun finally got to meet him. Sun, a high school senior, answered the Zhihu question “What do you think of Liu Tong?” by describing skipping two afternoon classes to go: “It was finally almost my turn, and my heart was pounding like mad.” Sun marveled at Liu Tong's “poise of a successful person” — he shook readers' hands firmly during the signing and spoke without hiding anything about his bleak past. “He toughed it out for 15 years; only twenty-odd people showed up at his first signing.”

It didn't stop there. At 8 p.m. on March 4, Liu Tong became the first author to livestream a book signing on Miaopai. In a white shirt and black tie, he had Ding Guansen, an actor from the film Whose Youth Isn't Confused, beside him playing guitar and singing along as he signed.

The book's release was timed to the film's nationwide opening, too. Just as Liu Tong was about to tour with the cast and crew to promote the movie, the team “rushed the new book out” — so he promoted the film and the third book of the same-named series at once. He even named the film's theme song “Toward the Bright Place.” Yes, the same as the book.

With momentum from every direction, the new book hit No. 1 in April and May on the nonfiction bestseller list compiled by the publishing-industry data firm OpenBook. On the photo app Butter Camera, 8,200 people tagged more than 10,000 photos “Toward the Bright Place.”

5

The new book's sales falling off in June came as no surprise. Bestsellers built on an idol effect always see fans buy in a concentrated rush during the first two months. That is why it is now hard to find a new bestseller that holds the top of the sales charts the way a classic like One Hundred Years of Solitude does.

More than that, the fatigue may already have spread to youth-themed books, films and TV dramas themselves. The film Whose Youth Isn't Confused took the lowest box office of comparable films before it — So Young, My Old Classmate, Fleet of Time and The Left Ear — bringing in only 180 million yuan.

But Li Jingyuan thinks they may also have “paid dearly” for pairing the book's promotion with the film's. It could produce a spillover effect, true, but it also made the book's own promotion less pure.

The book market is a small mirror of a whole restless society. For publishers like Li Jingyuan, one question keeps swinging back and forth: how much value can a book generate on its own? Should it hitch a ride on other hot markets? The biggest problem troubling publishers now may not be whether to bend and cater to trends, but that even after bending, a good return isn't guaranteed. They are a bit at a loss.

“It [the book] gets drowned in the film's promotion, and it tires his readers a little too — everyone's a bit worn out,” Li Jingyuan says now.

Still, for anyone hunting the next bestseller, “mass reposting” may remain the most reliable measure.

Cover image from: doubanio