Who Made *84, Charing Cross Road* a Bestseller, and How Many Books Did the *Yu Zui* Series Sell? | The Stories of Six Book Editors, No. 2

Part of our Shanghai Book Fair series. Here you'll see how the smartest minds in a market that still looks prosperous are chasing 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.” Publishing is no different now — its smartest minds are all thinking about how to make their books catch the internet's wave.

The waves come in many shapes, and editors ride them in different ways. We have put together the stories of six book editors, to see how smart minds keep this old industry thriving.

Eleven years ago, when 84, Charing Cross Road first came out, the readers it reached first were the ones who love books and love talking about books. It was called “the bible for book lovers.”

The slim volume collects the letters between Helene Hanff, a writer in New York, and Frank Doel, a bookseller at Marks & Co. in London. Hanff was hunting for out-of-print books and wrote to Doel; over years of hunting, finding, buying and arguing about books, the two built a friendship that lasted twenty years.

Secret thoughts, secret feelings — no better material to work with. Cut into it from any angle and you get a fine review: how, for instance, two people who lived an ocean apart and never once met in twenty years built trust through books, and whether there was love between them. And even if none of that were there, for some readers a real bookshop and real letters are beautiful enough on their own.

Zhang Yuanfan, the book's editor and director of the editor-in-chief's office at Yilin Press, says that when this collection of letters came out ten years ago, the people buying it were mostly people who loved books.

Now, though, 84, Charing Cross Road has become a love story. One of the most-read reviews on Douban at the moment is titled Please Don't Rape Trust in the Name of Love. The special edition released in May has Tang Wei and Wu Xiubo on the cover. The book turned into a minor internet celebrity because of a film, Book of Love. The film uses the book as its thread: Tang Wei, a PR woman at a Macau casino, and Wu Xiubo, a Los Angeles real-estate agent, start writing to each other by accident because of the book, fall in love, and a year later finally meet at the bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road in London.

Zhang Yuanfan heard this crucial piece of news from the film's people less than a month before release, but he moved faster than anyone: “The ‘seed’ we planted eleven years ago has finally ‘flowered and borne fruit.’” Letting a chance like that pass would have been a sin. At the “production company's request,” and “to repay them as well,” Yilin Press produced a special film edition of 84, Charing Cross Road and immediately swung its marketing around, from “the bible for book lovers” to “the best love story there is.”

Afterwards, in an interview, Zhang Yuanfan played up the link between film and book: “Xue Xiaolu, the director of Book of Love, was a core reader of the old edition, and made the film as a tribute to it.” But in another interview Xue Xiaolu denied that: “With 84, Charing Cross Road, I did draw on it, but I wouldn't call it a tribute. The letters gave me a great deal of inspiration for building the story.”

Nine weeks after release, Book of Love had taken 790 million yuan at the box office, 13th among the films released in 2016 so far. That is a respectable result, but its Douban score of 6.6 makes it, against what the producers had hoped for, no more than ordinary.

For Yilin Press, though, it was a very big deal. The new edition of 84, Charing Cross Road, published in May 2016, reached a print run of 600,000 copies — six times what the old edition managed in eleven years.

Entertainment! Even a book, once it steps into that vast industry, grows a vivid imagination. The review titled Please Don't Rape Trust in the Name of Love was one serious-nonfiction reader's protest against vulgarization: “A trust that was never betrayed, a buyer and a seller loyal to each other, a respect that came out of books and knowledge — all of that far outweighs some imagined stirring of romance,” wrote its author, Xinhuan.

But the fact is that nothing now pulls in the whole country — and makes your business bigger — the way entertainment does.

“The film pushed this book harder than it pushed many others. It even outsold what people call the original story it came from [Book of Love].” Zhang Yuanfan is happy with the crossover.

Next to 84, Charing Cross Road, another book, Yu Zui, walked into the entertainment industry far more deliberately.

Cheng Feng is its editor, and his job is one no traditional book editor would recognize.

In October 2015, seven months before the web series adapted from Yu Zui went online under the same name, Cheng Feng had already got the air date out of the producers, New Classics Media and iQIYI, along with stills and posters. He had also seen the trailer early, and thought it “should be pretty good.” In early 2016, Dook talked to its sales channels and printed an extra 10,000 copies to hold in stock.

On May 23, 2016, the series went live. The first two seasons of Yu Zui drew more than 4 billion views between them; in the first half of 2016, only Descendants of the Sun, which started in March, matched it. Thanks to these two hits, iQIYI said in June that its subscriber base had grown by 10 million year on year, with revenue from new members approaching 150 million yuan a month. Advertising over the show's run was worth a great deal too: pre-roll video ads alone were estimated to bring in more than 480 million yuan for the first two seasons.

Carried by the series, print sales of Yu Zui doubled that month, e-book revenue for the month reached 390,000 yuan, and the print run hit 1 million copies — five times Dook's average. Which points to a slightly awkward fact: Dook is the Chinese publisher best at marketing and selling books, with average sales 33 times the national average per title, and even so that number is usually only 200,000 copies.

Clearly this was not two equals “lending each other a hand.” For the series' revenue, the book was one publicity tool among many, at best the icing on the cake. For the book, the series changed everything.

The world of books really has changed.

By choice or not, book publishing is now one link in the IP chain.

The extreme case is of course Harry Potter.

From the first English novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in 1997, to the eighth and last film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, in 2011, the IP chain built on the seven books produced more than US$22 billion in total output. Publishing brought in US$1.2 billion, box office US$7.7 billion and games more than US$1.5 billion — and that leaves out the theme parks and the food, clothing, toys and tourism around them.

Now Yu Zui, too, is a fully qualified IP.

To turn a book into an IP you can stretch your imagination over, you need to know something about how an audience thinks, something about operations, something about what users want. You have to behave like a product manager and use every internet tool there is to make the thing a smash.

So now Cheng Feng is a product manager.

He began with reader research, and found that Yu Zui had “a very high-quality fan base.” The mystery and crime-fiction crowd was already interested, thanks to recommendations from two bestselling hands: Xiaoqiao Laoshu, author of Hou Weidong's Notes from Officialdom (《侯卫东官场笔记》), and Ma Boyong, author of The Antiques Game (《古董局中局》). This small circle pointed in a clear direction, Cheng Feng reckoned: men aged 18 to 38 with “a certain understanding of how society actually works,” overlapping heavily with the readers of Hou Weidong's Notes from Officialdom, Twenty Years in the Underworld (《黑道风云二十年》) and Hu Xueyan, the Red-Hat Merchant (《红顶商人胡雪岩》). By the ordinary laws of how things spread, Yu Zui would soon reach general readers.

Next, the genre had to be fixed. Take the title alone, Yu Zui: My Criminal Investigation Notes — “the character 罪, crime, carries suspense, and criminal investigation is the category” … Notes? A word that “really feels like fiction.”

Then: what grabs an audience most directly? The cover, of course. “Colors that whet the appetite sell better,” supposedly, so red, green, blue, purple and orange became the colors of the Yu Zui series — and they are certainly loud enough.

The copy — “The water too deep! The hearts too black! The hands too hard! The luck too tough! The blood too hot!” — was printed on the belly band in bold yellow on black, in type larger than the title. Under the title: “A true record of one legendary cop's clashes with drug dealers, hardened criminals and gang bosses.” “There are gunfights, there are chases, there is drug running, there is undercover work.” Cheng Feng thought it was lurid enough that readers would bite.

Only one thing was left: getting more people to hear about it.

Before Yu Zui aired, the print book, the e-book and the website pages all began trailing the series, posting stills, showing off posters, starting arguments. In online media, Dook put out a “Top 30 Chinese novels ranked by sheer reading pleasure,” with Yu Zui at No. 16 and the top three the acknowledged genre bestsellers The Grave Robbers' Chronicles, The Three-Body Problem and The Return of the Condor Heroes. Social media was used to “influence the people who can influence readers.” Zhang Yishan, the series' lead, showed the book off on Weibo, and copies went to the crime novelists Cai Jun and Zhou Haohui and to the “gangland novelist” Kong Ergou.

And that is not all. Yu Zui was more “internet,” more aggressive and more of a gamble than you would imagine.

After it aired, besides the routine press releases, book reviews, controlled publishing pace and guaranteed shelf position in bookshops, Dook bought up search keywords in bulk, swapped in ad copy tied to the series overnight, cut the price of the first volume of Yu Zui on Amazon, applied to join Amazon's Kindle Unlimited e-book subscription service, and gave iQIYI membership cards to Yu Zui readers.

You would also find a large crowd furiously debating whether “the author thinks the series damaged the novel's logic.” Hard as it is to believe, “all of that we steered on purpose,” Cheng Feng says.

Because e-commerce sites like JD.com and Dangdang prefer books with high list prices, which give them room to discount, Dook deliberately packaged the first five volumes of Yu Zui as a boxed set, priced at five times what the volumes cost separately.

They will even borrow a line from Ford to say that what they make always exceeds what readers expected: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses, not a car.”

All right, then. Go on and disrupt the world. But once Dook had used up every internet and marketing trick, it found in the end that on the road to running an IP, book publishing — as the lopsided numbers during Yu Zui's run made plain — is not where the big money is. If you already own an IP, why not make film and television directly?

A Dook company making film and television is busy pushing its new business, and at the same time it has cut the old one clean away.

“From here on, in domestic fiction, we are doing none of the rest of it — only the IP we incubate ourselves, which is why we've set up our own film and TV company,” Cheng Feng says.

By comparison, Yilin Press is still an old-fashioned publishing house. The windfall from the entertainment business was no more than a chance encounter with its marketing.

Apart from the film edition that came out of nowhere, the hardcover collector's edition of 84, Charing Cross Road is still, as Zhang Yuanfan puts it, “close to what everyone imagines a classic book to be.” There is no belly band, and the four literary essays by Zhang Lixian, Tang Nuo, Chen Jianming and Kaidi that ran in the old edition have been bound as a separate booklet. The advantage of doing it this way, Zhang Yuanfan believes, is “not disturbing the reader too much — just supplying the background.”

After the Charing Cross campaign, Zhang Yuanfan thinks the thing to take away is “the change in who is reading.” Eleven years ago the people who bought 84, Charing Cross Road were mostly book lovers. Eleven years later most of them came for the film. Behind the success of both film and book, he believes, is that 84, Charing Cross Road fits the mood of its readers, a “cultural anxiety.” “Charing Cross Road may answer everyone's longing for something that beautiful. That nostalgia — for paper books being replaced by e-books — is really the nostalgia for a time when we still wrote letters,” Zhang Yuanfan says.

“Early on, when we were promoting this book, we didn't want to talk too much about love either,” he says.

“So the book itself isn't really about love?”

“Right, right, right. Back then we couldn't easily call it a love story, or lay it on too thick. But the film, by exaggerating and interpreting, got many more people to notice it, because a lot of people came for the love. The film solved our problem of what kind of bestseller this is — on every major website the pages are all romance, all love,” Zhang Yuanfan says.

And so this “bible for book lovers” turned overnight into “the best love story there is.” 84, Charing Cross Road has even “become a quiet way of saying you like someone, a thing people give as a present,” Zhang Yuanfan says.

A friend he had not spoken to in years thanked him specially because of this book — he wanted to give it to a girl he liked.

“[That] proves our book is about love. Even if it has no love in it, people find love through it.”

Cover image from: doubanio