Young People Have Taken to Buying Calendars, and Publishers Don't Want to Miss Out — Their Main Business, Selling Books, Isn't Doing Well

"Of course there's copying going on here — no question about it."

Xiang Xiaoquan works at an entertainment marketing company in Beijing. Every year when winter comes, she buys the next year's calendar.

And not just one. This year she has already bought a celebrity calendar newly released by the art institution Lianbang Zouma — it scatters literary and artistic idols at random across the days of the year, pairing each with a map and one of their widely quoted lines — and in a couple of days she plans to add the two new small calendars from Duku to her collection.

Xiang Xiaoquan's calendar collection is not small. Over the past few years she has accumulated Guokr's Species Calendar, a calendar of film merchandise from Mtime, and an anime calendar. Some of them came out of the habit among young people of giving each other small gifts. In 2014 she bought two sets of Duku's Daily Lessons and gave one set to a good friend. The friend gave her a calendar in return — one illustrated by the painter Huang Yongyu.

Calendars, remade every year, have become one of the first things this group reaches for, whether for themselves or as gifts. Nearly all of them come in cloth hardcover with cloth-wrapped spines, built around design and personality, like a small book, priced anywhere from 50 yuan to more than a hundred. They sit somewhere between a book, a piece of stationery and a home-decor object — the price range straddles those categories too. And although the real demand for them is harder to pin down than it was for the planner notebooks that had a brief moment a few years ago, with most people admitting they only "flip through it when they remember to," they still sell well.

Buyers have now started worrying about which calendar to pick. "The One-Way Calendar, the Forbidden City Calendar, the Dream of the Red Chamber Calendar, Lianbang Zouma — I can't figure out which one I want. They all feel super artsy," wrote a Weibo user under the handle "Xihuan Jike De Lingyu Y Ye."

There are too many to choose from. Just list the new calendars that have appeared over the past year or two and you realize this is no small business: the Forbidden City Calendar (《故宫日历》), The Peep Box Calendar (《西洋镜日历》), The Dear Calendar (《亲爱的日历》), the One-Way Calendar (《单向历》), the Mind-Cultivation Calendar (《修心日历》), Douban's Movie Life Calendar (《电影生活日历》), Guokr's Species Calendar (《物种日历》), Weidu's Moon Phase Calendar (《月相历》), Law Press China's Beauty of Justice Calendar (《正义之美日历》), CITIC Press's A Calendar for Children (《给孩子的日历》), and Zhonghua Book Company's Peony Pavilion Calendar (《牡丹亭日历》), Beauty of Ancient Capitals Calendar (《古都之美日历》) and Beauty of Tang Poetry Calendar (《唐诗之美日历》). By QDaily's incomplete count, at least 30 new calendars appeared this year alone.

One interesting but less visible fact: more than 24 of the calendars on sale are made by publishers.

The trade paper Publishing Business Weekly (《出版商务周报》) noticed this last year. Feng Wei, editor of the Mind-Cultivation Calendar, wrote in its pages that "a wave of creative calendars led by the Forbidden City Calendar has set off a consumer craze," calling it "a new publishing phenomenon." It was no exaggeration, he added, to call 2016 "year one of calendar-book publishing" for the Chinese industry.

The momentum shows no sign of stopping. "Competition [among calendars] is fierce this year — next year it will be brutal," Zhao Shengwei told QDaily.

Zhao Shengwei is one of the newest entrants to the calendar market. His Beijing Shushi Life Culture Studio, an independent publishing-planning outfit staffed by book editors, worked with a publisher this year to launch the history-themed Peep Box Calendar — precisely because he had noticed people like Xiang Xiaoquan.

A cultural-creative product like a calendar meets their needs. "What they want is an artsy vibe — it's part of an emerging middle-class consumption habit; what I want is personality," Zhao Shengwei said. Among people born in the 1980s and 1990s, calendars also serve strongly as gifts.

Once it sank in that "print books aren't working," the publishing industry woke up to this almost as one. It is a good business whose timing happens to be right, and a small one that is easier to take up than turning intellectual property into film and television. They might as well ride the trend and get a little clever about it.

The Accidental Rise of the Calendar

Like Zhao Shengwei, Chu Chen, an editor with 11 years in book publishing, joined the calendar market this year, publishing The Dear Calendar (《亲爱的日历》), a calendar built around love poems. The pink cloth-hardcover volume gathers love poems by well-known Chinese and foreign poets including Rilke, Goethe, Neruda, Yeats, Pushkin, Han Dong and Lin Huiyin.

The front of each dated page carries a story or a line of love-talk from a poet tied to that day; the back carries a love poem. If you like this style, and don't mind that the choice of poets and poems feels a little rushed, the pink calendar can fairly be called sweet and artsy.

Chu Chen used to be a poet himself. In 2005 he founded Chu Chen Culture Studio and became a publisher of literary books, poetry above all. He has helped plan and publish poetry series including the Decades Poetry Collection, the 20th Century World Poetry Translation Series, the 20th Century French Poetry Translation Series, the Great French Poets Biography Translation Series and the New Continent Poetry Series. "From 2000 until now, I've published basically 70% of the poetry books on the market," Chu Chen said in a media interview last year.

Chu Chen first thought of turning those poems into a calendar 15 years ago. Back then he worried that no one would buy anything so contrived.

Before mobile phones, the elders of today's young people probably kept track of time with the old almanac calendar. Legend holds that this kind of calendar was created by Xuanyuan Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor of ancient Chinese mythology — hence the name huangli, the "Yellow [Emperor's] calendar." Wall and desk calendars printed with plain scenery or figures were common too. They were cheap, roughly designed and roughly made, and some still carried the old auspicious-day notions: "good for bathing, bad for weddings."

Young people don't like them. And once smartphones spread, they lost nearly all practical use; they are now hard to find.

So no one expected the Forbidden City Calendar to sell. In a media interview, even its editor, Wang Guanliang, called it an "accident."

Wang Guanliang first heard of the Forbidden City Calendar by chance, at an editorial training session in 2009, when the talk turned to what the Palace Museum had published during the Republican era. Curious, he tracked down a five-year run of the calendar, 1933 to 1937, in the museum's library. To him it had "a well-proportioned format, simple binding, and a wonderful feel in the hand," and the idea of reprinting it took hold.

The 2009 reprint made little noise. The 2012 edition switched to color printing and arranged dragon-related artifacts from the Palace Museum month by month by material — bronze, ceramics, calligraphy and painting — and sales doubled. From the 2013 edition on, the calendar took "clear themes" tied to the Chinese zodiac, and kept selling. Print runs went from 35,000 copies for the 2011 edition to 80,000 for 2013, 220,000 for 2015 and 300,000 for last year's 2016 edition — a startling rate of growth.

Chu Chen decided the timing for calendars was ripe, and he was not alone. Book editors with a feel for the market all saw that demand in this segment was far from satisfied. A new generation of buyers would pay several times the price of the old almanac for a handsome calendar with "personality."

After the Forbidden City Calendar succeeded, "everyone started copying it." Even shoppers noticed. Zhang Xiangrong, who bought a Peep Box Calendar this October, wrote on Weibo: "Personalized calendars are the 'trending discipline' now. The Forbidden City Calendar has an artifact vibe, the One-Way Calendar an artsy vibe, the Peep Box Calendar a historical vibe."

Beyond their separate cultural flavors in content, these new calendars all look much like the Forbidden City Calendar: cloth hardcover, cloth-wrapped spine, an added inner cover.

"Of course there's copying going on here — no question about it," Chu Chen said.

Selling Better Than a Bestseller

Zhao Shengwei is the editor of the history-themed Peep Box Calendar. Starting in 2014, he and two or three friends began collecting historical material from abroad and compiling books, drawn from foreign engravings, photographs and periodicals, on the theme of "China through Western eyes." Among them: China's History Lost in the West: China as Recorded in the Illustrated London News, 1840–1873 (《遗失在西方的中国史：伦敦新闻画报记录的中国 1840-1873》), China's History Lost in the West: China as Recorded in French Color Illustrated Papers, 1850–1937 (《遗失在西方的中国史：法国彩色画报记录的中国 1850-1937》) and Peep Box: The First Sino-Japanese War Through Overseas Sources (《西洋镜：海外史料看甲午》).

Because these books were "fairly niche," and "collecting the original prints and newspapers was (also) very expensive," which made "the cost of a stand-alone book relatively high," Zhao Shengwei decided the content and rights he had already gathered could be used more fully in spin-off products.

"The most direct reason is to spread out some of the cost," he said.

That explains why most calendars on the market today are built from material that has already been published. Chu Chen's love-poem calendar is one; so are the calendars Zhonghua Book Company brought out this year — the Dream of the Red Chamber Calendar (《红楼梦日历》), the Peony Pavilion Calendar (《牡丹亭日历》), the Beauty of Tang Poetry Calendar, the Beauty of Chinese Characters Calendar (《汉字之美日历》), the China Guardian Calendar (《嘉德日历》) and the Beauty of Ancient Capitals Calendar. (Dream of the Red Chamber and The Peony Pavilion are both public-domain works, free of copyright restrictions.)

The more important reason is that cultural-creative products like calendars make far more money than books do — in Zhao Shengwei's view, the calendar boom is tied directly to the fact that "print books aren't working." Figures from the book-market research firm OpenBook show that although China's book retail market has been warming up over the past two or three years, print books actually shrank in 2012 and 2013. That is a signal bound to worry the print publishing industry.

As a rule, a book has to print at least 5,000 copies to earn back its cost, while a cultural-creative notebook needs a run of only 1,000 to go to press. "At that profit point, a run of 1,000 notebooks earns about as much as a run of 5,000 books — and sold through vertical channels, the profit is double a book's."

Put simply, a book's cost includes royalties, and it must obey China's strict book-pricing rules. A cultural-creative product works more like a consumer brand: no royalties in its cost, and no strict pricing rules to follow.

Publishers and bookstores have wanted to make cultural-creative products for years. Compared with books, they carry a much higher gross margin and reach more people. Publishing people also believe that "a publishing house is, after all, in the culture business" — they are good at controlling content, which gives them an edge in making and selling such goods. "It's probably a product where culture meets everyday life," said Luo Hua, product manager for Weidu's Moon Phase Calendar.

They had tried plenty before. The cultural-creative counters in bookstores were restocked and redesigned again and again, and nothing truly worked. Once a few calendars started selling, publishing people decided that this time they might catch a real trend, and that they could use the skill they were proudest of: competing on ideas.

Chu Chen and 20 editors combed the internet for a story or a line of love-talk from some poet for every day of the year; from planning to finish, The Dear Calendar took about 158 days.

The more than 300 lines in the One-Way Calendar were picked from more than 10,000. Those 10,000-plus came from nearly 100 people across One Way Space, plus more than 3,000 lines submitted by users online, and the final cut was made by an editorial team of about 10.

As for the standard, "it really just comes down to our years of experience making content and running media — we decide a line is good, and we pick it," said Zhang Fan, COO of One Way Space.

The content of Daily Lessons was chosen by the editor Wang Xing from more than a hundred lower-primary-school textbooks — covering Chinese, moral cultivation, social studies, general knowledge and other subjects — published between 1902 and 1937. Wang Xing believed that early-childhood enlightenment mattered more than teaching facts to older pupils, and that "1902 to 1937 was the most flourishing period for textbook publishing in China."

Daily Lessons 2015 sold more than 160,000 sets, the One-Way Calendar 2016 had a print run of 70,000 copies, and the Forbidden City Calendar 2016 more than 300,000. Those numbers already qualify as a "bestseller," and the gross margin is far higher than a bestseller's — especially as these are high-value products measured by gross print value (gross print value = print run × list price).

"All You Feel Is Time Flying By"

Chu Chen and Zhao Shengwei both expect the calendars they brought out this year to sell well.

Beyond the growth of the past few years in buying for oneself and buying as gifts, these new calendars can lean on the existing distribution networks of CITIC Press and Zhongnan Boji Tianjuan. "Another author might sell thirty or forty thousand copies at some other publisher; with us, the volume might be a hundred thousand," said Mao Minfeng, deputy editor-in-chief of Zhongnan Boji Tianjuan, unable to resist boasting about his company's channels in an interview with QDaily this past August.

CITIC Press is the same. Beyond the traditional channels of Xinhua Bookstore and the four big online stores, this publisher, which started out in finance and economics titles, has opened around 100 CITIC Bookstores in cities and airports across the country.

"Not knowing where to sell it" is one reason publishers have stumbled with cultural-creative products. They are forever hemmed in by their "existing distribution channels."

In the traditional book trade, distribution (sales) runs mainly through "Xinhua Bookstore plus the four big online stores — Taobao, JD.com, Amazon and Dangdang," along with a small number of private bookstores. But cultural-creative products? You are more likely to find them in stationery shops, figurine shops and private bookstores.

In the past, because private bookstores mostly sold little and folded easily, collecting payment from them was riskier and harder for publishers, and the book system always treated them warily. Under the traditional model, publishers dealt with a handful of large distributors, Xinhua and Boku among them, and private bookstores bought from those distributors or from wholesale book markets, rarely getting to deal with publishers directly.

But once a crop of private bookstores — One Way Space, Fangsuo, Yanjiyou, Sisyphe, even MUJI's own MUJI BOOKS — began winning over young people, publishers who wanted to sell cultural-creative goods directly had to learn to work closely with them.

Such products also depend more on segmenting the audience and going vertical, something the old book channels never sorted out. "Whoever has the better channels, whoever picks their audience segment better, will sell better," Zhao Shengwei said. The newer bookstores look better at this, and they have tried everything to turn themselves into places where young people hang out.

One Way Space was founded in 2005 by six media figures, Xu Zhiyuan among them. The bookstore now runs Dantan (salons), Dandu (publications), Danchu (dining) and Danxuan (original design). It carries close to 100 lines of cultural-creative goods, including metal bookmarks, notebooks and canvas totes.

It also put out its calendar, the One-Way Calendar, for the first time last October, with a print run of around 70,000. Each page pairs a quotation from some great mind with "special" do's and don'ts — the page for September 23, 2016, for instance, reads "Good for: growing freely," with the quotation: "It should grow in its own particular way, the way a child loses its baby teeth, the way hair grows, the way nails grow. It should grow according to its own will. — Herta Müller, Insights (《心得》)."

By COO Zhang Fan's estimate, this neatly conceived calendar will certainly sell more than 100,000 copies this year.

One Way Space has nothing like the trove of copyrights publishers can draw on, yet Zhang Fan still predicts that within a year or two cultural-creative products will pass One Way Space's other businesses — and, given how complicated the company's business is, will of course far outrun book sales — to account for more than half of revenue.

This follows from the high margins. A bookstore, as a retailer, earns only what is left at the end of the chain after publishers and wholesalers take their share — "gross margin is around 30%" — whereas "if you make the product yourself and sell it yourself, gross margin is at least 50% or 60%, and often more."

What publishers probably regret most now is not building their own channels sooner. They should have seen earlier that a product this easy to run could bring in such high profits, and that it works nothing like selling books.

Publishing people like to cite two examples, then sigh.

One is the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Back in the 1970s it was already publishing the same kind of product, based on the same Republican-era calendar the Palace Museum in Beijing later drew on; today it takes the form of a wall calendar, the Palace Museum Monthly Calendar. The National Palace Museum now has more than 2,400 cultural-creative products, develops nearly 600 new ones a year, and earns more from them than from tickets.

If setting publishing beside "tourism" — museums are not purely tourism, of course — feels unseemly, the other example comes from inside publishing. Duku opened a Taobao store as early as February 2008, bypassing Xinhua Bookstore and the four big online stores to sell direct.

Duku was also among the first brands to make calendars. In 2013 the editor Wang Xing worked with Duku on Daily Lessons (《日课》), a set of calendar notebooks. Daily Lessons leans toward the notebook, leaving more blank space for readers to record their days.

The success of Daily Lessons may have shaken the publishing industry no less than the Forbidden City Calendar did. Figures from Publishing Business Weekly show that Daily Lessons 2015, priced at 96 yuan, sold more than 160,000 sets. That means one calendar brought Duku nearly 16 million yuan.

But Zhang Lixian, Duku's founder, still thinks calendars are a niche product. "Next to phones, this is a very small share — forget tens of thousands of copies, even a few million would be small. This isn't a demand where everyone owns one," Zhang Lixian said in a media interview.

Calendars sell well, but Zhang Lixian says he still spends most of his time on Duku (《读库》), the magazine that comes out seven times a year.

In the long run, sticking to the main business may be the wiser choice. The gap between how hot this business is now and how uncertain it is underneath is a little like what Xiang Xiaoquan realized after she started using calendars. When you mark time with a calendar, you don't feel you are racing the clock — "all you feel is time flying by."

(At the interviewee's request, Xiang Xiaoquan is a pseudonym.)

Calendars Published in the Past Three Years (an incomplete list, by publication date):

Publishers:

A Calendar for Children — November 2016 — CITIC Press

The Peep Box Calendar — October 2016 — China Books Publishing House · Zhongnan Boji Tianjuan

The Diamond Sutra Blessings Calendar (《金刚经修福日历》) — October 2016 — China Books Publishing House · Zhongnan Boji Tianjuan

The Daily Poetry Reading Calendar (《每日读诗日历》) — October 2016 — New Star Press · Thinkingdom Media Group

The Zodiac Calendar (《生肖日历》) — October 2016 — The Commercial Press

Dream of the Red Chamber Calendar — October 2016 — Zhonghua Book Company (first edition October 2015)

The Peony Pavilion Calendar — October 2016 — Zhonghua Book Company

The Beauty of Tang Poetry Calendar — October 2016 — Zhonghua Book Company

The Beauty of Chinese Characters Calendar — October 2016 — Zhonghua Book Company (first edition November 2015)

The China Guardian Calendar — October 2016 — Zhonghua Book Company

The Beauty of Ancient Capitals Calendar — October 2016 — Zhonghua Book Company

The Notepaper Pattern Calendar (《笺谱日历》) — October 2016 — Henan Literature and Art Publishing House

The Moon Phase Calendar — October 2016 — Beijing United Publishing Co. · Weidu

The Beauty of Justice Calendar — October 2016 — Law Press China

The Poetry Every Day Calendar (《天天诗历》) — October 2016 — China Youth Publishing House (first edition October 2015)

The Huang Binhong Art Calendar (《黄宾虹艺术日历》) — October 2016 — China Youth Publishing House

Parent-Child Calendar: 365 Days Mom Loves You (《亲子日历：妈妈爱你的 365 天》) — October 2016 — China Economic Publishing House

Parent-Child Calendar: 365 Days Dad Loves You (《亲子日历：爸爸爱你的 365 天》) — October 2016 — China Economic Publishing House

The Flavors of Beijing Calendar (《北京风情日历》) — October 2016 — World Affairs Press

The Flight Calendar (《飞行日历》) — October 2016 — Central Compilation & Translation Press

The Dear Calendar — September 2016 — CITIC Press · Chu Chen Culture

The Qi Gong Calligraphy and Painting Calendar (《启功书画日历》) — September 2016 — Beijing Normal University Press

The Forbidden City Calendar — August 2016 (first edition 2009, a new edition every year since)

The Gaokao Calendar (《高考日历》) — May 2016 — World Publishing Corporation

The Daily Lessons series — 2016 — Duku (first edition 2014)

The Wu Changshuo Art Calendar (《吴昌硕艺术日历》) — October 2015 — China Youth Publishing House

The Mind-Cultivation Calendar — October 2015 — Fujian Lujiang Publishing House

The Analects Calendar (《论语日历》) — November 2014 — Zhonghua Book Company

Non-publishers:

The One-Way Calendar — 2016 — One Way Space (first edition 2015)

The Species Calendar — 2016 — Guokr (first edition 2015)

The Vintage Arts Calendar (《文艺复古日历》) — 2016 — Lianbang Zouma (first edition 2014)

The Movie Life Calendar — 2016 — Douban

Cover image from: behance