How People Read Novels Now — and What That "Three-Hour Novel" Thing Really Is

"I don't want to live that profoundly, but I don't want to live that easily either."

Novels have long counted as one of the best seasonings for a dull life. In the latest all-category bestseller list from Dangdang, the number of books by Japanese authors in the top 100 has doubled since 2015, reaching 12 titles — more than half of them by Keigo Higashino.

While digging into why, another question caught our curiosity: how do young people read novels these days?

So the QDaily Research Lab ran a survey — "What was the situation the last time you read a novel?" — and got 2,113 responses. QDaily also interviewed 10 young people from different professions who all happen to love novels. Out of that we put together a list of what may be the 20 traits of a bestselling novel.

Looking at the results, the most important trait is being able to finish the book fast — about three hours is just right. Cheng Feng, a partner at the publisher Dook, agrees that most bestselling novels today follow this "three-hour rule."

In his view, the perfect path for a runaway bestseller looks like this: someone buys a new book at the airport, reads it on the flight, lands with the taste of it still in their mouth, and immediately posts about it on Moments or Weibo — one complete cycle of purchase and word of mouth.

Anything longer than three hours blocks the impulse to share. Apart from students, most young people who have entered the workforce have their time cut into fragments; even three hours in one unbroken block is hard to find outside a weekend. "Showing off the book you just finished on social media also gives you a sense of superiority — it shows I'm learning, this is my life," Cheng says. That second round of sharing pushes sales further, which is one reason The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry shipped more than 500,000 copies within three months of publication and became a bestseller.

The Higashino novels in Dangdang's top 100 — The Miracles of the Namiya General Store at number two, Journey Under the Midnight Sun at six, The Devotion of Suspect X at seventeen — satisfy the same demand for an easy read. Higashino has, in fact, been popular in China for years.

Thinkingdom Media Group is the Chinese private publisher that has released the most work by Japanese authors, and it publishes Higashino. Li Yao, its editor-in-chief for foreign literature, sums up Higashino's success with four "nots": "not difficult, not much plot, not many words, not complicated."

Readers bear this out. Qiu Xue, 24, does marketing planning at a game company in Shenzhen and counts herself a Higashino fan. "It's mystery, but it reads easily — reading him is pure entertainment, and his language is funny and the plot is tight," she says. Not many novels meet all those conditions at once, she adds: "A lot of foreign literature has small type and tight line spacing, packed solid. Higashino's books are laid out so they don't tire your eyes. They're a really easy read."

Everyone in publishing knows that readers are more careful with their money buying a novel than buying a social-science or business book. But a runaway bestselling novel can sell hundreds of thousands of copies, sometimes more than a million — far beyond bestsellers in other categories. And a bestselling novel is a result that can be carefully manufactured.

Dook's efforts so far at least prove that such a machine exists. Dook is known as "the company in China today that is best at selling books"; The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, Everything I Never Told You, Fall of Giants and Yu Zui (《余罪》) all came out of it.

To find the pattern behind what sells, Dook once ran an experiment on campus: it had college students read the first 10 pages of various novels and timed them. The faster people got through those first 10 pages, the more likely the novel was to become a bestseller. The company even distilled it into a golden rule of "faster is better" — "The first 10 pages of a lot of bestsellers can be read in three or four minutes. The more characters a reader gets through per minute, the more likely the book is to sell."

That became Dook's threshold for publishing a novel at all. Its latest release, Learn to Love Bitter the Way You Love Sweet (《你要像喜欢甜一样喜欢苦》), even turned the first 10 pages into a marketing hook: the belly band around the new book reads, right across the middle, "Penguin's editor-in-chief was blown away after only 10 pages."

The second most common answer in the QDaily Research Lab survey was: "I've read the beginnings... of a lot of novels." Life moves fast enough now that a book you put down is hard to pick up again.

To make a novel sell, publishers commonly rewrite its opening. When Dook got the first draft of The Riddle of the Qingming Scroll (《清明上河图密码》), its answer to the author was, "This won't work" — the opening ran several storylines at once, too many threads, asking too much of readers and turning many of them away.

So the author did as Dook asked: he cut the multiple storylines from the opening, cut the places where the book breaks off mid-story to tell something else, cut anything that might confuse a reader. In the end Dook applied its standard formula for building a bestseller — a single protagonist, a linear narrative told in unbroken chronological order. Only after that adjustment did the book get published; it sold more than 100,000 copies in six months and its film and television rights sold too.

Cheng Feng explains that the approach comes from The Hero with a Thousand Faces by the mythologist Joseph Campbell. After studying myths from all over the world, Campbell found one thing they shared: every one is a variation on a hero going through trial after trial. The same principle works for film and television scripts.

Multi-perspective, multi-storyline novels do succeed sometimes, of course. But the single protagonist is the most common way to sell, and the safest.

The three-hour rule also caps how thick a bestselling novel can be — roughly 400 pages, so it can be finished in one go. That brings two benefits. A thin book uses less paper, so it costs the publisher less. And it weighs less on the reader's mind, which is why long novels in multiple volumes have lost the mainstream market.

Li Qianqian is a junior at Sichuan University. Even on campus she already feels her time being sliced up by social media. "In high school I could read a long novel under the covers for four or five hours a night, but I don't have the patience for that now. Even with a really good novel, after 40 minutes of concentrating I have to pull out my phone and see if anyone's messaging me," she says. A shorter novel, by contrast: "Reading it feels good, it keeps going, it's exciting."

To read fast, the prose also has to be plain — better still if it feels of this world. My Brilliant Friend is a bestseller translated into more than 40 languages. Its Chinese translator, Chen Ying, holds a doctorate in Italian linguistics and has translated several Italian classics. Translating this novel, she said, felt "full of the smoke and steam of everyday life," and she describes the book's language as something that "pours that everyday life back into yours."

By now you may see why this kind of bestseller catches fire overnight: the barrier to reading is low, it is easy to share, and it can gather a crowd of fans quickly — the basic requirement for a bestselling novel to take off. "It has to catch fire fast," Cheng Feng says.

Publishing has a common yardstick for this: one month after a book comes out you can see whether there's any stir, and three months tells you whether it lives or dies (classics excepted). So a book that sells 100,000 copies in its first three months has the makings of a runaway bestseller.

So Why Is Everyone Chasing "Fast"?

The three-hour rule, the short novel, the plain language, the simple plot, the single protagonist — nearly all of it comes down to one word: fast.

This may have to do with the way young people live and feel right now. As we reported earlier, the moods young people express these days tend to look listless and dejected.

Behind that is the anxiety and pressure they live under, and technology and social media only sharpen it. The latest research from the APA (American Psychiatric Association) shows that social media is one of the main sources of stress for young people, and that those who check email, texts and social accounts constantly score higher on stress.

Reading light novels is one way to let the pressure out. In middle school Huang Yongxian loved Han Han's novels; every time he finished one he felt it had said what he wanted to say. Now he is a client manager at a bank in Shenzhen and finds them "too heavy. Work already wears me out, I want to read something simpler and lighter," he says. "I don't want to think too much."

He even refuses any novel with too strong a voice of its own, afraid of seeing himself in it.

I refuse to read novels with that strong a voice now. I used to feel I thought the same way as the author, that it really struck a chord — right was right, wrong was wrong, black and white. That feeling is gone, I really can't find it anymore. The villains in books now, the parts I don't like... I may have become that myself.

Huang Yongxian, 23, client manager at China Merchants Bank, Shenzhen

Zhu Yu'an, who does marketing planning at a television station in Taiwan, also changed completely as a reader once he started working. He used to be obsessed with Haruki Murakami — the surreal, oblique, plotless novels pulled him in. Now he avoids that kind of book. "You grow up and run into a lot of real things, and what Murakami writes feels too far away from me," he says.

He prefers solid novels with a clear meaning, which also gives him a clearer thing to talk about with friends. He can no longer bear the vagueness and unease in a novel — the very thing he used to like.

My life is so repetitive now, I find it dull — work every day, exercise, then home to sleep. Reading novels gives me another view of life, lets me notice things I otherwise wouldn't.

Zhu Yu'an, 29, marketing planning at a television station, Taiwan

You Xing, a director and screenwriter in Los Angeles, loves novels too, though mainly to stock up for his work. Reading fiction matters enormously to anyone who makes things, because you can learn how a story is built, and the more you read the deeper the reserve. You Xing reads short stories most of all, because, as he has heard, "the relationship between film and literature is built on the short story." Short stories don't lean on dialogue or strict narration; they are more about technique and the construction of a scene, suggesting a person rather than describing one, and their way of saying things is closer to film.

But there is the same unease behind this practical approach. "I read novels fairly practically — it has to connect to my work. I make myself read, I set a plan, that's the only way I keep it up," You Xing says. "There's too much information now, it's saturated."

An American writer I've been obsessed with for the past two years, Jonathan Franzen, has picked up a lot of National Book Award nominations. He's good at the relationships in the modern American family, at building family conflict and friction — empty-nest parents, suburban housewives, that kind of thing. After three of his novels in a row, I have much more confidence working out a script about a family. You know which methods will produce livelier conflict.

You Xing, 28, director and screenwriter, Los Angeles

Why Do Stories About Women Growing Up Sell So Well?

On subject matter, Dook feels it has been burned. It once brought in a series of foreign spy novels, picking authors who appeared on overseas rich lists for writers, but no matter how it pushed them, sales over several years came to only tens of thousands. Even the novels behind foreign films like 007 and the Bourne series sold modestly in China.

These were all well-regarded books that never reached bestseller numbers. The reason Dook finally settled on: most people in China who read foreign novels are women, and spy novels cannot take that mainstream market.

So Dook changed direction fast, publishing novels about women growing up and all kinds of healing stories, and it worked every time.

Suo Mali, the editor responsible for My Brilliant Friend, had plenty of choices when she was working out how to sell the book on its belly band. She considered "postwar Italy," "the power structure of a Naples neighborhood," "Italy's political upheaval"... and in the end chose "female friendship" — 50 years of friendship and war between two women. Next to the heavier options, this was obviously easier on women readers.

99 Readers' Culture, the publisher Suo Mali works for, has put out a great deal of serious literature, on subjects as serious as Jewish life, American society and secularity, "but it just can't become a bestseller. It's too complicated, people can't follow it."

A simple message, tied tightly to the argument about women's rights going on right now — to Suo Mali the book arrived at exactly the right moment. She believes women today are at their most confused and most pressured point in understanding themselves. "Every girl once thought she was unique, but somewhere along the way she loses her individuality," she says. And this book, about the inner lives of women through the second half of the 20th century, seems to suit their taste exactly.

What Is a "Super Symbol"?

Dook has an in-house design standard for manufacturing bestsellers, which it calls "super symbols." A symbol has to meet two conditions — "being seen and being understood." Dook treats being seen as the point where a bestseller lives or dies. The symbol can take different forms: a block of color, for instance, like the white blocks of a crosswalk, since a large block of color grabs attention fast. In nature the yellow and black of a bee are warning colors, so Dook settled on a consistent yellow-and-black and black-and-white combination for its belly bands.

The color isn't fixed, of course; much of the time it depends on the overall palette of whatever fiction is popular. Before The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry came out, its editor, Zhu Yihong, went to bookshops specifically to see where her forthcoming novel would sit on the shelf and what color the covers and spines around it were. If red dominated, the new book would go yellow. She also watched the color scheme of the recommended lists on Dangdang and the Amazon rankings, and adjusted her own cover accordingly. When there were too many colors to choose from, one option was almost never wrong — red, which stands out and sticks in the memory.

This is a bit like the point above about the words meaning exactly what they say, moved onto the cover: the cover should leave no room for doubt, so one glance tells you what it's saying — a nebula on a science-fiction cover, say. Suo Mali once thought about putting a child's face on the cover of My Brilliant Friend, but worried people would take it for a children's book. The final version was a woman with her eyes closed, tied tightly to the theme — a woman growing up.

There's Also a Shortcut

On top of all these bestseller-making techniques there is a shortcut for telling whether a foreign novel will sell in China: look at which countries have published it already.

Editors like Suo Mali get countless recommendation emails from all over the world every day, and reading every new book one by one isn't realistic. Her rule of thumb is that if a book has already come out in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, she will always give it a second look. She is confident that a book able to conquer the rest of Asia has a good chance of conquering China too, or at least reaching it. That is also the reality of publishing here: "A lot of the time, whatever Taiwan and Japan do, we follow."

There is one more unwritten test for importing a foreign novel — it has to have been approved by the English-speaking world. However big a hit a book is in a country that doesn't speak English, Suo Mali would never consider it. She admits, "It's a kind of hegemony. You're only likely to catch on in China once you've caught on in English," she says. "Unless you're willing to gamble, and nobody has that much time."

Today book editors spend most of their time on foreign novels, because foreign novels still dominate China's fiction market. "Out of every 10 bestselling novels, more than half are foreign. There are too few good Chinese novels, and it's been this way for almost 10 years," Cheng Feng says.

That is a dispiriting thought. Li Qianqian doesn't believe good mainland work is missing; it's that mainland novels rarely suit her. She has read Mo Yan's Red Sorghum (about the war against Japan) and Yu Hua's To Live (about the Cultural Revolution). "I hate having to think about these bloody realities and the problems history left behind — the Cultural Revolution, the countryside, selling blood, people at the bottom. Sometimes reading them leaves me unable to breathe, so hopeless, how could our country be like this, it makes me feel awful," she says. "But your life is still here, so I deliberately stay away from those novels."

Among Chinese-language novels she prefers writers from Taiwan and Hong Kong, who come across as more romantic and lighter. They are readier to write about the culture and pursuits of intellectuals, to teach you how to live. The mainland has its share of novels billed as healing, too, but Li Qianqian isn't buying it: "They just hand you a comfortable reason, an excuse to escape, to curl up inside your mental shell instead of breaking it and climbing out."

I don't want to live that profoundly, but I don't want to live that easily either.

Li Qianqian, 20, third-year undergraduate at Sichuan University

You might say: what about Eternal Love (《三生三世十里桃花》), on the air right now, or Nirvana in Fire (《琅琊榜》), Ghost Blows Out the Light (《鬼吹灯》), The Lost Tomb (《盗墓笔记》), Love O2O (《微微一笑很倾城》) and My Sunshine (《何以笙箫默》) before it — aren't those all by Chinese web novelists? They are. But don't forget that all of them are five to 10 years old.

Liu Geng, 27, would love to find a novel by a young Chinese writer about the lives of his own generation, and never has. He even wonders, "It can't all be coming-of-age films, surely?" He used to follow the group of writers that the magazine Mengya first brought up, but that group has scattered. "Young writers are all looking for an easier way to make money out of fiction — building IP, making products," he says, while the steadier, more serious novels are still written by the previous generation.

Liu Geng once asked a teacher of his, "Why are there no novels now that really record us, young people — novels that get remembered?" The answer he got: "This era probably doesn't need anything that everyone remembers."

Illustration: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image: pbs, imgix, Douban