Can You Really Run Book Publishing on the Internet and Crowdsourcing? | 100 Entrepreneurs

Fiberead has genuinely made foreign books appear in Chinese faster. What the model can't fix is how good they are.

On the second floor of M&A Coffee on Beijing's Innoway startup street, a co-working space holds more than a hundred desks. Fiberead's founder, Jiang Yuanwei, and her three colleagues work in a corner of less than 20 square meters. What they run is a crowdsourced translation and foreign-book publishing platform.

Search "Fiberead" in the Amazon Kindle store and 405 e-books come up.

Sorted by popularity, the top five are the thriller Fifth Avenue, the parenting book How to Raise an Outstanding Child, the spy novel The Kramsky Case — MI7, the political novel The City of Evil, and the suspense novel Sugar and Spice. All are foreign books, and the ones near the top are mostly suspense and horror, relationship guides, or workplace titles; more than a few are by bestselling foreign authors. Each e-book sells for somewhere between 0.99 and 10 yuan, translated and published through Fiberead.

Jiang Yuanwei told QDaily that since the site launched in 2014 the company has published more than 400 e-books, sold through Amazon, Duokan, Douban and other platforms, and has acquired the Chinese rights to over 1,000 more foreign titles now in translation. Six print books are on sale, with 100 titles planned by the end of the year.

At more than a hundred books translated and published a year, Fiberead is now the size of a small publishing house. That is still a long way from CITIC Press, which brings in a thousand foreign titles a year on top of its Chinese-language list — but Fiberead does it with four people.

The one problem is that the books are wildly uneven.

Cut out the middlemen, and foreign books arrive faster

"Chinese publishers import less than 1% of what the British and American markets publish each year, and they do it slowly." Three years ago, that thought led Jiang Yuanwei to found Fiberead.

The route a book takes here looks nothing like a traditional publisher's, and every translation is done by crowdsourced translators. A foreign book typically takes four to six months on Fiberead to go from translation to finished e-book — much faster than the conventional route.

It starts with the author, who registers on the site and uploads the work. Fiberead then recruits volunteer translators for it on the homepage. Whichever book finds translators first gets translated first.

Jiang Yuanwei began by posting on Douban and other forums where translators gather, assembling the first 300 certified translators, screened during the site's closed beta. Translators translate, review and typeset the books by following Fiberead's workflow. The backend provides messaging tools, so translators, authors and the team can talk directly. Fiberead then puts the finished books on sale through Duokan, Amazon, Douban Read and other channels. Revenue from every copy sold is split three ways, between Fiberead, the author and the translators.

Fiberead gets its speed by deleting every middleman. To import a foreign book, a traditional publisher must settle on the title, find the rights agent (the rights are not always the author's to give), then bid for the rights, often against several other publishers at once.

Fiberead trades something else for the Chinese rights: it will produce the author's Chinese edition for free. Uploading a book to Fiberead means agreeing to hand the platform the Chinese rights. No rights agent, no tangled negotiation between publishers in two countries — a stage that on its own used to take as long as a year.

Faster, but nobody is guarding the quality

Speed is what Jiang Yuanwei is proudest of. "Authors publish a Chinese edition without spending a cent, and translation enthusiasts get to translate subjects they actually care about." Efficiency aside, she argues, the model pays authors and translators back in other ways.

Her thinking is that Fiberead should not be a gatekeeper. Choosing which books deserve to exist is left to the translators and the readers, and the role a traditional publisher uses to police quality — the editor — is cut out.

"Some authors have nowhere to submit before they're famous. Think of Ghost Blows Out the Light (《鬼吹灯》) in its early days. So I don't think one or two people should decide whether a book gets published, or an expert in the field. The market should decide."

At no point does the foreign author put up money, and no one pays for the translation; if the book sells, the author takes a cut. For Fiberead, one more e-book costs almost nothing at the margin and might bring in revenue. The lower the bar, the more free rights Fiberead collects, and the more authors with nowhere else to send a manuscript get a Chinese edition.

The cost lands on the reader, who now has to pick.

A book needs to clear exactly one standard to go up on Fiberead: the e-book can be listed on Amazon in the US. That bar is low, because Amazon's only requirement for listing an e-book is that the typesetting meets its specifications.

With editors and rights negotiations gone, publishing does get faster, and translators and foreign authors get more chances to test themselves. But the reader — the one paying for all this — now spends a great deal of time sorting through material that professional editors used to filter. This is not even a question of taste. Under that listing standard, any amateur with a manuscript can upload it too.

Most of the books barely sell, and barely matter

Chen Haibin is a veteran translator on Fiberead.

In two years she has been the lead translator on dozens of English books. In early 2015 she was the core translator on The Road Back, by the Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Vitez. "Before I started, the book had already been translated once, but the quality was so bad it was basically unusable." Jiang Yuanwei had contacted her directly and asked her to rework it.

Over a year and a half, The Road Back sold fewer than 5,000 e-book copies across all channels. Even so, Chen Haibin told me, that makes it one of the few genuinely good sellers among the books she has translated.

Fiberead does have hits that have sold more than 100,000 copies: How to Be a Smooth Talker (《做个侃爷》), a guide to making conversation, and the suspense novel Sugar and Spice, which reached number one on Kindle's Chinese paid chart when it went up on Amazon in 2014. With no marketing behind them, those are good numbers.

But across the hundred-odd translated e-books, only a few sell well, and no pattern explains which ones. In three years, the norm for a Fiberead e-book has been sales in the dozens or the low hundreds. No promotion, an author nobody has heard of, ordinary writing — the numbers stay down.

And these books face one more problem: how well they are translated.

Fiberead crowdsources the work. An enthusiast registers, picks from the new titles the platform posts, and translates a sample chapter; then an "editor" like Chen Haibin selects the best two to four to staff the project. The "editor" keeps the schedule and coordinates everyone's time. A book takes four to nine months to translate. Fiberead has even built an idiot-proof typesetting routine — the translators follow it, and the book goes straight into distribution.

None of these "editors" work for Fiberead. Most, like Chen Haibin, are experienced volunteer translators on the platform.

Chen Haibin has been burned more than once. "Translators dropping out halfway, translations that aren't good enough — that happens all the time." Under the platform's split, her earnings as core translator on The Road Back, a book of 150,000 characters, came to about 1,100 yuan. It sold roughly 5,000 copies. The author's share and the platform's take were about a thousand yuan each as well.

To her it feels like any community that assembles itself out of enthusiasm: the money is poor, the structure is loose, and translators come and go. "Most translators weren't trained for this. They do it because they want to, like the fan-subtitle groups."

That sets up a loop. Most books sell modestly, so translators earning only a share of e-book revenue make almost nothing, so better translators don't stay. Authors with reputations and real craft have reason to hesitate. And the books that most need a Chinese edition but that traditional publishers have missed aren't necessarily on Fiberead's radar either, precisely because nobody is doing the editor's job.

In the end, most Fiberead books sell under a thousand copies, and their effect on readers and on the book market rounds to zero.

E-books pay too little, so she started printing the hits

Because e-book income is "too low," Fiberead has shifted its weight back to print.

"E-books can sell fine, but the price is low and you split the revenue with the platform, the author and the translators. There's very little room to make money." After more than two years of publishing e-books, Jiang Yuanwei and her team spent a full year working out how to produce a printed book from end to end.

From the 400-plus e-books already published, Fiberead used online sales and rankings to pick the best few for print. They went on sale on Dangdang early this year: the distinctly self-help How to Be a Smooth Talker: Master Small Talk, Deploy Charm (How to Keep Talking With Anyone), The Road Back by the Pulitzer winner Michael Vitez, and the suspense novel The Art of Murder (《谋杀鉴赏》).

The printing works differently too. Fiberead plans to print on demand, reprinting a few dozen to a few hundred copies a month as orders come in, which keeps early warehousing costs down.

"You've spent a lot of money up front on the rights, and unless you sell at least 100,000 copies you don't make money, so you expect to print at least 100,000. Printing 500 to start is meaningless. First you pay the printer a deposit of a hundred-something thousand yuan, then you pay for storage, and all of that comes before any sales."

Fiberead does none of that. For each book, Jiang Yuanwei pays a publishing house a manuscript review fee to obtain an official publication number, and the other pre-press costs a print book normally carries — royalty advances, translation fees, editing and proofreading — either don't exist here or are absorbed by the translators and the original author.

"Pre-press costs that would have been 100,000 yuan come down to roughly 10,000 to 15,000," Jiang Yuanwei calculates. There is money on the table now, not much of it, but enough to put more pressure on sales than an e-book ever did.

There is another catch. The "efficiency" and the "no editors" approach Fiberead has always been proud of are not its strongest cards in print. What makes a reader buy a physical book may be the author's name, the quality of the writing, the blurb on the belly band, the cover design — and all of that is the traditional editor's work.

By Fiberead's own numbers, in the first three months of 2017, after print sales began, it took in about 200,000 yuan in gross list-price sales. Its best seller, How to Be a Smooth Talker, sold 5,000 copies in two months. Jiang Yuanwei plans to publish 100 print titles by the end of the year; by catalogue size, "that's a mid-size publishing house."

But if only one e-book in a hundred sells, there won't be many candidates to become the next How to Be a Smooth Talker.

Which leaves Fiberead's business looking self-contradictory. The internet and crowdsourcing make it faster than a traditional publisher, while the missing editorial judgment leaves what it publishes with little chance of winning.

In theory, putting more books on the platform would solve part of this. But a book is not a feed of news items in the Toutiao mold. People who want to read — to unwind or to improve themselves — have already cleared a bar that isn't especially low. This is reading, after all.

Cover image from weseink