Friends, do you still remember Jiang Ping?
Her story was very popular on the Internet some time ago. If you are interested, you can search it.
Today we are going to talk about Jiang Ping, but not Jiang Ping. Because you can't imagine where I passively followed this hot topic, not Weibo, nor Tik Tok. . .
But it is: Qidian Chinese Network.
It is very common for short article and short video bloggers to chase hot topics. After all, this industry is all about efficiency, and everyone knows it.
But now I find that in the circle of online novels with millions of words, the authors' way of chasing hot topics has already evolved super-fast.
Open Qidian.com and search for technical secondary school, and you will find a wonderful world:
This is not the first time that the online literature circle has tried to take advantage of a hot topic. I don’t know if you still remember that a few months ago, when Xiaomi Automobile’s promotion was all over the screen, a book called “Reborn to Teach Lei Jun How to Make a Mobile Phone” appeared.
However, perhaps because the name of this book is too direct, even after it was renamed once, it still could not escape the fate of being taken off the shelves. Now this wonder of the online literary world can only be seen on pirated websites.
As long as something becomes a little popular, it will become the new favorite of online writers.
I'll talk about some new books in recent years, and you can guess what hot topics they are riding on – “Ji, You're So Beautiful”, “Douluo: The Beginning Awakening Lightning Five Whips”, “I'm the Prisoner, Not the Boss”, “Ape God Starts!” . . .
No matter which reading website or app you use, there are so many online articles that are trying to take advantage of the hot topics. It’s impossible to count them all.
I'm really confused. Online novels often have hundreds of thousands of words. They can take advantage of the popularity, but the story development is also trapped by the beginning. Besides, after two weeks, will this popularity still be a hot topic?
To address this issue, these authors have a little trick up their sleeve.
Many authors simply talk about hot topics in the title and the beginning, using them as fishing hooks to lure readers who like to follow hot topics online.
Since World of Warcraft has returned to China recently, someone has written a book about it. The background setting of the novel is that World of Warcraft has confirmed its return to China, and the male protagonist was so excited that he died on the spot without being able to catch his breath.
Then there is no more content related to the return of World of Warcraft to China. The so-called hot spot is simply an inducement to push the story forward.
The story after that is very familiar. The male protagonist closes his eyes and opens them again, and goes back to 2005 with the golden finger, when the public beta of World of Warcraft in China has just begun.
While readers watch the hero perform amazing games in the game and experience past game plots and dungeons, they also watch him become a crooked-mouthed dragon king in reality and slowly save money to acquire Blizzard.
Don’t think that only male-oriented literature likes to take advantage of hot topics, female-oriented literature also likes to do so.
Ms. Rabbit, who has written more than 20 online novels, confirmed to me that many of the novels on Jinjiang Chinese Network also reflect popular culture and social trends. Although the protagonists still have to fall in love, in addition to falling in love, they have begun to follow the trend and start businesses in new energy vehicles.
After reading these online articles that are trying to capitalize on the popularity of the topic, I feel that they are quite contradictory and outrageous.
Short article bloggers take advantage of hot topics with short content and low time cost. Online article authors take advantage of hot topics with a weekly word count that can equal three months’ work for short article bloggers, and they may not become popular. High investment and low return, what are they trying to achieve?
At first, I didn't understand why they did this.
Haven’t you seen the light novels and comics in Japan? After so many years, there are still a lot of people who are working on the different world genre. Now, the only thing they do is let the protagonist have some time travel tricks besides just getting lucky with the dump truck.
I even thought at one point that whether a hot topic online article can become popular is like buying a scratch ticket, which mainly depends on luck.
That being said, why do online writers still rush into the spotlight like moths to a flame?
After carefully browsing several novel websites, I finally understood everything – there are just too many people.
In 2024, online literature has developed to such a great stage that any online literature routine you can think of has been written by others, and authors can only rely on hot topics to make a breakthrough. Even if Tolkien and George R. R. Martin came here, they would be dumbfounded when they saw the authors' imaginations.
For example, Qidian has 15 sections for men and 11 sections for women. Each section is further subdivided. For example, fantasy is divided into four secondary sections: Eastern fantasy, otherworldly continent, dynasty hegemony, and high martial arts world.
No matter which district, a large number of novels are completed or have unfinished stories every day.
In the past, an infinite flow novel would make you stay up late to catch up, and save a few dollars on cigarettes to buy a genuine subscription, just to see it first.
Nowadays, old bookworms fiddle with reading software over and over again, but it is difficult to find a book they want to read.
Therefore, if online writers want to stand out in this buyer's market, there is only one thing they can do today, and that is to roll!
Things like writing style and storytelling can only be acquired through training, but everyone can ride on the popularity of something.
The most representative ones are the authors of Feilu. Whenever a hot topic comes out, if you don’t take advantage of it, there are people who will.
For example, when the public beta of Absolute Zero was just launched a few days ago, a bunch of author brothers rushed in.
The reason why there is such a trend of thousands of people jumping on the bandwagon to catch the hot spots can actually be understood from two different aspects.
From the author's perspective, as long as the online writer is willing to take advantage of the hot topic, the traffic of the novel will naturally be higher than that of novels that do not take advantage of the hot topic under the same circumstances.
After all, the hot topic is already on the hot searches, and countless people know about it. If you want to make it to the hot searches by conceiving a purely original outline from scratch, it will probably take a long time.
Maybe for great authors, it is not a big deal whether to take advantage of the hot topics or not, but for those low-level authors, even if they know that taking advantage of the hot topics is only a temporary solution and not a fundamental solution, if they don’t do it, they may have nothing to lose this month.
Otherwise, it's already 2024, why are there so many new authors still writing fan fiction about Douluo Dalu and Fights Break Sphere? Besides being fans of the original novels, isn't it because it's easy to become popular?
In addition, adding hot spots in the novel will make people feel more involved.
Those who often read online articles know that online articles are often equated with cool articles. What online article authors want to create is the kind of cool feeling that is hard to find in reality. The more this cool feeling can make people empathize with it, the more likely people will buy into it.
The combination with hot spots will undoubtedly give people a sense of immersion that extends the virtual pleasure into reality.
Everyone has read books like “Reborn as a Coal Boss” too many times. If you read “Reborn as a Coal Boss”, it would make people imagine something very different and feel like they can beat Europe and the United States.
From the perspective of the website, there is no direct resistance to this kind of novel writing idea of riding on the hot spots. The reason is simple, because the new book recommendation mechanism of each website determines that riding on the hot spots is more likely to become popular.
As we all know, there is a “100,000-word” rule or “golden three chapters” rule in the online literature world. In other words, for many grassroots authors, the first 100,000 words determine the life or death of the book.
When you have written 100,000 words in a novel on Tomato, the data is basically stable. At this time, if the completion rate is still less than 10%, you can consider cutting it off and starting a new book.
Qidian is more concerned with data. If the early data is average, it will be difficult to get exposure in the recommendation competition. Without exposure, the data will naturally not go up. Sometimes the snowball rolls like this, and new authors may not be able to hold on until their reputation improves.
This leads to many authors placing too much emphasis on the beginning. A book that combines hot topics can at least give a small buff to the first 100,000 words.
Anyway, it is still a bit novel to read the book by taking advantage of hot topics, and it reads better than the old-fashioned and stereotyped online articles.
Feilu is the website that encourages authors to follow trends the most. It even has a special trend section to tell people what settings are the most popular online articles at the moment.
But no matter how reasonable the rise of hot-spot online literature is, I still feel a little sad. The books we chased when we were young, such as “Zhu Xian” and “Fights Break Sphere”, although they cannot be said to be very literary, just looking at these book titles, at least they feel very powerful when read, and the flavors are different.
Today's online articles that take advantage of hot topics, after all, just use the hot topics as an attractive shell, and the main content is still the same routines we are familiar with.
Maybe many years later, when my child grows up, he will give me a 5,000-chapter “Reborn: Counterattack” and let me watch the protagonist pretend to be awesome and get slapped in the face. By then, I will be helpless and can only punch him in the ass.
At present, the Feilu-style online literature that follows hot topics is spreading all over the Internet. Many people on the Internet have criticized the current online writers for being better and better at writing settings and openings, but that’s all.
The remaining content is actually still produced on an assembly line, trapped in a mold made of old ideas and unable to move.
The final product is like industrial saccharin. After tasting it, people can only feel that it is sweet, but if you eat too much, it will inevitably become a bit greasy.