RECONFIGURING PUBLISHING CHANNELS

The Latest Social Shopping Trends in the Chinese Publishing Industry

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Book campaigns through live-streaming are set to become a popular trend in book marketing as the epidemic is normalised. In 2020, the live book launch of Der neunte Arm des Oktopus took place on the YouTube channel of the major German bookstore chain, Thalia (Norrick-Rühl, Peter, and Schüler, 2021). Although the number of views on this live-stream weren’t astounding, most books don’t get the same level of exposure on the day of publication. In addition, the rise of ‘BookTok’ also has a huge influence on purchasing decisions for customers, especially for teenagers (Alison, 2021).

In 2020, Mo Yan, a Nobel Prize for Literature winner, got over 100,000 followers in the first six hours of his account being live on Douyin (Chinese version of TikTok), which became a landmark event for book marketing on the live-streaming platform. In the eyes of Chinese publishers, 2020 was the first year of live-streaming book sales, and this trend has already intensified in 2021. The market share of traditional E-commerce channels has dropped, from 79% in 2020, to 64.82% in 2021, with Douyin already accounting for 8.77% of the entire market in terms of book sales (OpenBook, 2021, Centrin Ecloud, 2022). The figures in the latest ‘Douyin E-Commerce Book Consumption Report’ are overwhelming: users have spent 5,818,000 hours live-streaming for book sales, with 8.05-billion cumulative views, and there are now 148.57-billion video views on the topic of books (Douyin E-commerce, 2021).

As these figures suggest, the number of books sold on Douyin is astonishing. Book sales through Douyin are up 312% year-on-year, with more than 450,000 books sold every day (Ibid). Book sales through live-streaming platforms are reconfiguring publishing industry sales channels in China (DoBooks, 2021). However, the impressive figures don’t mean that this is going smoothly. The huge discounts on books which have been exacerbated by live-streaming has forced Chinese publishers to rethink their processes. So, is live-streaming a boom or a bomb for the publishing industry?

Live-streaming has exacerbated the Chinese market’s unhealthy book discounts. The price for a new book on the major E-commerce platforms is often 25-30% off, occasionally even up to 50% (Tan, Pan and Yu, 2020). Shopping festivals have overwhelmed Chinese publishers with their competitive discounts. Book sales by live-streaming have seen continuous low prices. In September 2021, a live-stream which claimed to include ‘half of China’s publishing industry’ sold 500,000 books for less than ¥ 10 Yuan (approximately £1.2 GBP - full price books in the Chinese market are around £6 GBP) and 100,000 books sold for ¥ 1 Yuan (£0.1).

Behind these incredibly low prices, was a battle for user traffic from internet companies (Douyin subsidised the price of books), and publishers who didn’t want to miss out on a ‘windfall’ of live-streaming only lost the initiative (DoBooks, 2021). One main advantage of the live-streaming platforms, the ability to reach a wider audience, has become the key for book sales. Users of these platforms, whether in terms of age group or education level, are much broader, which means that users’ abilities to filter products are mixed. Some consumers lack brand awareness when buying books and only recognise recommendations and discounts from KOL (DoBooks, 2021), which has led to serious homogenisation due to the publisher acquisition of books with similar content but lower prices, and low-price dumping (lower costs for planning and production means lower selling prices), which has severely squeezed the market share of high-quality books.

However, the benefits of live-streaming platforms for the publishing industry are also undeniable. On their official Wechat account, Do Books mentioned that ‘the long-term value of live-streaming for the publishing industry is to open up a direct connection from author to reader, allowing each book to find the largest number of potential readers’ (Ibid). In addition, live-streaming also breaks down barriers of geographical and economic disparity to promote access to knowledge, as confirmed by the Head of CITIC Children’s Books:

We often receive orders from remote mountainous areas. New technological means allow books to reach reader groups that are not easily reached by the traditional distribution system, which is exactly how live-streaming is empowering the publishing industry.

The trend of live streaming in bookselling has become inevitable for the Chinese publishing industry. The two-year journey of the gradual development of bookselling through live-streaming has also led to difficulties. Compared to the UK publishing market, China is one step ahead in social shopping, and this trend could be an inspiration or a caution to UK publishers as their marketing strategies evolve with new social media.

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Bibliography

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Alison (2021) ‘The Rise of BookTok: Meet the Teen Influencers Pushing Books up the Charts’, The Guardian, 25 June. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/25/the-rise-of-booktok-meet-the-teen-influencers-pushing-books-up-the-charts> (Accessed: 6 January 2022). Centrin Ecloud (2022) ‘With 120-Billion Yuan in Total Price, Which Categories Support the Book Market in 2021 - Centrian Ecloud Annual Report’ (in Chinese), Centrin Ecloud, 4 January. Available at: <https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/PvD9iBpyQJKmkmI9QL0U8g> (Accessed: 6 January 2022). DoBooks (2021a) ‘How Short Videos and Live Streaming Have Changed Publishing in 2021’ (in Chinese), DoBooks, 30 January. Available at: <https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/f8q0maQ74ch5zFhtdmVAiQ>(Accessed: 6 January 2022). DoBooks (2021b) ‘The 2021 Publishing Industry Through the Eyes of DoBooks’ (in Chinese), DoBooks, 31 December. Available at: <https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/dJbt0rkAzyfhthKYD6zhBg> (Accessed: 6 January 2022). Douyin E-commerce (2021) ‘The 2021 Douyin E-Commerce Book Consumption Report: The Fastest Growing Science Book Sales’(in Chinese), Douyin E-commerce, 31 December. Available at: <https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/NjCC1MmWR-jNMS53W_2upw> (Accessed: 6 January 2022). Norrick-Rühl, Peter & Schüler (2021) ‘“Pay to Play” in the German Book Trade?’, Publishing Research Quarter, 37, pp. 241–254. Available at: <https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-021-09804-x> (Accessed: 6 January 2022). OpenBook (2021) ‘The Size of the National Book Retail Market Saw Negative Growth for the First Time in 2020, Down 5.08% Year-on-year’ (in Chinese), Beijing OpenBook, 7 January. Available at: <https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/3UBt2h3KQl6gEL2IUKiFAQ> (Accessed: 6 January 2022). OpenBook (2022) ‘Book Retail Market Report 2021’ (in Chinese), Beijing OpenBook, 6 January. Available at: <https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/av5qnT6exm_OH3JYBT3FOQ> (Accessed: 6 January 2022). Tan, Pan and Yu (2020) ‘Proposal for Legislation to Regulate Price Competition in Book Retailing’ (in Chinese), China Publishing & Media Journal, 22 May. Available at: <http://dzzy.cbbr.com.cn/html/2020-05/22/content_1_3.htm> (Accessed: 6 January 2022).